This under-10 per cent includes older women who sexually advance on young boys; not all boys see it as sexual initiation. And long-term effects of this have started showing up in sexually dysfunctional young males and husbands not getting erections. Says Dr Vijay Nagaswami, individual and marital psychotherapist in Chennai, ‘I have been struck in recent times by the more frequent reporting of a less commonly observed pattern of Child Sexual Abuse. More of my male clients than can be explained by chance, report that they have been abused during their childhood—when pre-pubertal and sexually immature—by older women. The abuser is invariably an older relative (usually maiden aunt or cousin), servant maid or familiar neighbours (one case has the lady engaging in sexually perverse activities). The predominant motivation for the abusers seems to be sexual. The pattern of abuse ranged from genital apposition to breast suckling. The primary adult manifestation of such abused male children is inordinate ambivalence in making and honouring commitments in their adult intimate relationships, low self-esteem and interpersonally inappropriate attitudes to sex.’

This under-10 per cent also includes mothers who have been sexually abused as children themselves.

But there is another important fact hidden in here.

The world over fathers who have been sexually abused when they were little boys tend to sexually abuse children, their own and others, as adults.

Mothers subconsciously try very hard not to sexually abuse children, their own or others, even if they have been sexually abused when they were little girls. Instead women, specially mothers, take it out on themselves. They also physically abuse the child with slaps and other forms of beatings. They emotionally neglect them by mentally ‘blanking out’ their children from time-to-time; this space which the mother puts between her and her offspring is seen by psychiatrists as a desire on the part of the mother not to hurt her children the way she was hurt by her elders.

Affected mothers can also unleash a bizarre range of medical perplexities upon their children; it is called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. A German called Baron von Munchausen, born in 1720, was often described as a ‘gifted raconteur’, that’s polite for imaginative liar. In 1951, when Dr Richard Asher was researching a set of bizarre physical behaviour by adults, he chose to call it Munchausen Syndrome. This term came into medical prominence and was called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy in England in 1977 to describe children whose mothers invent stories of illness about their children and substantiate such stories by fabricating false physical signs. This would include perceiving persistent illness in the child, doctor shopping for several opinions, enforcing invalidism by encouraging the child to believe that it cannot walk or go to school, and fabricating the illness. The extent to which the mother is emotionally disturbed can be understood by looking at some of the ways in which she practises Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy on her baby: she smears her menstrual blood or some from raw meat on the baby’s nose and then rushes the child for medical attention, she gives the child laxatives for diarrhoea and then collects medicine from the doctor to stop the diarrhoea which she also administers alternatively with the laxative, she induces vomiting in the child, she uses caustics and dyes to make the child break out in rashes, she warms the thermometer and then tells the doctor the child has fever, she withholds food from the child and she tries to poison the baby. And then at the doctor’s she revels in the attention.