And then the women’s liberation movement gained ground—the time had come to deal with Child Sexual Abuse through the women’s movement. By the late 1970s and early 1980s a lot of work was being done on the subject in America and England. In India this happened only in the early 1990s as part of the women’s movement. An understanding of her rights has also taken women out of their four-walled prison called the kitchen into a work place. These women, specially middle-class women, are increasingly joining the ranks as office-goers. They may be emotionally wobbly, as yet unsure of their role beyond second-salary earners, but they are out there. And they have begun to think of themselves as human beings with feelings and secrets which need to be told, so they have begun talking. And out have started tumbling the family’s best-preserved skeletons from the ‘khandaani’ closets. The women have been talking about violence in their homes, then sexual violence.

Listening intently have been two women—mainstream working women—one a journalist, the other a lawyer, Jasjit Purewal and Naina Kapur. And this is how Sakshi came into being. Sakshi—meaning witness—is the Indian subcontinent’s premier organization dealing with Child Sexual Abuse. Sakshi began with recognizing the extreme violence which women face in the name of religion, tradition, culture and family. Closer questioning uncovered links between violence against women and the silence that shrouds sexual violence on both women and their children. Since then Sakshi has been working in the field of sexual violence against women and children. Sakshi has spearheaded the legal movement to comprehensively recognize Child Sexual Abuse in the Indian laws, along with Ifsha, recently set up by Jasjit Purewal as a sister concern. Adds Naina Kapur, ‘Kirti Singh of Janvadi Mahila Samiti has joined Sakshi and Ifsha in our effort.’

Around the time Sakshi was formed in Delhi, a doctor specializing in child psychiatry at Bangalore’s National Institute for Mental Health and Neuro Science felt the time had come for him to do something about it, there were far too many children coming into his out-patient department as victims of Child Sexual Abuse. Dr Shekhar Seshadri began his work, he spoke with Anita Ratnam—also wanting to do something about the problem—and they formulated a survey (see earlier chapter ‘What the numbers reveal’), the results of which were proof of what so many victims knew but people refused to believe.

These days the anti-CSA movement gets a fillip the world over—specially in the Western countries—loudly and in all possible forms of media through a terse statement: ‘Do not indulge in Child Sexual Abuse as you might get Aids.’ The irony, that such a negative message should be used to tell people not to abuse children. More the irony, that this statement winds up admitting that adults do, indeed, sexually abuse children. They penetrate them through their mouths, vagina and anus; they introduce the virus into the child’s bloodstream, then they walk away. To penetrate their women and wives, and another set of children.