Ground realities of child sexual abuse

Vidya Reddy is a co-founder of Tulir, an organization whose sole focus is to address child sexual abuse at various levels and in various sectors. She has a way of shaking the kaleidoscope to offer insight and glimpses that are extremely rare into the depths of this dark world. It is for this reason that any conversation with her becomes anecdotal and very much in the nature of a caseworker’s diary. Interview by Roma Bhagat, Seema Baquer and Pallavi Baraya; transcription by Puruvi Baraya.

 

What are the kinds of conversations that we should be having about Child Sexual Abuse (CSA)?

Sexual violence is the most universal crime, very complex with no understanding of demographics, urban/rural, educated/not educated, rich/poor, nothing whatsoever. It is essentially a crime embedded in society, even though it certainly does have its psychological and criminal dimensions. This understanding needs to be the metatext for any engagement with child sexual abuse. Sexual violence is viewed primarily as a law and order problem whereas a higher reportage of sexual violence particularly CSA shows perhaps a greater degree of confidence in the system. This skewed view of sexual violence ends up tying higher reporting to deteriorating law and order but actually cases of sexual violence only become a law and order situation when the responders do not react appropriately. Unfortunately, the framing of the problem dictates the kinds of solutions that are sought and so the solutions could be inappropriate or at best fall short of the mark. For example, introduction of the death penalty in CSA, with the belief that it will deter possible abusers, is a knee jerk reaction, a mirage trying to lull people into a false sense of security.

We live in a very sexualized culture where sexual subtexts are omnipresent and all pervasive. Advertisements and TV shows are sexist, children’s video games are extremely sexual and even the conversational language we use is laden with much sexual connotation. Yet at the same time our culture is highly repressed in terms of sexual expression. This is a toxic combination. The 2014 ICRW¹ study captures the effect of this in its results. The percentage of men who said that they would rape a woman in the given situation in five out of six countries was in single digits, the lowest being 4.3%. In comparison India at 24.5% was astronomically high. This illustrates that there is a need to address the attitude and behaviour of Indian males with regard to sexual violence – a result of their upbringing, their thinking and their sense of entitlement, which is very different from men everywhere else. Yet, the average Indian believes that the number of cases of sexual violence (with rape being the larger chunk of reported cases) reported in the newspapers reflects the magnitude of the problem little realizing that media reporting barely extends to one in 100 cases. In Indian society discussion about sex and sexuality are taboo, sexual violence more so and sexual violence against a child even more so, unless of course it is in the wake of media sensationalism.

Apart from revenge porn, where else in the world do you have a huge market for unstaged rape videos. These videos are made about an actual rape as it is happening – it’s like predators going for the kill. It shows how you corner this girl and how you start molesting her and how you rape her etc. Often the assaulters take pictures of themselves in the throes of their assault, as if to prove their participation – almost like a trophy to add to the collection. And then there are the ‘homely’ videos for which there is a huge market as well. They are referred to as homely because they capture people in the room while they’re having sex without their consent or knowledge. They have caused immense disruption and upheaval in people’s lives, like for instance a bunch of men were watching pornography when one of them suddenly realized the couple in the video was his sister and brother-in-law on their honeymoon.

It has to be kept in mind that our law-makers and criminal justice personnel come from this very society with their own baggage of stereotypes, myths and understanding about sexual expression. Given this, are they really capable of addressing sexual violence appropriately? Prior to the enactment of POCSO, sometimes the police, stumped with the complexities of incest and the challenge of working with a child witness, would achieve ‘justice’ by prosecuting the accused under the Narcotics Act (NDPS) (an involvement that could be managed). But that does not help because when compiling and analysing statistics for crime, it does not reflect in those statistics as sexual violence. The unfortunate thing with statistics is that these are relied upon by parliamentarians and policy makers when framing policy, when allocating resources, both monetary and human. If there are not enough numbers in a certain area they will say well this does not happen. This can lead to any one of two outcomes: either the issue is not recognized at all or the issue is minimized so that other problems take priority for allocation of resources. The best case scenario is that the issue is recognized as requiring immediate budgetary allocation but even then, the designated funds are inadequate as the magnitude of the numbers is not comprehended or is allocated for an ad hoc idea.

 

What are the areas that need to be addressed within CSA to make redressal more robust?

Mandatory reporting under POCSO (the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012) in its current form poses many challenges. Yet we cannot completely wish it away. However, to be effective it has to be more nuanced since in its current form it is compromising the victim’s access to healthcare – physical, mental and preventative. Perhaps one solution is that the police should not be the only recipients of the information which is to be mandatorily reported.

