Society shames male survivors into silence

In the aftermath of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu’s Kathua district and the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, the government on April 21 approved an ordinance to amend laws, including the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) 2012, to award the death penalty to anyone found guilty of raping a girl below the age of 12. The centre is further considering a similar amendment for sexual assaults against boys below 12.

Children are not just vulnerable to sexual offences committed by adults. Increasingly, children are being sexually abused by other children. Between 1991 and 2016, the number of rapes by children increased almost 11 times, according to statistics captured by the National Crime Records Bureau.

The matter came into sharp focus in 2012 when one of the accused in the Delhi gang rape was a 17-year-old. Until then, the maximum punishment that could be awarded to juveniles was three years of detention in a remand home irrespective of the crime. Much public outrage ensued and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, was amended to allow 16-18-year-olds to be tried as adults for heinous crimes such as rape and murder.

Tough punitive laws aside, we need to ask why these crimes are taking place. An analysis of sexual offences committed by juveniles in the past four months reveals that many of the accused have easy access to mobile phones and know their victims. In Bharatpur, a 14-yearold

For the seven-year-old, it all began at a wedding. Relatives and family friends were streaming into the house for a week and no one had a moment to spare. It was then that he started developing intimacy with an older cousin, who was 16. Now an adult, he remembers the agony and urgency to continue their relationship for the sake of what the older male, strapping and popular, called ‘their special relationship’. Word of the abuse never spilled out because he was afraid of losing his friend, and being seen as weak.

This isn’t an isolated incident. The abuse of male children by juveniles and adults alike is a reality often shrouded in shame, secrecy and mores of masculinity.

“No one is bothered about the male child though he is more exposed by virtue of the fact that no one is likely to listen to or believe him. Abuse is prevalent across classes,” said Amod Kanth, a former director general of police and founder of Prayas, a Delhi-based non-governmental organisation. In 2007, Prayas along with Unicef and the Union ministry of women and child development, conducted a study on child abuse in India. Held across 13 states, it found that 53% of 12,447 children surveyed had been sexually abused. Of them, 53% were boys.

Another survey conducted in 2017 among 160 male survivors of sexual abuse by Mumbai-based activist Insia Dariwala found 84.9% had not disclosed it to anyone. The top reason for non-disclosure was shame, the survey revealed. It was Dariwala’s Change.org petition that Union women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi responded to last week, and ordered a nationwide study on male child sexual abuse.

“Men are ridiculed, their sexual orientation is questioned, and the pressure to live up to the façade of society’s macho image, weighs in so heavy, that ultimately the only way out, is to live a life allegedly raped a five-year-old earlier this month. His father blames the “video clips on his mobile phone” that he watched with his friends. In Assam’s Nagaon, a 12-year-old girl was raped and set ablaze by three youths, including two minors, in March. One of them was her cousin. In Odisha, a 16-year-old boy in Sambalpur district sexually assaulted a Class 1 girl, who had visited his home to watch television. Preliminary investigations into the rape of a four-year-old in Ludhiana in January revealed that the accused, aged 12 and 13, could have been watching pornography.

Sexual offences by and against children do not occur in a vacuum.

There is little to no conversation about sexuality within homes and schools, but the media is rife with sexualised imagery that dehumanises women and places unfair expectations of machismo among men.

In the case of young boys who are abused, the silence is deafening.

All forms of sexual experience between adolescents are criminalised. As a result, a number of them apprehended under this law are in consensual relationships with other adolescents.

The remand homes that juveniles are sent to also lack appropriate infrastructure, like mental health counsellors or after-care services to help them re-integrate into society.

So really, it’s no surprise that children are committing sexual offences against children.

And while such cases may horrify us, they should also give us pause to think about how our silence about all things sexual with adolescents will only increase the next victim’s vulnerability.

As the nation grapples with sexual offences against children, it is time to talk about why an increasing number of abusers are minors themselves NEW DELHI:

within,” Dariwala said in her petition that has been signed by 122,418 individuals at the time of writing this report.

Abuse is often about power and not so much about lust, points out Mumbaibased psychologist Janavi Doshi, but for male survivors, handling the trauma while managing social expectations to be macho, a protector and an aggressor is difficult. “They suffer the double burden of getting abused and getting called a sissy that you couldn’t protect yourself,” says Sangeeta Punekar, an activist with Mumbai-based Forum Against Child Sexual Exploitation.

