What has reached the police stations in Mumbaii is perhaps the most damning indictment of the entire ostensible ‘upper’ social structure. Nahida Sheikh and Trupti Panchal have compiled data from a handful of police stations in Mumbaii’s inner city areas. This very small survey which works out of information available on police records reveals more than enough. That upper and lower classes behave no differently when it comes to sex. That 68 per cent of Child Sexual Abuse on ‘lower’ class little girls had been perpetrated by male family members and acquaintances trusted by the victims. More than half this Child Sexual Abuse has taken place at home.

So. They are all the same—these evil perpetrators of Child Sexual Abuse, class no bar. They use their own home, or that of the little child’s. Home is clearly where the maximum harm is.

The study also reveals another similar pattern among upper, middle and lower-class homes. The perpetrators tend to coldly calculate the time for the act, when they are free. Normally, they are gainfully employed males. Only 27 per cent of this survey have non-working offenders, the rest have their own business or are employed (peons in offices, carpenters, drivers). Alcohol is used as an excuse when they are caught as is the line, ‘She made me do it to her.’ Again, just like the middle and upper classes.

There is another set of statistics which need very careful studying in connection with Child Sexual Abuse—that of child prostitution. The End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (Ecpat) estimates this global phenomenon to be a US$ 5 billion industry including trafficking, sex tourism and pornography. In India, it accounts for Rs 11,000 crore of the Rs 40,000 crore commercial sex industry.

A survey by the country’s Central Welfare Board has found that:

• there are an estimated 2 million child prostitutes in our country between the ages of five and fifteen years
• 80 per cent of these child prostitutes are to be found in the five major metros
• girls between the ages of ten and fourteen years are the most vulnerable
• 15 per cent of these child prostitutes are below fifteen years of age and 25 per cent between the ages of fifteen and eighteen years
• 5,00,000 children—little boys included—are forced into this trade every single year

Says Keith Oliver, detective in the police force of Great Britain, who recently extensively toured India through the British Councils to speak with concerned citizens and the police. ‘It is no secret that places in India like Goa are being used for sex tourism. The internet is being used in a big way by paedophiles the world over to access “easy” places to visit, these people then reach places like Goa for, and only, sex with little children, specially the boys. India should not sit in isolation on this subject, also because your children are being sent to other parts of the world too by pimps for child prostitution.’ Perhaps this is where they go, the little girls and boys who vanish forever from our minds after we see their pictures in the papers and on television as ‘missing’.