Sexual Abuse of Children…(Part 1: The Parent)

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 I interacted with, confessed to having been sexually abused in their childhood.

Isn't that scary and disturbing, especially for you parents out there?

As parents, I am sure you are quite careful about your children. In spite of that, if your child faces a traumatic experience, you can’t be blamed for it. After all, you can't guard a child round the clock. They go to school, they go out to play and these are necessary for their development.

But sadly, I have come across kids who have faced sexual abuse repeatedly through their childhood, many a times at the hands of more than one sexual predator. These children were either too scared of their parents to talk to them about what had happened, or hadn’t been taken seriously when they attempted to talk about it. What would you say about these parents?

I don't blame these parents, you know. The root lies in their upbringing. These are individuals who have been taught to look at sex as a disease, as an ailment. Their reaction to any topic sexual is to shy away from it, dust in under the rug. So they pass it on to their children. It leads to the kids being scared of talking to their parents.

Then we have some of these parents who might have experienced such trauma themselves as kids. This combined with their stupid views about sex, makes them incapable of reacting to such situations correctly. They start denying it. If a kid is brave enough to try and talk about something that has happened to him, one negative reaction from you would make him/her shut up and keep bearing the torment forever.

Sex, rape, abuse…these are no doubt difficult topics to discuss with a child. But believe me, you need to. There’s no other way to make a child comfortable enough to be brave and raise a voice against it.

In the next part of this article, I will try to shed some light on the character profile of a sexual predator. I will discuss a lot of wrong views that people maintain in their minds about this topic, etc. Stay tuned to my blog.