A Bowl of Elusive

WARNING: Those who were bummed out by my depressing article "Just Another Day in Life" might find this article even more demure. That's because it is. But it is a topic I needed to write about. So here goes nothing. Being a child born in a country which is as densely populated as India just multiplies your chances of being sexually abused. In fact, I believe that as much as 95% of kids today face some form of sexual abuse or the other. Do you want to know why I am assuming such a huge percentage? That's because most of my peers who felt comfortable enough with me to share their woes, told me that it had happened to them. In some cases, it was just some neighbor "uncle" touching them inappropriately and in other cases, it was more horrid than that. A girl I knew had confessed to having been raped between the age of six to nine by five different men, most of whom were either related to her or were close family friends. I myself faced abuse at the h

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

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