A few churches in India run similar, but smaller, programmes for the about-to-be-wed young couples in their parishes with a padre conducting the short talk-cum-course. There is now this famous, but unfortunately unconfirmed, report of a Mumbaii parish where a young lady thought so deeply about what had been explained to her in connection with marriage and motherhood that when the time came to say ‘I do’, she said ‘I don’t’ and simply went back to work as a single, career woman till she felt she could marry when wanting to get married and not just to have babies, and all of this without being pressurized by her family to do so.

Such cases of individualism are, sadly, rare; the family structure in India does not encourage individualism. Explains Dr Shalini Bharat of the Family Studies unit of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, ‘We have a sacrosanct view of the family in our country, even if it teems with strains within. In such a structure human rights are not regarded as rights in the individual sense. There is a “we”, but if you hear an “I” the reaction is knee-jerk even if there is only negativity in this “we-ness”. Everyone is supposed to subsume their own individuality in a family, specially the women and definitely the children. Those who want to be an “I”, as is the wont of the young males, have to do it outside their family structure and home. This leads to our famous Indian characteristic: the duality-and-denial syndrome. Ghar mein kuch, bahar kuch; like being “vegetarian at home”. In such an environment it would be well-nigh impossible to get a family to admit that there is a horror like Child Sexual Abuse happening within the four walls of any house no matter how educated or rich or perhaps more so because the social image of the family has to be guarded. If we acknowledge Child Sexual Abuse in our middle and upper-class homes, we would have to look for reasons for this abuse within. We would then have to admit that these reasons are not as terribly complex as we would like to think. And we cannot have our families being seen as anything less than part of a great and ancient culture, can we now?’

Unofficial Secrets

Clearly, a lot of work needs to be done on Child Sexual Abuse in India, much of this urgently. Or else Indians might well come face-to-face with Child Sexual Abuse in the form of an incredulous crisis the way Britons did. It is called the Cleveland case and it completely shocked England. It also took the lid right off Child Sexual Abuse.

Cleveland is not a particularly well-known area even in north-east England where it is situated. When the matter came up in the media, one radio station in London thought that this mass Child Sexual Abuse had taken place in Cleveland, Ohio, America. On 1 January 1987, a consultant paediatrician called Dr Marietta Higgs took up her appointment at the Middlesborough General Hospital in Cleveland. She teamed up with Dr Geoffrey Wyatt who was already in place at the hospital and between them they diagnosed suspected sexual abuse in a total of 165 little girls and boys. Average age: 6.9 years. From January to May 1987, Dr Higgs and Dr Wyatt diagnosed sexual abuse in 121 children from fifty-seven families. Four cases were diagnosed by other doctors. In another two months, by July 1987, the figure was up to 165. Most of these cases were of anal abuse. They were diagnosed by the doctors through physical tests known as reflex and dilatation, or quite simply the buttock separation test which reveals signs of habitual abuse.