Then there is a lack of understanding of the prevalence of sexual violence even amongst the medical professionals. Most often doctors do not have the skill set, because they lack training or the understanding to be able to detect sexual violence when it does not really present itself as overt sexual violence. It’s only in cases where there is hospitalization or need for medical help that the families come forward. Often reporting is linked to blood and gore. In that way many cases go under the scanner. For example, there was this case of a young girl who had become extremely overweight in the year between her 9th and 10th grade. All her tests were in order and there was no pathological reason either. In the case, the girl was taken to a psychologist, who explored ‘other things happening in her life’ and it came to light that her cousin had been sexually abusing her over a long period. It was to keep the cousin at bay that the girl had started to ‘pile on the pounds’ in order as she saw it, to make herself as unattractive as possible.

Even cases that come to the hospitals are not free from problems. There have been instances where the nurses have said, ‘oh how can the doctor examine the child; the child is so dirty so we have to clean up the child’ and in the process all the forensic evidence is compromised. In another situation, a fourteen-year-old who was brought to the hospital with the complaint of a stomachache was discovered to be pregnant. So initially, both parents agreed to an abortion but thereafter the father was very reluctant for preservation of fetal matter. This kind of flip-flop raises a red flag. Additionally, there was an observation that the mother and daughter were petrified of the father. These two bits of information juxtaposed together clearly indicated that either the father was the molester or was aware of the molester’s identity and willing to protect it.

From a caseworker’s point of view there are multiple instances where perpetrators who have been accused of child sexual abuse are allowed to go back into settings where they have continued access to children, which makes the recent move of the government to institute a sex offenders registry, farcical. Take for example the case of the Principal of a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Bangalore who was accused of sexually assaulting multiple students. When this came to light, an inquiry was instituted and a FIR (First Information Report) was lodged. However, the Kendriya Vidyalaya administration transferred him to Dharwad and then Leh, pending the outcome of the inquiry. He was eventfully posted to Tamil Nadu. However, there was an outcry and the Principal was relieved of his duties by the Collector who is the de facto Chairperson of Kendriya Vidyalaya in a district. What is appalling is that an institution like the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan with roughly 92,000 schools pan India does not have a child protection policy in place to address these situations.

Even more worrying is the fact that it is well established that many people choose jobs which give them the access and proximity to abuse kids because they have a sexual interest in children. Let’s remember there are far more offenders who are out there who’ve not been reported than who’ve been reported. There are far more offenders who are out there who’ve been reported and acquitted than who’ve been convicted. So what we are doing just does not make sense.

 

In these sorts of situations, how would it help to have the death penalty?

The challenge is even with POCSO and supposedly child friendly procedures – are the courts really up to the task of addressing the unique developmental situations of children. Look at cases of acquittals and the reasons are astonishing. In one case the victim became pregnant as the result of a gang rape. The judge acquitted all the accused except the one whose DNA matched the fetus. Unless one comes to the table with an in-depth understanding of sexual violence, one will never be able to see the nuances and complexities of cases. For instance, there was this case last year where a young child of eight or nine who had a hearing and speech disability had gestured to her mother that her father was behaving very inappropriately with her. It then transpired that the father was actually sexually assaulting her, so the mother filed a case. The police when they were recording the child’s statement found it extremely difficult because the child had never been sent to a school and there is no standardized sign language in India, so very often what happens is that children and their families have their own particular way of communicating, which would be understood by the immediate family. So, in this particular instance that was the case, so even though the police brought in experts to help, the special educators could not really figure out what was happening.² Therefore, the police took the mother’s statement as the statement.

When the case came to court, the court faced the same problem that the child could not be fully understood. The so-called experts then presented an idea to the judge, which he followed. However, it has to be understood that an expert in sign language would probably know nothing about sexual violence or its dynamics. So, in this case the experts advised the judge to put the father of the child with a screen separating them. Then without telling them to suddenly remove the screen and observe the behaviour of the child. If the child shows shock and horror at seeing the father then the verdict is guilty otherwise you assume innocence and therefore acquittal. The child saw her father and smiled and greeted him leading to skepticism as to whether the allegation of abuse was trumped up.

We need to bear in mind that we cannot take away the relationship context from the abuse which is happening and therefore responses could vary and may not fit into a preconceived notion of the ‘appropriate response’. The same question arose in the recent case of a nun who accused a bishop of raping her. A picture of her sitting quietly next to the accused, the day after the alleged incident was reported made her a liar in the minds of the congregation supporting the bishop, who saw this behaviour as unnatural. The crux of the problem is the lack of understanding about the Rape Trauma Syndrome or how people react under stress and/or shock. Just because you’ve been sexually assaulted does not mean you present yourself as one hysterical creature just sitting in a corner weeping and screaming. You could be getting on with your life, you could be able to articulate and say your version in an absolutely even tone and in a clear way but that does not fit into our perception of how sexual violence victims should be. Most often disclosure itself never happens for various reasons and if it at all it does happen, it could be inadvertent or much later. And so there is a bias which comes in.

