What chance does childhood have in such an adult world?

‘Where you start looking, the number of enemies childhood can have,’ points out Vidya Apte of Terre des Hommes, which works for a child’s rights in an increasingly cruel adult world. ‘What can it be called,’ she asks, ‘when they marry off young girls, except Child Sexual Abuse?’ A socially sanctioned environment which crushes the girl-child as she grows: that motherhood can be her only mission, that she therefore has to be ‘married off at the soonest possible legal age even if she is not mentally or emotionally ready for it. What kind of mother can such a child herself make? Most research clearly states that men do not have an in-built ‘father touch’, they have to actively work on it if they genuinely want to be decent fathers. Young men—nor older ones, for that matter—are not expected to be fathers in the complete sense anyway. But young mothers are expected to ‘mother’ from the time they are born. Most research also proves that ‘natural motherhood’ is a myth, there is no such thing as ‘mother pangs’, except for social pressure. A woman feels ‘motherly’ only from the third or fourth month of her pregnancy and this is a primal feel which continues for the infant’s food and physical protection. There is no other in-built manual on child-rearing in a young mother who is otherwise bewildered, exhausted and very alone. What kind of ‘complete’ mother can she make to another child?

Agreeing is Dr Manisha Gupte of Masum, which works for the betterment of women and children in Pune district, ‘I have watched young women getting “possessed” in rural Maharashtra. They just do not know how to talk about their repression and their deep unhappiness, there being no outlet they “get the devi”. Once I have watched a girl, married off young, tell her father—through this “devi”—about what had been done to her sexually in her childhood. Another time I have watched a girl of seventeen feel pressurized that her family had not found her a match till then while all her friends had been “settled”, she got the “devi” and told her family through it that by next year their daughter would be married. The next year the drought lifted, the family saw it as most auspicious and not only found a match for this daughter who was a bit slow mentally but also pulled out her fourteen-year-old intelligent sister from school and got her married too, so that money could be saved on the joint feast that had to be given to the village.’

In the rural areas child-women can get a ‘devi’. In the cities they must be content with smiling depression.

‘From childhood women are being primed to expect too much from marriage and motherhood and too little from anything else,’ says Prasanna Invally of Susamvaad which is developing ‘marriage workshops’ in Marathi. ‘Boy children are primed to expect everything from their wives in the marriage, and not give too much if anything at all.’ The workshops Susamvaad has conducted till now reveal young couples—about to get married—coming in with ‘they lived happily ever after’ dreams because the partner is being expected to heavily ‘adjust’.