Police point out that almost all the cases of girl-child rape making it to police stations are from lower class, lower-middle-class and some middle-middle-class homes. There is virtually a deafening silence from upper-middle and upper-class homes. Since it does not stand to logic that little girls from these two classes are not being raped, and since there is also unofficial evidence that child rapes do transpire in these homes, police surmise that around 25 per cent of child rapes are not being reported in the country. This would include the police—perhaps even erring on the side of caution—unofficially computing child rapes which do not get reported from the other class of homes as well.

So that’s 5,517 children being raped annually.

Assume that there is no growth at all in the child rape rate in the country from 1997 to 2000. Again, just to err on the side of caution.

That makes it fifteen children raped in India on any day.

Two questions.

If there are fifteen children being raped every single day in India today, how many more children are being otherwise sexually abused every single day?

If there is a 28.8 per cent increase in child rape, what kind of unreported increase is there in other forms of child sexual abuse?

One answer, in the form of yet another question.

Now do we still want to maintain this conspiracy of silence about what we are allowing to be done to our children?

A Mother on the Run

Think about this conspiracy of silence, even as a woman in Varanasi runs to protect her daughter from further sexual abuse. A brave woman paying a very heavy price for no fault of hers. Ila Pandey from Karvi in the Chitrakoot area of Uttar Pradesh, married to Jagdish Pandey of the dairy department in Karvi. They were married in 1986 and have three daughters, ages eleven, nine and four. In February 1999, her eldest daughter writes a small note to her mother disclosing that her father has been doing ‘gandi harkat’ with her. ‘Gandi harkat’. Dirty acts. Ila confronts her husband, he brutally beats her up.

Ila contacts Vanangana, the local women’s organization, for help. They try to intervene but are brushed off by Jagdish Pandey. Ila falls so ill with the stress that her mother who is visiting stays back to take care of her and on 7 March 1999, takes her away to the natal home. Ila manages to take her youngest daughter with her, Jagdish Pandey prevents her from taking her elder two daughters. Vanangana monitors these two daughters in Ila’s absence while she reaches Varanasi and contacts the Social Action and Research Centre which works closely with Child Sexual Abuse in the district.

‘Jagdish Pandey kept the two girls back saying they had their exams,’ says Tulika Srivastava of the Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiative in Lucknow. ‘He did sign papers to the effect that he would send the girls after their exams. On repeated requests from Ila for her two older daughters, Jagdish Pandey went to Chandauli and before the family mediator, Prem Shankar Tiwari, promised to send them within three days. But he did not do it, not even in May when their school was shut for the summer vacations.’ It is only three months later, on 10 June 1999, that Ila Pandey can return to her husband’s home; and with the legal and moral support provided by the two non-government organizations, she collects her two daughters in the absence of their father. She immediately appears before the judicial authorities in Karvi to record her statement that she is taking her children out of their father’s custody.