Her eight-year-old sister just sits; no, she says, everything at home is lovely, mummy is lovely, daddy is lovely.

Dr Woods examines her. He can put two fingers in her vagina and her rectum dilates up to an inch.

Dr Woods tells her maybe there is something she is forgetting to tell him.

She says, ‘Yep.’

It takes Dr Woods eighteen months to bring her to disclosure. She agrees to say who has hurt her only if she writes it on a piece of paper and Dr Woods promises to tear it up.

It says: ‘Daddy’.

Dr Woods tears up the paper.

She puts her head on Dr Woods’ lap and she cries, and cries.

Dr Woods tells Beatrix Campbell, ‘Don’t assume for one minute that the children have told you everything. They always keep back the worst things.’

Beatrix Campbell says Cleveland could have happened anywhere. She ends her book by asking society to find solutions to Child Sexual Abuse which go beyond punishing, blaming and denying.

Work in this direction is also needed in India, but first there will have to be acceptance of the very existence of Child Sexual Abuse in all classes of Indian homes. And this acceptance is likely to take a very long time to come because if there is such an acceptance, it would affirm that there are a lot of adults abusing children. And then this would start to say something about Indian society. And its false facade of happy families. And the men in these families. And the kind of women who live with these men.

Uncomfortable questions could be raised: about who we intrinsically are, the way we live, and the way we treat each other. The Ugly Indians.

The enemy is so clearly within.

Women as Perpetrators

The enemy within, sadly, can include the woman.

Yes, women do sexually abuse children.

‘We do not know about any sizeable number of women who sexually abuse children in the Asian context,’ points out Dr Shekhar Seshadri of Nimhans, Asia’s largest mental health institution. ‘Asian women, and this includes Indian women specially the mothers, are not known to sexually abuse children. The cases which we do have are of those women who had been sexually abused in childhood themselves or that of the woman who sees sexually abusing a child as a way of settling a power issue within herself. The latter is more applicable in cultures where patriarchy prevails, India being no fortunate exception.’

It must be noted that if being sexually abused as a child leads a person to become an abuser, then women, who are most often abused in childhood, would constitute the majority of the abusers. They are not. This, even though women report far more trauma then men do from the sexual abuse in childhood.

International studies peg the women who sexually abuse children as being less than 10 per cent of the total numbers of adults—the remaining 90-plus per cent being men. Every other research worldwide on Child Sexual Abuse completely fits the Indian context. Therefore it would be incorrect to ignore this fact. Even if it be as low as 2 per cent (figures taken from 411 cases of sexual abuse referred to a major children’s hospital in Britain between 1980 and 1986). This information, however, must not be misused by an unscrupulous lawyer in a court hearing a Child Sexual Abuse to sow that seed of doubt in the judge’s mind that ‘the mother could have also done it’. This would be a dangerous dilution of the men’s responsibility.