CHILD ABUSE: A Scar Difficult To Heal

By: Barnali Bose (Associate Editor-ICN Group)

The internet often entraps innocent children in such pornographic virtual cycle. Parental supervision is therefore a must.

To quote the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their silence in times of moral crisis.” A subject that I was hesitant to write on was Child Abuse. I felt I would not be able to handle a delicate topic as this one.

However in the recent times, I find such incidents occuring and recurring yet again. It’s not the fear of being banished to Hell, if there be one, that has prompted me to tread on this self-restricted territory, but my moral responsibility surely has. Heaven and Hell are both of our own making on this earth itself. Sadly, for many children today life has become a living hell.

Child abuse earlier denoted employing children for household jobs or worse still in factories and shops. However with the National legislation against Child Labour in India, such abuse has become an exception rather than the norm.

The Factories Act,1948; The Mines Act,1952; The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act,1986;The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) of Children’s act,2000 have to a great extent been instrumental in curbing atrocities on the child.

The Right of Children to free and Compulsory Education Act,2009 has further augmented  child’s security in society. Now school-going children also comprise those  below the poverty line. Child labourers are hard to come by. The midday meal provided in Government schools is  an incentive to the less privileged.

Bernard Shaw said,  “Poverty is the root cause of all social evils”. With the spurt in the incidents of child sexual abuse even within the boundaries of school and  family, and poverty having to do nothing with it, I wonder if Shaw is turning in his grave and wishing he could edit his own quote.

In the recent ‘#MeToo’campaign that trended on social media many have narrated their childhood ordeal, quite often the perpetrators being close to the family or being family itself. The recent Hindi movies Dear Zindagi depicted the former type while Kahani 2, the latter.

A study conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child development in 2007 revealed that 85% of abusers were known to the victims of which 25% of the victims had confided in someone and only 3% were reported to the police.

The Union Government framed the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 but such crimes are definitely not on their wane. The data collected by the National Crime Records Bureau(NCRB) shows that has been an alarming increase in such crimes.

Child Trafficking, another manifestation of child abuse, either happens for flesh trade or child labour. The 2012 Global Report on Trafficking officially released by United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) has made a startling revelation. It says that 27% of such victims globally are children.

It is ironic that no gender discrimination is in practice in this arena and one must bear in mind that the male child is definitely not immune to sexual abuse.

A horrific aspect of this is Child Pornography, both real or virtual. On December 7,2017 a former team doctor for U.S.A Gymnastics was sentenced to 60 years in prison on child pornography charges, The New York Times has reported.

The internet often entraps innocent children in such pornographic virtual cycle. Parental supervision is therefore a must.

To top it all, the recent incidents of elementary school children being violated by children their age or slightly older is alarming. Do such acts manifest from curiosity to explore their bodies, the tendency to imitate having probably witnessed such acts accidentally or their exposure to sexually explicit images on the internet ?

Certain television shows encourage child participants to emulate grownups with  anchors and judges not refraining from joking about their love lives. This is a very disturbing trend and more than increasing the TRP s, the organizers must keep the mental health of the children in mind. The children in such cases might fail to separate the reel from the real. Such children are often seen to behave like miniature adults.

The silver lining to the dark cloud is that society no longer scorns victims. Some years back such incidents were less heard of because societal ostracism compelled both the victims and their parents to brush their ordeal under the carpet. The empathy towards such victims now encourage them not to be silent sufferers but be vocal about it and seek redressal .

To protect our children we need to give them sexual know-how suitable for their age and  get them trained in martial arts such as Taekwondo and karate so as to empower them in self-defence mechanisms.

Children’s minds are extremely impressionable. Childhood traumas may leave permanent scars on an individual’s mind .Hence, it is our moral responsibility to protect children from falling prey to human predators.

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