The Silent Scream

The reported scale of child abuse in India is simply staggering ....

India's Forbidden Subject .....

.... As far back as 2007, a study by the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare in India, found that more than 53% (of the nearly 12,300 children who were surveyed), reported one or more forms of sexual abuse.

The same study also revealed that possibly more boys than girls were being sexually abused, with more than 53% of those boys questioned in the survey, saying that they were victims of sexual abuse.

The latest reported crime statistics, show that in 2020, the National Crime Records Bureau of India registered 43,000 abuse offences under the 2012 Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POSCO) Act, This is approximately one case every 12 minutes (and that's just those offences reported, with many believing its a just drop in the ocean compared with the number of offences that aren't being reported). In fact the conviction rate under the POSCO Act is just a very poor 2.4% (possibly because victims are pressured to withdraw allegations).

Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is illegal under Indian law, but it is still widely available and often carried out openly on platforms such as Facebook (In July 2020, police in India's north-eastern state of Assam received a report of one such Facebook page from a non-profit organisation, and arrested a 28-year-old man a month later). Social media platforms have very poor records for policing such content, and the page was reportedly only closed after the arrest, not before. Much of the CSAM content is created out using VPN's to make the abusers true location harder to trace.

The India Child Protection Fund said that as usual, its men who drive the CSAM market, with the user base for CSAM in India reported as more than 90% male, and just 1% female. Interest is largely in subjects general topics such as "school sex videos" and "teen sex", which in the West usually involves models aged 18+ (on legal sites - we also have child abuse issues), but in India, less so.

The fact that Indian society is unwilling to discuss or acknowledge that its has some of the worst figures for both child abuse and also for rape in the world, is perhaps not surprising, given that many of the child abusers are close family members. But that reluctance to call the police means that it continues as a silent epidemic. So for every abuse (and rape) case that reaches court, hundreds don't ..... So the larger issue is the social problem of the social stigma that a report generates, and a general reluctance to talk about the topics, that needs to be addressed, as well as issue of more prosecutions by the courts.

But while Indian provincial high courts still make decisions such one that a man should be cleared of the sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl, because "there was no skin-to-skin contact" with the victim, or that a man convicted of forcing a 10-year-old boy to perform oral sex, should have his 10-year jail sentence term reduced, because it considered that the assault was not "aggravated" ... both these verdicts are subject to India's Supreme Court striking them down (as the first verdict mentioned already has), then it demonstrates how intransigent the problem really is.

Underlying all this the Indian patriarchal society, which vastly under values women, and treats both them and children as being under the control of male relatives. Attempts to discuss the problem by campaigners and even MP's, usually result in on-line trolls (aka cowards) describing them as being "part of a Western conspiracy to defame India". 

Its this sort of nationalistic view and attitude, that prevents India from attacking and dealing with one of the biggest social problems it has ...