There are instances where an abuser who is undergoing trial gets bail, moves on to another place where he again commits the same offence. Sometimes criminal cases are stayed and everyone forgets to revive them. It’s laughable to think that the death penalty is going to be the panacea to all these problems. Look at the numbers if you crunch them. Only a small number of cases get reported, investigation may not really be adequate, you may not have an open and shut case in most of the cases so only those which are really robust and stand the rigours of a trial are going to get a conviction or an acquittal. So, from 10 it whittles down to none or one. By giving the death penalty to one person are you going to solve the problem? When somebody is sexually assaulting another person the last thing they or any other penetrating part of their body is going to be thinking of is the death penalty, noose, or electric chair. The situation going to be in the visceral at that moment.

A lot of cases of non-penetrative sexual assault do not reach trial for a variety of reasons. For instance there is the case of a young girl who complained that her father licked her all over her body. The police were clueless as to how to deal with this situation as there was no possibility of any medical evidence being forthcoming. Then it is often reported that the victim was sent for medical examination to confirm rape! The understanding of physiological reactions to sexual expression is not comprehended. Except in India and a few South Asian countries, nowhere else will they do a routine potency test on the accused. Look at POCSO’s substantive sections, you can penetrate with penis, but other body parts you can penetrate with an object. If you penetrate a child with a carrot, what is the relevance of the potency test? Is it there to show your hand can hold a carrot? There has to be a greater understanding of sexual violence. What is the logic to these things, like these tests? These are processes that have to be deconstructed. For instance, there are fathers who say thank goodness my child is a boy he won’t get pregnant. Is the impact of abuse only physiological? There is a constant minimization and trivialization.

 

What is ‘grooming’ when used in conjunction with CSA?

Typically, grooming in the context of CSA is a word used to describe the process by which the abuser manipulates the child’s thinking or his/her surroundings and environment. The objective is to create a feeling of complicity, helplessness, and shame in the child ensuring secrecy and repetitivenessof the abuse. Abusers are consummate strategists. Rare is the situation when an abuser just abuses any child who happens to be around. They study the lie of the land, so to speak. They figure vulnerabilities and then they focus on a targeted child exploiting that child’s Achilles’s heel to their advantage. It’s almost like a carnivore on a hunt; it does not just go in for the kill, it observes and sees who is the most vulnerable in the herd, separates it from the rest before attacking it. (However as much as the modus operandi may sound predatory, it would not be accurate to label abusers as predators as it immediately gives the impression that they are different when actually they are in our midst.)

So, PD was a volunteer at a child care institute (CCI). His tactic was to tell children that if they wanted to look like Salman Khan, whose physique many young boys idolized, they would have to swallow his semen. This ensured he had a constant stream of children vying, not just wanting, to give him oral sex morning, noon and night. They in turn got younger kids interested who were doing it to them. After a point these kids were willing to do for anyone around, not just PD. Just look at it from a sexual abuse point of view, he got the kids exactly where he wanted them. And if exposed he could always turn around and point to their ‘complicity’. They did not consider the ‘exercise’ abusive and did not report the situation because of the way an authority figure had presented it to them.

In another case, this man accused his nephews and nieces of stealing Rs 100 as the scenario to put his plan in action. He had already set the context by being Uncle Cool, he was always giving them these little gifts and would get them treats. So, when he said someone stole money and wanted to check their bags they were all nonplussed. Little did they know he had wrapped a Rs 100 note and kept between his fingers so when put his hand in the bag of the child he was intending to abuse was able to substantiate his ‘suspicion’. The mortified family then jumped onto the shocked child saying ‘oh how terrible, how can you do this to us and look you have stolen from the nice man.’ Three days later he started abusing the child, the child did talk about it, but what did the family say: you’re just trying to be revengeful. Nobody believed the child.

The most disturbing aspect of grooming is when the abuser makes the victim complicit and a willing and active participant. In one particular case, ‘A’s uncle started touching him and told him you are soon going to have an interest in girls the only way you are really going to get their interest back is it to exercise your penis, so I’m going to exercise your penis and you exercise mine, so there was mutual masturbation going on. One day when the father saw ‘A’ and the uncle coming out of the bathroom, he asked them what they were doing in the bathroom. The uncle told him that your son keeps having these terrible thoughts about girls so I was just telling him he should not be having these thoughts. The father slapped the boy. The boy said that he has never had a congenial relationship with the family after that incident. See how brilliantly the uncle manipulated the situation?

