Punishments should be from ten years to life imprisonment.

Now please look at 354, Outraging Modesty. Why is it called this, because it is non-penetrative and therefore cannot be harmful to a child? If a girl’s breasts have been fondled, would that be merely the outraging of her modesty? If a boy’s testicles are being fondled by an elderly uncle, would that be merely an outraging of this boy’s modesty, or would they say a boy cannot have ‘modesty’ since only girls have it? If a grandfather asks his granddaughter’s visiting friend to touch his penis with her hand, what would that be?

This law needs to be correctly addressed so that it is correctly applied in police stations and courts. Call it ‘unlawful sexual contact’. And give it a minimum of three years as punishment.

These two laws need restructuring, and this is long overdue. It will happen, it must. The Government of India must give its citizens-in-the-making a legal future; the victimized child must have a voice. For this, Parliament must restructure the laws.

And when this happens, children in this country will be better protected legally. One child must go through hell for other Indian children to benefit; a little child did. Her sexual abuse by her father went on for even longer because daddy would take her to a hotel and do it, daddy would also invite his male and female friends to watch. One day she went with her sisters, her mummy and her mummy’s sister for a little picnic in one of Delhi’s parks, and as she sat there on the green grass surrounded by her toys and her potato chips and soft drinks and cake, feeling comforted by the healing rays of a gentle sun, she found herself telling her mummy about the picnics that daddy took her for with his friends.

When her case reached the courts, they could not understand how to categorize it. Daddy had invited his friends but they did not do anything to her though they did things among themselves while watching blue films on the hotel’s video. Daddy himself had not put his penis into her but he had put in quite a lot else. What was this in black and white categories? It did not come under legal rape, that was for sure. The law, clearly, had not caught up with the atrocities being perpetrated on the children it was supposed to protect; a legal review was urgently required. Sakshi, the organization working with children and women victims of sexual violence, pointed this out and followed through with recommendations. It is now a case almost forgotten; but that family has yet to recover. Daddy tries to control his other daughters emotionally from the distance he is at, they wind up quarrelling among themselves at home. Tragically, ironically, cruelly, he had earlier even encouraged his other daughters to fight with the one he had abused, by making the ones whom he spared feel ‘un-special’. His wife who has weathered enough, including her own parents telling her to drop the case against her husband, is back at work; but every now and then she does hear a remark flung in her direction. Earlier, she used to find hand-scrawled notes left on her desk: ‘Kya, he stuck it into your daughter instead of you?’ ‘Humey bhi kuch khidmad ka mauka do.’ (‘Give us a chance too.’)