Child Abuse - Protect that smile

by
Gaurav Kumar

The dark scar starting from somewhere between his hairs and crossing across his eye-brows stopped at his left cheek like a line of ignorance and apathy on the face of the nation. Mohsin, the 6 year old was rescued from one of the chudi factories in Faridabad, Where he had to eat mica-bauxite wrapped bread loafs, puff in the long rusted pipe in a furnace above 700 degree Celsius and cut himself with an oxidised blade piece to take leaves. Mohsin is not just one such story, he is a tale of 40% of the 440 million (19 percent of world) child population in our country. Mohsin was rehabilitated in one of the schools run by a child welfare organization in Noida.
Every development issue in India has an implicit effect of poverty or may be poverty seems to be root cause in most of the issues, but brutality and discrimination with children has lot many crucial factors involved out of which one of the most important understands the meaning of "abuse". Many of the erudite directly correlate abuse with either child labour or sexual harassment.
To understand it properly, abuse is constitutionally divided into four categories which have a grotesque face as revealed below.
Physical Abuse
1. Two out of every three children are physically abused.
2. Out of 69% children physically abused, 54.68% are boys.
3. Over 50% children in all the are being subjected to one or the other form of physical
abuse.
4. Out of those children physically abused in family situations, 88.6% are physically abused by parents.
5. 65% of school going children reported facing corporal punishment i.e. two out of three children are victims of corporal punishment.
6. 50.2% children worked seven days a week.
Sexual Abuse
1. 53.22% children report having faced one or more forms of sexual abuse.
2. 21.90% children face severe forms of sexual abuse and 50.76% other forms of sexual abuse.
6. Children on street, children at work and children in institutional care report the highest incidence of sexual assault.
7. 50% abuses are persons known to the child or in a position of trust and responsibility.
8. Most children do not report the matter to anyone.
Emotional Abuse and Girl Child Neglect
1. Every second child report facing emotional abuse.
2. Equal percentage of both girls and boys reported facing emotional abuse.
3. In 83% of the cases parents are the abusers.
4. 48.4% of girls wish they were boys.
The data may look exhaustive and redundant to many of the readers , for it all just flashes the poor face of a child in plight and may be there is a pinch of sympathy of an iota of time, but it has larger meanings and more detailed implications.
I see a link of the child abuse in the our so called , so much boasted tradition which talks of dictatorship in the smallest unit of society, our families. Our basic psychology of considering punishment as a tool to make good people. Why were we beaten up in schools for not completing home works, Is discipline complementary to punishment? I strongly believe that the act of slapping your own child for not completing his own task is extended to burning your child servant in tandoor for not completing his work.
If I talk of sexual abuse , again I see a reason to curse the same stereotypical boasting of our culture and traditions which makes sex a taboo and subject of curiosity which leads to the frustrations and rapes. Most of the cases registered under sexual abuse are as shameful as exhibiting private parts in front of minors and sending them into a state of trauma. Do you a see a link of opposition of sex education here??.
Forget about being a human activist and volunteering for child protection movements, we need to start with talking about the denigration of innocence and understanding the root cause of the existence of the shameful issue. It makes more sense to stop the reason of creating abusers in society rather than rehabilitating a raped girl child and giving a life sentence to the person who commits the sordid crime.