To be noted: the above are not the reasons why children are being sexually abused in their own homes; these are some of the reasons—and what has happened to Ila Pandey is the rest—why most mothers do not come to the immediate aid of their children. Applicable as much in India as anywhere else, especially in the light of Groth’s theory that sexually abusive fathers choose partners whose resistance can be easily overcome. The disabilities noted by Sahd, Bennett, Herman, Hershelman, Harrier, Frederichson and Goodwin further significantly reduce the mother’s ability to protect her children from Child Sexual Abuse.

And a mother who has been sexually abused herself in childhood turns into her own victim; the grown woman is the gaoler of the little girl, she paradoxically continues the role where the abuser left off. And so it gets handed down, generation to generation, feeling the impact of what just one man did—with perhaps just his finger—to one child a long time ago. That’s how long term the effects of Child Sexual Abuse can be.

Traumatic sexualization (detailed on earlier pages in the list of long-term effects) is another outcome which can disturb not just the victim but an entire family for the rest of their lives. Psychiatrists dealing with adults who have been sexually abused in childhood—this is never revealed at the outset—are also contending with an array of sexual identity crises. A man cannot have sex with his wife any other way except lying on his side because that is how his driver did it to him; yet another responds sexually only to female on top; a third can ‘take her only dog-like’ because that was what the seniors brutally did to him in the toilets at his upmarket college in Delhi. Two college-going boys come into therapy for panic attacks at Dr Manoj Bhatawdekar’s clinic in Mumbaii; they question their heterosexual orientation because they have been penetrated anally by both, the finger and the penis, by their uncles at home.

Supposing these teenagers had not found the courage to make it to a psychiatrist’s clinic? Suppose they had done nothing at all except continue to suffer their anxiety attacks, marry, have sexual relations with their wives, then have anxiety attacks again, and begin to experiment with other men—or worse, with little boys—as a means of settling the question of their sexual identity? What would it have done to their wives, the rest of their families, the children whom they might procreate? This does happen, it happens a lot; a man’s entire family in the future gets marked for abuses-sexual, physical, emotional, financial too—when he is sexually abused in his childhood.

Fortunately college boys as also young, working men—specially from middle and upper-class homes—are seeking professional help to understand their own sexual orientation, even if they have not been sexually abused in childhood, purely because they want the choice to be made by themselves and not social conditioning. If it turns out that they have strong same-sex orientation, they are happy to be gay. Unfortunately, not all these men are able to put off their families when it comes to ‘settling down’ and a hapless woman bears the brunt; but those homosexuals who are, indeed, able to hold their own are to be congratulated by Indian women. A man finding his own identity—even if through a sexual preference and not much else—means less trouble for women and their daughters.