Even a few years ago, the possibility of children being sexually abused in schools was rarely discussed in Indian homes — if at all, in hushed tones, which inevitably got doused in confounding amounts of disbelief.
However, in a spate of just a few months, India has woken up to a grim reality, where a seven-year-old boy was found with his throat slit, a five-year old raped in the washroom, a three-year-old assaulted by a bus-cleaner and a four-year-old allegedly sexually abused by her two teachers. The frightening common denominator for all these horrific crimes is that they all happened within the four walls of schools — a place we were all taught to trust.
The Indian National Crime Records Bureau reports that in 2016-2017, 10,186 cases were filed under the Pocso Act (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences), the law dealing with sexual assault on children. That is on an average, a case registered every hour and in 95 per cent of the cases, the children identified a known person as the assailant. India is home to 19 per cent of the world’s children and this statistics should not only be agonising, but a matter of national shame and concern.
Over several generations, the very word ‘school’ was reciprocal to a ‘safe’ place, completely built on trust and not on the basis of active logical or technological vigilance from parents. Thousands of parents, even in this internet-enabled, GPS-tracked smartphone era, act on conventional knowledge while choosing a ‘safe haven’ for their children. An expensive private school — where teachers are expected to be caring and vigilant — and a school bus, generally approved by the school, to ferry pupils to and from the institution formed part of the safety net. The idea that children, as young as those in kindergartens, could ever be subject to any perverse sexual act clearly does not occur to most parents even now.
No wonder, every incident of sexual assault in India, be it on a minor or an adult, is followed by outrage — though mostly within the safe confines of social media and television studios, followed by candle-light vigils. Rash online petitions start pouring in soon after, demanding death penalty for the deemed perpetrator or callous demands that the principal of the school in question be physically accosted. Even alumnus and self-appointed social observers join in this chorus and start online petitions demanding the school be shut down immediately or its affiliation to national examination boards be cancelled. In case of a recent incident in Kolkata, the state education minister had questioned the very need of having male teachers in a girls’ school.
Unfortunately, these ad hoc activisms are far removed from the reality of safety, diluting all possibilities of having a coherent conversation about incidents of abuse faced by children in school. In a country where age-old patriarchal conditioning endangers every possibility of having a healthy, innocent conversation between millions of men and women every day, a school, which is supposed to be a modern, progressive space, should not act as one that encourages children to treat the opposite sex with angst, perplexity and panic from a very early age. These comments are particularly discouraging, coming from people of position, because they are compromising the possibility of having a realistic dialogue about the best possible ways to compel schools to show more responsibility towards ensuring the safety of their pupils.
It is not easy to be a parent in an age where a five-year-old has to navigate a hyper-sexualised society. They are more likely to learn about sex through pornography on your smartphones or personal computers. As a parent, one should start by discussing sexuality without resorting to mystifying euphemisms and help them separate fact from fiction.
Their minds are incapable of processing the sexual imagery and messaging that surrounds them. The lusty couples in condom advertisements or the bikini-clad women on billboards are images that are now within easy reach of pupils — thanks to television and other multimedia platforms. What is a five-year-old to make of them? No parental control button is fool-proof enough to keep out such corrupting influences from the lives of minors.
All stakeholders — educators, parents, schools and governments — will have to formulate a language and rhetoric that will help a child see any inappropriate sexual overture as such and raise an alarm — without feeling intimidated.
As children and even later on as adults, we tend to see our school as the place where we built life-long bonds of friendship, trust and mutual respect. It’s a place of longing, of old-world nostalgia. It is dreadful when we, as parents, lose our trust in our children’s school because the adults we have assigned to keep our children safe have failed in their duty. It is criminal. We have to give back our children the schools we had.
Archisman Dinda is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata, India.
