CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE-2 The Abuse

O Rose ,thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
of crimson joy
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy

William Blake

Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) as defined by the US Dept of Health Education and Welfare , consists of contact or interaction between a child and an adult when the child is being used for the sexual stimulation of the perpetrator or another person.

It is not solely restricted to physical contact ; such abuse could include noncontact abuse such as exposure , voyeurism an child pornography. Abuse could be physical , psychological, emotional and ritualistic. (Ritualistic abuse is defined as child physical torture, hurt, or forcing the child to do somehing sexual during some sort of ritual meeting, cult gathering , or religious activity of forcung a child to watch any of the above to happen to someone else.

CSA takes place in almost all cultures, races and in all strata of society. Most of the reported cases and personal interviews reveal the fact that girls are more victimised than boys and the abusers are mostly men and not women.But this does not necessarily imply that the victims are mostly girls alone and that women never come in the garb of the perpetrator.

And friends, who are the perpetrators? You think that they are the typical movie- villain type strangers with a dirty sneer on their lips and a sinister-looking scar across their faces? No, my friend.He/she knows your child and your child knows him/her. Researches show that 70% of the perpetrators are known to the victims intimately.They come either as a friend , a cousin, an uncle, or saddest of all. as the step father or even father.

The mere mention of a child brings to ur mind a pair of wide eyes filled with innocence, curiosity ,and yes, trust. But ironically it is these very traits in the child that act against them.

Children are the most vulnerable , gullible lot among human beings. They can be talked into anything the adult wants to get done because their guileless minds cannot comprehend the enormity of the mistake they are about to commit. They are curious about every leaf that rustles in the wind...and more so when the adult presents it before them with an air of mystery and secrecy.

Kids look up to the adults and and trust them blindly. So it is easy to manipulate and exploit them.But when this trust is shattered , the child is totally lost and the emotional havoc it creats stays for a whole life-time. Children become easy preys because they are relatively powerless. This unbalanced power equation is very important here.The abuser is an adult who commands a very powerful equation in the family and the children are taught to repect and obey the powerful adult. The perpetrator plays on this sense of powerlessness of the kid.


CSA is either under-reported or it goes totally unreported , , mainly because of the stigma attached to it As said earlier , most of the abusers are intrafamilial and so the family's reputation is threatened. However , the matter is hushed up and the child is either asked to shut up or his/her disclosure is totally ignored. Children on their part, most of the time, fail to communicate their problem properly to another adult member of the family.

The fear, anxiety and guilt experienced by them make them incapable of proper comunication and as a result , they are not understood and believed. All the while, the perpetrator sits smugly in the knowledge that his/her secret is safe.
It is saddening to note that family, which is supposed to be the very source of safety and security turns out to be the place where the child is victimised both physically and emotionally . In our eagerness to cover up the issue and to preserve the so-called strong familial ties, we ignore the trauma experienced by the children. The way the abuse is handled when the disclosure is made, has a lot to do with its subsequent impact.

Researchers have found that the experience of sexual abuse can have a negative impact on the child that often persists to adulthood. It colours the individual's life in a negative manner and robs the survivor of many of the finer aspects of life. This aspect of CSA will be discussed in detail later.