Latter-day analysts have long since, and rightly, rubbished Freud’s redone theory, but most do acknowledge one aspect of his work: the theory of the subconscious mind. This helps explain why so many victims of Child Sexual Abuse are disturbed but the memories of the acts of abuse themselves stay locked away somewhere in their minds.

Research work on CSA could be said to have started even before Freud, in 1860, when French forensic physician Ambroise Tardieu published several papers on battered children, rape and Child Sexual Abuse. He was immediately shouted down by society and his contemporaries. Later, Freud’s student, Sandor Ferenczi, confirmed Child Sexual Abuse and pointed out that it lead to severe psychological distress; however, he added, being listened to and comforted helped healing in CSA victims. He died in 1933 and nobody ever accepted his insights on Child Sexual Abuse. Incidentally, in 1946 when the American paediatrician and radiologist John Caffey discovered the physical evidence of child battering by means of x-rays, he was shouted down as people preferred to believe that children had ‘bone problems’. No one wanted to see the obvious; that parents could be physically battering children, just as they did emotionally. It was only in 1962 when Henry Kempe’s book, The Battered Child Syndrome was published that this in-family evil came to be accepted.

The acknowledgement of Child Sexual Abuse has met with far greater resistance the world over. Even when faced with clear physical signs, doctors have refused to identify it as Child Sexual Abuse. In India, doctors still do this, their notations include ‘simple injury’, ‘patient’s promiscuity’, ‘congenital problem of absence of hymen’, ‘consequence of excessive masturbation’. When a physically or emotionally disturbed child is brought into a doctor’s clinic, how many of these doctors can honestly say that they have also looked for signs of Child Sexual Abuse as part of their diagnosis? Agreed that a child’s body heals rapidly compared with an adult’s, within seventy-two hours many of the minor physical signs are known to disappear; and since enough of Child Sexual Abuse is perpetrated in homes under the guise of affection, there tend to be no marks at all. Yet when doctors have been confronted with signs, have they questioned a burn, a grasp or pinch mark, scratches around the lower body, genitalia, anus, thighs, knees or buttocks? Not one adult who has been sexually abused in childhood in India remembers the doctor going beyond a superficial inquiry; though a lot of adults—including men—do remember being ‘felt up’ sexually by their ageing male family doctors.

In 1953 Alfred Kinsey and his researchers sampled over one thousand women, one in four reported Child Sexual Abuse and 80 per cent said they were petrified by the encounters. Kinsey and his colleagues minimized the impact and even discounted their accounts by stating, ‘It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched.’ In 1966—right in the middle of the sexual revolution—Noel Lustig blamed the mothers of the victims, ‘While rejecting their husbands sexually and generating in them considerable sexual frustration and tension, these mothers have played conspicuous roles in directing the husbands’ sexual energies towards the daughters.’ Internationally, until the 1970s, emerging accounts of Child Sexual Abuse were dealt with denial, minimization and blaming the victim.