Gang-rape of 4-year-old: Does India not care?
All of us, no matter which part of the country we belong to, have been guilty of enjoying the festive season. We have put on new clothes, clicked selfies, smeared vermilion on our cheeks and forehead, and worshipped Kumaris bedecked in gold jewellery. Some of us have fasted austerely. And celebrated Navratras with aplomb, chanting "Jai Mata Di", during night-long jagrans. And yet, in all this din, when the headlines recently screamed the horrifying gang-rape of a four-year-old in Delhi's Keshav Puram – we let the news pass. Perhaps we have now come to accept that a girl is a fodder for male lust - to be sexually violated and mutilated. That rape is now commonplace – more sensational than sad - the way we are spineless even in terms of our legal position on marital rape or dowry deaths...
How discussing many topics with our children is taboo – we even avoid intimacy in front of them. Instead we teach them fear. Make sex the enemy. Confuse consent with coercion. When the rot is within us. The stench rising from the mangled genitals of our daughters – not even the smallest ones spared. What happens to a child who has been raped? Who whimpers on a hospital bed. What becomes of her future? Who will pay for her treatment? Which school will admit her? Will she have friends? Will her father ever click selfies with her and instantly update them on social media? Will she ever get married? Can she bear children? Will she hang herself? Will some local/village panchayat decide her fate? Has rape made us immune, somewhere? Is the culprit, just this one man – the victim referred to as "Rahul bhaiyya".
"The culprit used to sit here with us. He had been trying to get close to our child for the last one-and-a-half years. He would bring candies and chocolates. We had no idea that he was plotting all this," the girl’s grandfather was quoted as saying.
The statistics are telling: In 1998, the NGO, Recovery and Healing from Incest (RAHI) conducted India’s first study of child sexual abuse, with a survey of 600 English-speaking middle and upper-class women, 76 per cent of whom claimed they had been abused in childhood or adolescence, 40 per cent by at least one family member, most commonly an uncle or cousin.
In 2007, the Indian government conducted a survey of 1,25,000 children in 13 states. Of the children interviewed, more than half (53 per cent) confessed to being subjected to one or more forms of sexual abuse. More than 20 per cent of those interviewed added that they were subjected to severe forms of abuse. Of those who said they were sexually abused, 57 per cent were boys. Cut to 2013, the Human Rights Watch Report “Breaking the Silence” presented a full 82-page report, replete with case studies and expert comments, that proved that child sexual abuse in homes, schools and institutions for care and protection of children is common.
Which bachpan can we save? Which child do we sacrifice? What does this pretence of "Beti Bachao" even stand for? Have we immortalised rape victims when they cease to live? Will we light candles and hold morchas, if mortality wasn’t in question?
If child sex abuse is human rights violation of the highest, crudest form. If not just fast-track laws and courts were the answer? If we need to raise our collective voices against rape and see it as not just another addition to the total tally – but begin a movement that doesn’t focus on the death of the woman, the child, in question, but her life, afterwards...When the cuts and tears heal...
When it’s just her scars...