Castration as punishment won't save our children from paedophiles
A few months ago, the Kerala Police launched Operation Big Daddy, an online crackdown on paedophiles for allegedly posting hundreds of sexually suggestive comments in Malayalam, alongside pictures of children in the age group of three to four years, on a Facebook page called Kochu Sundarikal (Malayalam for little pretty girls).
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| Facebook page Kochu Sundarikal. |
The accused were arrested on a number of charges, including soliciting children for sex. The arrests led the Supreme Court to order a probe into online child sex rackets on social media. Last week, a section of women lawyers too filed a petition before the apex court, demanding castration as punishment for child sex abusers. Quoting the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics for the last six years, they cited an alarming 151 per cent increase in "child rapes" in the country as reason for the extreme measure.
But how viable is the suggestion? The NCRB data does not have a separate category for registering crimes against prepubescent children, children below 11 years, the primary target of paedophiles, as the Indian law regards everyone below 18 years as a child or a minor. (It is another matter though that "naïve" minors above 16 years, now has the potential to transform into "adult" monsters, under the new juvenile law, if they commit heinous crimes.) So it is impossible to ascertain the exact number of paedophiles in the country.
Moreover, conviction rates of people who commit crimes against all those who are classified as children under the Indian law itself is as low as 2.4 per cent. If convicted, should castration be also extended to abusers of non-human minors? Mail Today had recently reported a case of zoophilia where a teenager was admitted at the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences for allegedly having sex with a calf. Since the animal involved is a minor, would the teenager's actions make him a zoopaedophile?
Incidentally, zoophilia, where the object of lust are animals, is an extremely rare sexual deviancy reported in one per cent of the population, and not the fallout of watching online pornography as some doctors seem to suggest. Most sexual deviancies, including zoophilia, have pre-existing histories, writes psychologist Jesse Bering, citing examples from ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Indus Valley civilisations, in his book Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us.
What online porn might have done is "pull together" all those people who were previously marginalised on the basis of their sexuality, on a single platform. Neither is there any scientific proof, other than our own moralistic revulsions and the fact that an animal cannot give consent for sex, to the claim that adolescents who engage in beastiality would go on to commit adult interpersonal crimes. Paedophilia, on the other hand, is regarded as an "inherently harmful" sexual deviancy by almost all researchers including, the American psychiatric manual DSM. This is not the first time that castration has been recommended as a punishment for paedophiles.
Citing examples of countries like the United States, Poland, Russia, South Korea and Indonesia, the Madras High Court in the past had called for castration as a silver bullet to prevent child sexual abuses. Sadly, none of these countries are role models for sexually mature democracies. Even in the United States, where the punishment has been in vogue for decades, the drug for chemical castration has never been approved by the FDA, the American health agency, for using it on sexual offenders.
Perhaps, even more worryingly, a review evaluating researches in English and Scandinavian languages on the effectiveness of medical interventions on people capable of sexually abusing children, published in the UK-based medical journal, the BMJ in 2013, showed that under certain circumstances castration could "increase the risk of sexual reoffending" apart from raising ethical questions about the side effects of the drug.
The best way, therefore, to protect your children would be through conversation, not castration. For that the real daddy's should play a more proactive role. Since most parents are too embarrassed to articulate the name of private body parts in front of their childrens, they should at least support the introduction of a comprehensive sexuality education programme in schools.
This would encourage children to speak up and learn about the importance of boundaries, including unwanted touch, irrespective of from whom it comes from, as a vast majority of the rapists are known to the victims. The role models India should follow are Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands and Germany, widely regarded as sexually tolerant and healthy societies with age appropriate sexuality education programmes in place, and not the US or any of the aforementioned countries.
America may have a flourishing porn industry, but the country is as conflicted and politically hypocritical as India when it comes to imparting sexuality education in schools. In 1994, the then surgeon general Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign by, of all people, Bill Clinton, for her views on masturbation and the importance of teaching sex education in schools at an early age.
Of course, the surgeon general's marching orders came long before the president himself was in the dock over his sexual peccadilloes with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, so much for American openness.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)