Is Your Child Safe Within Your Safety?

WHEN a mirror is presented to an individual or a society to contemplate and redress the bruises and scars veiling its face, the reaction is usually one of denial and blaming the mirror. The analogy best depicts the scenario of child abuse in Kashmir and the popular reaction to it. Despite all evidences to the contrary, people still claim Edenic innocence and challenge all the qualitative and quantitative indicators pointing to the rise and pervasion of child abuse in our society. This mode of denial in unison with lack of awareness on the intricacies of child abuse has only aggravated the problem and made its solution an inaccessible path. The lack of agencies dedicated to this cause of elimination of child abuse, the legal illiteracy, the innocence of children to recognise what is happening to them and their inability to report the same have all deepened and complicated the issue of child abuse. The present article attempts to delineate the contours of child abuse and the possible mitigation measures that can be of help in neutralising and checking the malice.

Child abuse is an umbrella term and is used to define physical, sexual and psychological maltreatment of a child or children, especially by a parent or a caregiver. A WHO report suggests that nearly 3 in 4 children – or 300 million children – aged 2–4 years regularly suffer physical punishment and/or psychological violence at the hands of parents and caregivers. One in 5 women and 1 in 13 men report having been sexually abused as a child aged 0-17 years. 120 million girls and young women under 20 years of age have suffered some form of forced sexual contact. The dimensions of child abuse has each its subtleties, complications, complexities and a host of resolution challenges associated with it. For the fact that sexual abuse presents a salience of its own and has long term traumatizing affects, goes largely unnoticed and has consequences outscoring those of any other form of child abuse, the same has been deemed important for the present article. The abuse of children has been a phenomenon quite common in history, across geographic and class divide. “Throughout history, violence against children has been manifested in every conceivable form: physically, emotionally, neglect, sexual exploitation, and cruel labour. Esteem for children has been slow to appear in history. In the 17th century, there was a shift from communal to family groups, and the child gradually achieved a place of honour in the family. Generally, protective services have consisted of institutionalizing children or placing them in foster care. In spite of good intentions, children have suffered physical and psychological damage under this system. Increasingly laws have been enacted to limit the rights of the father to manage his children as he wills”, writes S X Rabdill. Children are vulnerable and are left to the whims of elders/parents/caretakers and this vulnerability and inability to understand what is happening to them leaves them shield-less against the myriad forms of violence they are exposed to.

      The cases of sexual violence and abuse against the children have been on the rise and apart from statistical testimonials certifying the same, the undocumented, unreported and unrecorded horrendous stories of sexual offences against the children strike our ears regularly and with increasing frequency. The gruesome and challenging aspect of the problem has been that parents, teachers and instructors have been found perpetrating sexual offence against the children, thereby making the problem too entangled and sensitive, defying the traditional remedial approaches.

At the individual level, perpetrators of child sexual abuse have poorly developed socio-emotional skills, attitudinal and cognitive distortions, and possess similar attributes to sex offenders against adult women, namely a sense of sexual entitlement, empathy deficits, a construction of masculinity emphasizing sexual performance and dominance, and a history of childhood victimisation. At the institutional level, such as in schools and religious institutions, child sexual abuse is more likely to be perpetrated, concealed, and to continue when there is a rigid power hierarchy, a culture of silence protecting the institution’s reputation, and an absence of protective regulatory mechanisms including robust organizational policy, employee screening, codes of conduct, incident reporting processes, and staff education. At the societal level, child sexual abuse is enabled when children’s rights are not recognized, laws and policies do not prohibit and prosecute sexual offending, social norms against sexual violence are weak, gender inequality persists, constructions of masculinity emphasize aggression and sexual dominance,there is ignorance about sex and sexual violence, and opinion leaders in social institutions lack the will to act. We need to get out of the “culture of denial” and shun the assumption that bad things can happen only to other people’s children. It is also needed to understand that it is not always the outsiders who can harm our child’s physical, social and emotional health. Family members and close relatives can also do the same. As for the “conspiracy of silence,” in this case, it describes our behavior to remain silent when we see child abuse happenning around us. Parents have the most important role to ensure their children are not meted out with any abuse. They have to be vigilant. They do not have to ensure the safety of children only at schools and other places outside the home but they must make sure that kids are safe at their homes as well.

Views expressed in the article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial stance of Kashmir Observer 

• The author is a Srinagar based columnist

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