A Bowl of Elusive

Very few people realise how severely Sexual Abuse scars its victims. This is the last part of this article. I will be throwing some light on how deeply this heinous crime affects the lives of the children who go through it. Imagine a 7-year old boy being sodomized by a 30-year old man, bleeding and writhing in pain. If you think that is the worst thing a little boy could go through, you're mistaken. What's worse than the abuse itself is having to live with it. It changes people. And I am not talking just about the victims of violent sexual abuse like I described. Even milder forms of abuse leave their mark. We’re talking about little impressionable children here. Subjecting them to an intrusion of their privacy, coaxing them to cooperate with acts of perversion affects them in hundreds of little ways. It goes on to leave indelible dents on their personalities when they grown up. Don’t believe me? Read on. In the previous part of this article, I described...

As promised, here I am with the second part of this article. Let us talk about the sexual predator our kids face. We need to know what we are up against to fight it better. This is a sensitive topic and we need to eradicate all misinformation from our minds. I will sketch a character profile here, drawing inspiration from my own experiences and that of many people I know. There would be many readers who when they hear the phrase “Sexual Abuse of Children” will instantly imagine a pedophile. (A pedophile is a person who is sexually attracted to children.) But this isn't always the case with people who abuse children. To understand this better, we have to first get over the misconception that rape is committed out of lust. Rapists are almost never sex addicts, they are violent aggressive and disturbed people, and the purpose of rape is never just sexual gratification. Similarly, child abusers aren't always driven by attraction to children. Terrifying as it is, this means tha...

Having been a victim of sexual abuse myself, this was a topic I always wanted to discuss out loud. This is the first part of this series. I don’t expect these articles to change the lives of abuse victims out there, but at least they should enhance our understanding of it. This part is meant for parents. Almost all of you have faced some form of sexual abuse as a child. You might not talk about it, you might not report it or you might have blocked it from your conscious memory. But it has happened. Approximately 52.33% children report having faced some form of sexual abuse or the other. But seeing how sexually repressed our society is and how we condition our children to think of sex as something bad and alien, you can imagine how high that figure might actually be. Being a victim myself, I have always tried to make myself aware about this topic. I have spoken to a lot of peers about it, friends, colleagues, old flames, etc. And an alarmingly high percentage of the people...

Now this is a story not a lot of people know. I will be changing a few details for the sake of everyone. The super-cyclone of October 1999 was dark, fierce and devastating. But a strange calm fell upon the land once it was over. Thinking back on those days, I might say it reflected on the life I had back then. Having been appointed into a new job after leaving the air force, my father had to move to Choudwar in 1996. Divorced and single, he had to toggle between a job and his 6 year old son. So he appointed a governess/care-taker of sorts for me. Funny how things turn sour before you have time to blink your eye. She was a horror. My father kept busy with his job and was absolutely indulgent whenever he was home. But that wasn’t most of the time. This woman, lets call her Meena, used to beat up till I bled. She used to verbally abuse me, saying terrible things about my parents and family. She used to starve me. All this started gradually, mind you, and maybe that’s w...