Complicating matters is social silence on child sexuality that forces the law to look at any sexual exploration through the prism of illegality. “Sex is seen as taboo or something horrible. So, the child learns to feel guilty about such discussion. This is ideal for abuse,” says writer and director Pankaj Butalia, who authored the 2013 book Dark Room: Child Sexuality in India. He points out that among children, sometimes, sexual exploration starts innocently, but as the older child crosses puberty, the activity shifts from being fun for both parties to aggression, shame and abuse. “But the older child is not a criminal,” he says, advocating greater conversation.

Prejudices surrounding homosexuality and effeminacy compound the problem. Many abusers prey upon less aggressive boys, who fear being singled out as “gay”. This attitude also leads to other forms of sexual abuse: The “corrective rape” of queer men and transpeople, and the continual abuse of transboys.

What’s the way ahead? For years, Kanth explains Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalises “unnatural sex”, was the only recourse and continues to be invoked today, despite the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012, which Kanth thinks hasn’t helped the male survivors much. But he is also careful to note that harsher implementation of the law cannot be a solution as it refuses to acknowledge natural sexual explorations of children.

Shekhar Sheshadri, a professor at Bengaluru’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, argues for nuance which looks at not just the child’s gender, but also their age, maturity and exploration . He underlines the abuser’s process of “grooming — establishing a relationship with a child, imbuing it with specialness, isolating the child, making it secret and finally sexualising it.” 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0

OJuvenile rapes have been increasing, both in terms of numbers, and their weight in all cognisable crimes by minors. According to NCRB statistics, rapes by juveniles increased almost 11 times between 1991 and 2016. The total number of cognisable Indian Penal Code (IPC) crimes by children increased by 3.3 times during this period. This suggests that rape is becoming more common in crimes committed by juveniles ur selective absorption with cases of brutal child rapes and juvenile sex offenders, coupled with our overwhelming reliance on punitive responses, harm, not protect the rights of the child. Horrific as such cases are, they fail to address the child’s vulnerability to routine forms of sexual abuse.

The focus on the grotesque over the everyday achieves two things. In defining child sexual abuse strictly in terms of exceptionally violent cases, the state and society normalise everyday abuse against children. Our silence around adolescent sexuality diminishes the ability of the already vulnerable child to seek help.

After the Delhi gang rape incident of 2012, the Juvenile Justice Act was amended in 2015 to allow juveniles between the ages of 16 and 18 accused of grave crimes to be subjected to criminal trial and punishment on par with adults. 6% 5% 4% 3% 2%

One of the newest entrants to a Delhi observation home, where undertrial juveniles are housed, is the son of an e-rickshaw driver and a home maker, accused of raping a five-year-old neighbour. The resident of Northeast Delhi claims that he is 10-years-old, but the system records him as a 13-year-old.

“I don’t remember,” he said, when asked about the offence he allegedly committed last week.

According to the First Information Report, which HT read, the survivor opened up about what happened after her mother saw the child bleeding.

The juvenile was booked under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act for alleged rape and taken into custody.

He now awaits trial and stays at one of the four observation homes set up by the city’s department of women and child development.

Data from the National Crime Records Bureau shows that rape was the thirdmost prevalent crime amongst children in 2016 after theft and trespassing or burglary. A total of 44,171 juveniles were apprehended across the country that year, of which, a little over 2,000 were apprehended on rape-related charges.

Experts agree that socially-prescribed unequal gender roles have a deep impact on the way adolescent boys treat girls and women. This, coupled with a lack of scientific and stigma-free sexuality education means that there is little or no direction that adolescents receive about understanding sexuality.

Though each observation home has a mental health unit, there is a shortage of counsellors. All juveniles are required to meet with the counsellor when they first come in. Thereafter, the sessions are scheduled as per requirement. The house that the alleged juvenile abuser of the five-year-old is in, has 40 other children. This translates to only weekly half-hour counselling sessions.

On an average, the maximum sanctioned capacity of the Delhi homes is 75, which means even lesser counselling time for the juveniles. Enakshi Ganguly, co-founder of HAQ: Centre for Child Rights, a New Delhi-based non-governmental organisation that offers counselling to juveniles in observation homes that house undertrials, said, “We have seen during our counselling that when the kids begin to realise what the victim must have experienced, they weep. Around 80 to 85% of the children we have counselled, never committed an offence again,” she said.

NEW DELHI: I don’t think the aftermath of something like that ever ceases to exist… nonetheless, we have accepted ourselves... and we are strong, and successful people today. Eventually, that’s all that will matter... NEWDELHI: