Please look very carefully at 375, 376.

This law needs urgent changing in connection with Child Sexual Abuse.

What is it when a tongue or a bottle or finger or candle or carrot or banana is inserted into a child’s vagina or anus?

What can it possibly be if a penis is inserted into a child’s mouth?

Rape.

The rape of the child’s body, the rape of the child’s innocence, the rape of its very childhood.

Look at this even as a simple situation. A slap is an offence. A slap with a stick in the same hand is a greater offence. That is, use of body part plus object is a greater offence. Then why is a rape with an object not a greater offence than a rape with a penis?

Enormous complications come into play in India when the truth needs to be told as it is. For some reason—perhaps our innate duality or other-worldliness, these being polite words for hypocrisy—anything that leads to the truth and nothing but the truth in our country is perceived as a threat by a very large section of people.

But it does need to be said: unless a child is ruthlessly raped, society—parents included—prefers not to see what the men do as sexual; society also prefers not to see it as an assault. It is both, sexual and an assault. Rape, as the law sees it now, is the putting of a penis in a girl child’s vagina. Is this not an aggravated sexual assault? And the putting of anything else in any orifice of a child’s body, is that not an equally aggravated sexual assault? Men do not set out to just rape our children thereby being covered in our country’s legal context; they set out—purposefully—to sexually assault our children. Let us get this straight: our children are being sexually assaulted also by men whom we know. And there needs to be a law which says precisely this.

Therefore, the words ‘sexual assault’ need to be used in place of rape in 375, 376. This will be applicable to women, men and boy-children too. If the law changes the word ‘rape’ for ‘sexual assault’, all kinds of penetration including digital and oral can be included. Widening the scope of 375, 376 and making it gender neutral would also help all those little boys being sexually assaulted by men in their own homes and on the streets, and would assist the little boys being sodomized by paedophiles in Goa, Mumbaii and elsewhere in the country.

And this too needs to be done. Just as the law makes a distinction among rape, gang rape and custodial rape (whether a woman’s rape takes place in a police station or hospital), it needs to differentiate between Child Sexual Abuse by a parent and its extended family, and comparative strangers. Child Sexual Abuse by parents and close relatives is a far more serious offence because of the kind and depth of emotional scarring it causes to the psyche of the victim. The differentiating clause already exists in 376, all that needs to be added for the child is that father, grandfather, brother, maternal and paternal uncle or any other person in a position of trust of the child is to be seen as a greater sexual assaulter.