‘Recently a psychiatrist friend told me of a young lady who had been similarly traumatized in junior college by senior students, a lesbian group, in her college hostel. Except that hers was hard-spectrum ragging and she had not been able to fight it, they made her strip and did a few unspeakable things to her as “initiation” on her first night as the juniormost in the college hostel. I read in the papers that in the name of ragging a similar thing happened a few years ago in a Mumbaii college hostel to a fifteen-year-old girl by her seniors and the poor thing committed suicide because no one believed her. I firmly believe that matters have come to this because of the unfortunate situation of boys taking the sexual abuse in their schools and colleges by their senior students and professors. Boys see these encounters with older men in their childhood as inevitable initiation, even if painful. If they had the common sense, and the courage, to resist and fight back right from the beginning, we would not have such debased learned behaviour from lesbians in the name of ragging.’

Is ragging Child Sexual Abuse?

It is abuse.

It is sexual violence.

If the perpetrators are above sixteen years of age—be they women or men—and the victim sixteen and below, it is Child Sexual Abuse.

Both, the victim and her, or his, parents are well within their rights to take police and legal action against the perpetrators even if they are students a few weeks above sixteen.

This fine line being drawn here—sixteen, edge of sixteen, the other side of sixteen, etc—may look like a legal landmine. It is. (Perpetrators below eighteen would be tried under the Juvenile Act; the accused above eighteen would be tried as adults under the Indian Penal Code.) But then it is also that support which as a parent you must give your child, and which your child desperately needs if it has been a victim of Child Sexual Abuse.

There are instances outside of schools too where women appear to have turned as blind as men; that the space around children cannot, and should not, be violated. Children seem to be there as much for their sexual gratification as that of lust-driven men, these women who are unthinkingly aping the worst in males.

An eighteen-year-old girl enters into her first sexual encounter with a twenty-six-year-old bisexual aunty who has moved from Kerala to Tamil Nadu. Their relationship lasts for two years. After the bisexual aunty and her husband move out of town, the girl makes ‘my fifteen-year-old maidservant lick my pussy’. Sexual gratification derived through the unthinking abuse of class privilege and power.

A wheelchair-bound woman from Pune is in love with another woman but forcibly married off to a man and they move to Dubai. She decides to ‘convert’ her young maid ‘and slowly I trained her’, ‘today she is able to give me the orgasm I need’. The same pathetic situation.

Comments Ashwini Sukthankar who has edited a book on lesbian writing. ‘I think everyone is—or should be—aware that children are not appropriate objects of sexual desire for adults, be they heterosexual or homosexual.’