What has befallen us ….A look at Child Sexual Abuse

The word ‘disgrace’ seems inadequate to describe a society in which human beings are lured or forced into activities that our sense of common humanity. It is difficult to do justice to the moral repugnance and outrage felt by civilised people when the facts about child trafficking are brought home to them. The fact that such appalling suffering is deliberately inflicted on men, women and children by criminals who regard them as commodities to be abused and sold for financial gain, is so far removed from most people’s experience that it is easy for our minds simply to recoil from it. Therefore, the subject of sexual exploitation of children is an issue where a lot needs to be done to bring about awareness on an issue we would much rather keep under wraps.

Commercial sexual exploitation of children is defined as ‘sexual abuse by the adult and remuneration in cash or kind to the child or a third person or persons. The child is treated as a sexual object and as a commercial object’. It includes the prostitution of children, child pornography and other forms of transactional sex where a child engages in sexual activity to have basic needs of food, shelter or clothing fulfilled. It includes forms of transactional sex where the sexual abuse of children is not stopped or reported by household members, due to benefits derived by the household from the perpetrator.

Research has proved that children are especially victimised in the commercial sex trade. They are forced to accept a large number of clients can almost never negotiate safe sex and are often beaten and ill-treated. Due to the illegal and clandestine nature of the commercial sexual exploitation of children, their ‘keepers’ keep them in captivity — hidden from public view. Thus, children condemned in commercial sexual exploitation continue to suffer in silence.

India is fast emerging as a favoured destination for sex tourists from Europe, the US and other western countries. The favoured destinations are Goa, Kerala, Maharashtra, and more recently, West Bengal and Orissa. Goa continues to be a haven for sex tourists from Europe and the US. After Thailand, Vietnam and Sri Lanka strengthened legislations to combat the growing menace of sex tourism and paedophiles, the jugger naut rolled on to Goa. The state was a popular choice as it was cheap and easy to procure a child and sexually abuse him/her. The inadequacy of the existing legislations to combat this growing menace and the apathy of law enforcement officials adds to the attraction

Trafficking of children is also a serious problem in India. The nature and scope of trafficking range from industrial and domestic labour, to forced early marriages and commercial sexual exploitation. Existing studies show that over 40 per cent of women sex workers enter into prostitution before the age of 18 years. Moreover, for children who have been trafficked and rescued, opportunities for rehabilitation remains scarce and reintegration process arduous?

While systematic data and information on child protection issues are still not always available, evidence suggests that children in need of special protection belong to communities suffering disadvantage and social exclusion such as scheduled casts and tribes, and the poor. The lack of available services, as well as the gaps persisting in law enforcement and in rehabilitation schemes also constitute a major cause of concern.

Child sexual abuse has so far been largely ignored by the Indian legal system. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, does not address children as a separate category. The only legal provision that is most often used to bring about a conviction is Section 377 of the IPC that criminalises ‘unnatural sex’ and is abused by the police to violate the human rights of same sex couples.

According to figures provided by the National Crime Records Bureau, in 2004, as many as 2,265 cases of kidnapping and abduction of children qualified as forms of trafficking and were reported to the police. Of these, 1,593 cases were of kidnapping for marriage, 414 were for illicit sex, 92 for unlawful activity, 101 for prostitution and the rest for various other things like slavery, begging and even selling body parts. Most of these children (72 per cent) were between 16 and18 years of age. Twenty-five per cent were children aged 11-15 years. This is the tip of the iceberg; the malaise runs much deeper and many cases go unreported. And with trafficking having overtaken the arms trade and drugs as the world’s largest illicit industry, we need more hands on the deck than we have at present fighting this sickening menance.

A Bahu from Bengal

Kerala has been a pioneer in man power export in many areas and for long. But a new manifestation of this export should be causing all of disquiet. The state has largely been known for its export of man power as NRIs but of late it has begun exporting women as brides in girl starved North Indian states like Haryana. On the face of it, cross cultural marriages in an ethnically fragile country ought to be encouraged as a cementing factor – except for two things – The “ export” of brides and their relatively easy availability would mean that there is even lesser incentive for communities in many of these North Indian States to abort female fetuses. Demographic threats have often been held out as a potential deterrent that might work to retard the increasingly wide spread malaise of female feticide.

The other thing that is happening is that human trafficking, particularly trafficking in women and minor girls is shifting shapes and is often enough now coming disguised as marriages. Trafficked women are no longer clandestinely bought and sold as used to mostly happen, it is possible now to “marry’ such women and then “divorce’ such women who then go on to “ marry” other men.

With marriage – whatever be its colors enjoying social sanction, it becomes difficult to prosecute any one and with birth certificates and mirage registrations largely non existent in rural hinterlands, it is next to impossible prove that a particular girl was a minor or that a particular woman was not married but trafficked. In India in any case, the Prevention of Immoral Traffic Act despite its name, covers only offences occurring in brothels and non brothel based trafficking as occurs in these kind of sham marriages are not covered. So effectively India lacks current ant trafficking laws.

Of course the issue of trafficking and women being trafficked is not restricted to Kerala and is perhaps more rampant with more dire consequences in other impoverished states. “Trafficking can be disguised as migration, commercial sex or marriage. But what begins as a voluntary decision often ends up as trafficking as victims find themselves in unfamiliar destinations, subjected to unexpected work,” A BBC report for instance quoting the Assam police informs that since 1996 3,184 women and 3,840 female children have gone missing in the state and many have ended up working as call-girls around Delhi or used as “sex slaves” by wealthy landlords in states like Punjab and Haryana. That piece of statistic means that we are talking of about two women a day.

The market rate for a bride currently it seems is between 4,000 and 30,000 rupees ($88 to $660) and the custom of buying brides has not just infected the states of Haryana and Punjab only, it is spreading. In a district where the urban sex ratio is the lowest in the country at 678/1,000 and where the largest tehsil has a sex ratio of 535/1,000, the system of bride buying has become quite rampant in the last five years. Shahjahanpur’s block Bhawaal Kheda has several villages where, due to the low sex ratio, men have been buying brides from states like West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar.

Coming back to the case of the brides out sourced , even if a woman is not bought and sold in the slave market, the racial memory of polyandry as in Draupadi it seems still persists. As the Hindu reports “ In some villages in Punjab, however, all the men in a household have access to the bought bride. She has no choice. Even if she is married to one brother, she must be available to all the other brothers in the house. Thus, polyandry exists, particularly in poor households where only one man can “buy” a wife. Sex selection has ensured that there are too few local women available. And poverty has dictated that only those with money can “buy” a woman. And with sex ratios touching 535 girls per 1000 boys in parts of the country, it may be that soon in places there may be no women to celebrate or observe the annual International Women’s’ Day that just went by.