As a girl-child said to her counsellor in Lucknow, ‘Mainey socha sub key papa aisey hi pyaar kartey hain.’ She thought everyone’s daddy loved them in this way.

Historical Ethics of Child Abuse

Initiation into sex can often be painful and traumatic, there are several women who do not care for it all that much even if their introduction to sex has been relatively smooth. And there are more than enough men—when they get around to admitting it as they grow into mid-life—that sex is not all that it is cracked up to be; the effort that goes in to the act far outweighs the benefits. In other words, sex seems to be enjoyed most in the imagination of adults.

Can a child, then, be expected to react with anything but revulsion when it is set upon sexually by an adult? A child is somewhat aware of its body parts as being distinct from the time it is toilet-trained; this is the ‘su su’ and this is the ‘ka ka’ and ‘must not touch like that’. Unless it is a close family person disguising his sexual gratification as affection, the child instinctively recoils when the abuser touches its body.

But the perpetrator sees, and feels, no revulsion at all to what he is doing. In India today, there are thousands of men—and some women—who think that there is nothing wrong with an adult sexually advancing on a child. So, should an adult-child sexual relationship be considered abusive? After all, Child Sexual Abuse has been going on in India, and in the world, ever since the first man got free reign over a child’s body and was not ostracized by his own family for it.

Biologically: a little girl’s vagina and a little boy’s anus—and all other body parts—are too small.

Psychologically: it leads to the premature sexualization of a child.

And this is the most important. Ethically: there is no consent from the child. The child is not capable of informed consent. Suppose there is already premature sexualization due to earlier abuse the child might know what she, or he, is consenting to. But is the child—emotionally, mentally, physically or financially dependent on that adult—really capable of firm refusal? Legally, when it comes to a sexually abusive father, the child is under his guardianship and has no free will to start with.

Ethics, thus, is what society can use as its framework of values and with which it can justify ‘interference’ in the private life of the perpetrator and his victims.

In the final analysis, it is only the ethical aspect of Child Sexual Abuse that can prevent society from complete mayhem in sexual behaviour.

It was the same ethics, in fact, that made pyschoanalyst Sigmund Freud remark in his 1896 thesis, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, after talking to several overwrought women that ‘at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experiences’. The reaction was of such outrage from the men, parents of the women and society elders that Freud, unfortunately and hastily, withdraw his remark and added another—that it was every woman’s fantasy to be seduced by her father. This resulted in additional psychiatric literature from other analysts reasserting Freud’s new ‘fact’. That incest was actually very rare since much of it was hysterical women. That if it happened, it did so because of the daughter instigating it. And then, of course, there were the mothers with their own unresolved complex using their daughters as surrogates to act out their own incest wish for their fathers.