This is beyond the cops to understand. How do police even understand these nuances? The FIR format itself asks for time of incident, place of incident etc., not really allowing for the lead up to the abuse and repeated abuse to be recorded.

 

Do you have any comments regarding the police interaction with victims for evidence collection?

The police even if they are in mufti, exude a certain body language which is not conducive to anybody telling them anything. You cannot expect children to sit across a table and talk to you about something like abuse in the same way they may recount their day in school; it does not happen that way. Our best testimony has come from children during an activity, as long as they do not have to make eye contact they will keep talking. They will be drawing and talking, playing with a doll and talking, they are more forthcoming then. And you have to be really careful about how you ask questions. You can just loose the entire moment over one wrong word. You cannot talk to a 4-year-old the way you would talk to a 9-year-old. Do police have that wherewithal?

Then there is a clamour for a CBI enquiry. The CBI is very good in doing investigations of fraud, murder etc., but with the child victim/witness sitting opposite them, what do they think? I am a parent, I know how to talk to a child, which is very different from investigating a case of a child whose mind is probably all cluttered up depending on what rubbish the abuser has said during grooming, to give you the evidence. Interviewing a child is a science. That is why I always say during training that because you are a parent, please do not assume that you can deal with the situation of a child who has been traumatized. That’s very different altogether.

 

Do you want to add anything in conclusion?

A common problem in reporting CSA cases is that most families want justice to be served by recounting the abusive experiences and expressing their desire to see that the perpetrator is bought to book. Somehow, they envisage that the outcome will happen without a formal complaint, without them being named, only on the basis that they have told their story to an organization working in CSA, as if the narrative itself is sufficient. The flip side of the coin is when children who have been abused many years earlier in an institutional setting keep a track on their abuser and may want to lend their support in an active manner but are unable to persuade current victims and their parents to come forward to complain.

On another note, the average person does not understand the sequence of the law. They (even NGOs) believe that the accused getting bail means that the police have been bribed because they are unaware that bail is a matter of right. For most people the notion of death penalty carries an immediacy of punishment, as they have no idea of the progression of a case. A greater understanding of the criminal justice system needs to be there. Death penalty only comes at the time of sentencing which is dependent on a conviction which is dependent on the investigation. If we imagine the spectrum of CSA as a triangle, then the base is representative of unreported cases, which are by far the most numerous. The middle of the triangle would denote cases that are reported but do not convert into FIRs for various reasons. The top of the triangle would be the few cases that make it to trial and the convictions would happen in a small percentage of the last category.

It must be remembered that sexual violence in childhood is an adverse experience that can usually have lasting, harmful effects on victims and their family, friends, and communities. It would seem all current efforts are at the secondary and tertiary level of addressing post abuse situations and would include, public education media campaigns, and sexual assault deterrence by threat of criminal sanction.

Raising awareness, which involves behavioural changes to stop it from happening in the first place is primary prevention. This would entail preventing perpetuation by working with potential ‘high risk’ offenders, changing societal norms to decrease supportive attitudes to sexual violence etc. – initiatives which will not perhaps show results overnight but will systematically erode into the base which promotes sexual violence.

However, the solutions are just as complex as the problem. Different types of violence are connected and often share the same root causes. They can all take place under one roof, in the same community or neighbourhood, at the same time, or at different stages of life. Understanding the overlapping causes of violence by examination of cultural practices that allow for enhancing protective and reducing risk factors, is the key to redress.

 

* Tulir is an organization working on the prevention and healing of child sexual abuse in India.

Footnotes:

1. B. Heilman, L. Hebert and N. Paul-Gera, The Making of Sexual Violence: How Does a Boy Grow Up to Commit Rape? Evidence from Five IMAGES Countries. International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), Washington, DC, and Promundo, Washington, DC., June 2014, p. 7. This is a 5-country study of Chile, Croatia, India, Mexico and Rwanda wherein young boys from the ages of 15-25 years were interviewed on the basis of a standard 7 questions set. https://www.icrw.org/publications/the-making-of-sexual-violence (last accessed on 12 October 2018).

2. Editors Note: The quality of interpreters available to children with disabilities is highly questionable. In this case, an assigned sign language interpreter ought to have been allowed to observe the child communicating within the family in order to decipher the signs being used. This suggestion ought to have come from the so-called experts.