Child Sexual Abuse in Assam: Stories of unending ordeal of victims that are not revealed by statistics

“My mind may have forgotten the trauma, but my body has not. The body has a memory of its own; it neither forgets nor forgive!” said Prika, a student of Law from Assam, while narrating how she was abused seventeen years ago by a member of her own family. Living in a joint family since childhood, Prika was always asked not to speak out loud and refrain from being inquisitive to elders.

During the winters of early 2000, Prika’s grandfather passed away. All her family members had assembled for the funeral. One among them was her grandfather’s eldest son-in-law. Recollecting the haunting memories, Prika said, “during the night, a lot of family members used to sleep together on a set of mattresses. All of a sudden, I felt a cold touch on my body. Besides me, there’s my grandfather’s eldest son in law. I thought that his hands on the lower part of my stomach was a mistake and slept again. Suddenly, I re-felt a touch and this time, inside my clothes. He kept rubbing his bare hands on my bare body. I was helpless and did not know how to react.”

According to the Crime in India 2020 Report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the crime rate registered under per lakh children in India is 28.9. However, when it comes to Assam, the rate scales up to 38.3. More than 16,000 cases of crimes against children have been reported in Assam in the last three years, which is almost two times, the number of cases in the other seven North Eastern States combined. Every day, India celebrates the birth of more than 60,000 babies. And within the same time frame, it records more than 350 crimes against children.

In percentage terms, major crime heads under ‘Crime Against Children’ in the country during 2020 were Kidnapping and Abduction (42.6%) and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (38.8%) including child rape, the report states. State-wise data reveal that in Assam, in 86% of cases under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) Act, the offenders were known to victims. At the national level, 96 per cent of all such cases, the abusers were known to the children. An analysis of NCRB Data on Offenders Relation to Child Victims revealed that largely the offenders were none but the child’s family members, neighbours and family friends, relatives and online abusers.

According to the POCSO act, Child Sexual Abuse can be in more than one form. It includes a range of sexual activities like fondling, inviting a child to touch or be touched sexually, intercourse, exhibitionism, involving a child in prostitution or pornography, or even online luring by cyber-predators.

Avinash, a 23-year-old boy from Jorhat District of Assam was explaining how he was forced by one of his family members to watch Pornographic Content when he was a student of Class Six. “What started as a non-physical contact where I was forced to watch Pornographic Content, ended up becoming a physical abuse where I was repeatedly asked by my relative to open my pants.”

Generally, when cases of Child Sexual Abuse occur, the children are advised to go to their parents first and talk to them. However, 13-year-old Geeta from Golaghat District had an altogether different story. Losing her mother at a very early age, Geeta used to live with her father. Geeta’s father was a drunkard and started abusing his tender aged daughter. Geeta was beaten whenever she denied a sexual favour and even before she attained her puberty, she was raped multiple times by her father.

Her story, as told by a counsellor and social worker Deekshita Gohain, did not end here. She said, “When Geeta was sent to our NGO, she was pregnant holding a five-month baby in her womb. Geeta was too young and weak to deliver a baby. Consequently, after getting legal requirements completed, the baby was immaturely taken out of the womb and Geeta’s life could be saved. Currently, she’s undergoing special care at a Child Care Centre.”

In November 2021, the Allahabad High court passed a ruling. It ended up describing an act of ‘Oral Sex’ with a 10-year-old child as a “less serious” offence. The Court, then reduced the jail term of the molester from 10 years to seven years, as according to the judge, oral sex could not even qualify as an “aggravated sexual assault” and was considered as a “penetrative sexual assault.”

In a ruling by the Bombay High Court early in the year, the act of a 39-year-old man groping the breasts of a 12-year-old-girl was not considered a sexual assault. It stated that the child’s clothes had not been removed in the process and due to the absence of skin to skin contact, the same could not be considered as an assault. Even though, the Supreme Court overruled the judgement by focusing on the ground of ‘sexual intent’ and not ‘skin to skin touch’, the very first ruling by Bombay High Court is reflective of the problems that still exist while defining sexual harassment or assault in the country.

With lockdowns passed and a pandemic in continuity, a large number of children are staying indoors. But this does not reduce the chances of sexual abuse. The pandemic has seen a multi-fold increase in the number of such cases where the Paedophiles either sexually abuse the children online or groom them online, bring them into confidence and physically abuse them. Section 14 of the POCSO Act does not allow using of any children for pornographic purposes. But with the pandemic, a 600% rise in such cases was seen in 2020, in comparison to 2019. According to an analysis by Pew Research, videos with children under the age of 13 garner 3-times more views than other videos on average, which makes it a source of quick money for even vloggers over platforms like Facebook or YouTube.

A recent case of Police rescuing a 17-year-old girl trafficked from Kokrajhar in Assam to Siliguri in West Bengal from Kahlpara Red light area also brought to light how a large number of children groomed by human traffickers to agree to travel with the offenders and end up becoming victims of sex trafficking.

In an article published in The New Indian Express, Commissioner of Police, Guwahati, Harmeet Singh writes, “More children are falling victim to online grooming than before, a phenomenon wherein an adult builds an emotional connection with gullible children to gain their trust for sexual abuse or exploitation. That’s why Assam Police’s campaign on ‘Sharenting’ is perhaps one of the earliest interventions by any police department. Our goal is to initiate these conversations about the perils of oversharing and find ways to safeguard children’s digital well-being.”

(Perils of ‘Sharenting’, https://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/voices/2021/oct/31/perils-of-sharenting-2376999.html )

The statistics as per Crimes in India Report (2020), shows a different picture when it comes to the output of the efforts by the concerned authorities. In Assam, the number of cases pending investigation stood up at 6,083 in the year 2020, which is almost 1,500 more than the total number of cases that came up in 2020. Total cases of crime against children sent for trial in the state in 2020 was 14004 which include 11,141 cases pending for trial in the previous year. Of these only 57 cases were convicted in 2020.

Quick disposal of cases of child sex abuse and deterrent punishments to the perpetrators must be the top priority of the criminal justice system to protect the children from abuse. Apart from physical indictors of child sex abuse, observation of acute traumatic responses such as clingy behaviour and irritability in young children, sleep disturbances, poor self-esteem, regression in their conduct and inappropriately sexualised behaviours should sound the alarm bell to take note and initiate prompt and strong action against offenders.

(Names of all victims have been changed to protect their identities.)

Abhishek Kabra

(Abhishek Kabra is a Public Relations Practitioner and a Freelance journalist from Dergaon in Assam. He can be reached at - [email protected] )