Look closely, compute roughly. These statistics also reveal that there is a shocking 26.6 per cent increase of rapes on children below ten years of age within a year, from 1996 to 1997.

Curious about a state-wise breakdown? Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi and West Bengal accounted for a staggering 65.8 per cent of the total number of child-rape cases reported in 1997.

Another permutation. Of all the rape victims reported in the country in 1997, children alone account for 28.8 per cent of the all-India share.

Figures for 1998 initially available at the time of this book going to press is 15,031 cases of rape in the country. Of this 56 per cent involve women in the age group of 16 to 30 years; 22.8 per cent are children raped in the age group of 10 to 16 years and children below 10 tote up 4.2 per cent of the total rapes committed in 1998. Children are still accounting for more than a quarter of the country’s reported rapes. This, even though the reporting of rape has lessened in the country due to the understaffed, and largely indifferent, police as also a painfully slow, and largely callous, judicial system which does nothing to empower a woman’s complaint. A child’s rape by an adult goes into the same police station and courts. Or it does not, as is sadly apparent in the figures between 1997, when the rape cases reported were 15,336, and the 1998 figures which register a 2 per cent, ‘on paper’, decline. This ‘on paper’ decline, therefore, also does not accurately reflect the real percentage of child rapes.

So: let us work with 1997 statistics—4,414 children raped.

That is: there are twelve children being raped every single day in India.

And then there are those children who are raped but their cases do not get registered as police complaints. The Bundelkhand Mahila Manch speaks of one such case in their area. A ten-year-old girl was invited into the home of her neighbour for ‘kanya puja’. The ‘master of the house’ molested her, then penetrated her. The girl’s parents went to the police where they were advised to drop the case since it would be ‘very difficult’ to get a conviction.

And, yet again, there are cases of children being raped within their own homes—by their extended families as well—and these do not go at all beyond the barred doors of the house. Just as there are cases of little boys being sodomized by uncles and male cooks which have yet to make it in any quantifiable number to any police station in the country. Little boys keep quiet, some of them even think of it as a ‘rite of passage’ until they grow older and find themselves an emotional mess. Little girls, well, they are little girls and the family’s honour, izzat, shaan, is deep within that little vagina. Ergo, they cannot make it to a police station either, otherwise who will marry them then?