Priya was unlike most expectant mothers. She was not excited, eager to meet her first child, heart skipping multiple beats every time she’d imagine holding her baby in her arms. She was none of those things. Instead, she was tired. Tired and traumatized.
Last year, in March 2020, as India ground to a halt under a nationwide lockdown meant to slow the pandemic, Priya, still a minor, was sexually abused.
Her attending doctors, thankfully, knew to sound the alarm, and placed a call to the non-profit Counsel to Secure Justice (CSJ). It was Priya’s first step in her long and arduous fight for justice, but it was toward justice, nevertheless.
Not long after taking Priya’s case, the CSJ received another call, this time from a young boy who had been receiving psychosocial help from the organization.
Bipin struggled to find words as he recounted how his father had sexually abused his 11-year-old sister, Naina, for two days. The distress in his voice could not hide the enormous pain he felt for his sister.
Unfortunately, and heartbreakingly, the stories of Priya, Bipin, and Naina are hardly outliers.
Losing safeguards
According to a 2007 report by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, over half of children in India had faced at least one form of sexual abuse, while over 20 percent had experienced severe sexual abuse. A 2018 report by the CSJ shows that the circumstances have not changed much.
More than a decade after that initial report, amid last year’s lockdown, the situation still shows no signs of improvement. Anecdotal reports revealed a worrying spike in the number of cases of child sexual abuse. There is no data to indicate the extent to which children have been abused sexually during and in the aftermath of the lockdown in India.
Globally, experts have warned that efforts to quell the pandemic, particularly shelter-in-place orders, have led to increased risks of child sexual offenses.
A child eats snacks at a relief camp in India. After imposing the nationwide lockdown to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, children were forced to stay indoors, in close proximity to potential predators in the family and separated from people they could run to.
Lockdowns are a contributing factor to high-risk sexual behaviors among predators, which can include family members and close kin. In incest cases, lockdowns force children into an enclosed environment with their abusers.
Child sexual abuse is defined by the World Health Organization as “the involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or she does not fully comprehend, is unable to give informed consent to, or for which the child is not developmentally prepared and cannot give consent, or that violates the laws or social taboos of society.”
The stipulations about a child’s comprehension and ability to give informed, level-headed consent are crucial. Young people below the age of majority are unable to provide such consent as their psychosocial development is still assumed to be incomplete. All sexual acts between an underage child and an adult thus come under the category of child sexual abuse.
With India’s lockdown keeping family members in confined spaces, one would assume a subsequent rise in sexual assault cases against children. But Shivangini Singh, a support person appointed under the Prevention of Child Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and a social worker for CSJ, reported otherwise.
“The overall number of cases referred to us by the Child Welfare Committee has not changed,” said Singh. “But I feel that a number of cases now are unreported.”
Some of this underreporting may be administrative in nature. When a case of child sexual abuse is reported, the Child Welfare Committee (CWC), a government institution, can in turn refer the victims and their families to non-profits such as CSJ for additional support.
Whether or not the CWC actually does these referrals, however, is completely upon their discretion. It may be possible, then, that while cases referred to CSJ did not increase, those received by the CWC did.
Another reason may be that the lockdown further isolated children from people who they could run to. “With schools closed, many of the cases that were reported to the police as a result of interventions by teachers are not being addressed,” explained Singh.
Teachers play an important role in reporting cases of child sexual abuse. Many children see them as confidants, but they also usually have a clearer view of red flags, easily spotting trauma-induced behaviors and attitudes like aggression, anxiety, and withdrawal, among others.
Administratively, under the POCSO, teachers are required to report visible bruising and other warning signs of trauma to the police. While law enforcement remained open to reports of child sexual abuse under lockdown, losing the additional safeguard that teachers provided could have only made underreporting worse.
In cases where the abuser is the family earner, household members also would just tend to stay quiet rather than report the incident.
“Accounts of incest are already difficult to share with family members, but the pandemic has created socio-economic turmoil that made revealing such facts even more problematic,” said Tilak, director of Restorative Justice at CSJ.
Volunteers distribute water to migrant workers on their journey back home during a nationwide lockdown in India to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
‘Trauma-unaware’
Non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGO) are trying to reshape such a fraught social landscape in a nation where nearly 40 percent of the population are children. But even before the pandemic, they’ve been finding themselves grappling with limited resources.
COVID-19 only served to strain their ranks further, as some support workers had to be deployed to healthcare-related services.
Childline India Foundation (CIF), an NGO providing a helpline to children in distress, felt the impact of the pandemic on their trunkline the most. From March 20 to 31, 2020, they registered 300,000 incoming calls, a 50-percent increase compared to the usual 200,000 calls in the same period pre-pandemic.
In addition, of the 460,000 calls CIF received between March 20 and April 10, 2020, 9,385 social service interventions were made, of which 20 percent were child protection-related concerns, ranging from child labor to sexual abuse.
India’s POSCO Act mandates that every crime of child sexual abuse should be reported to law enforcement authorities. Social workers thus do a lot of heavy lifting. Crucially, they have to make sure that case reports on sexual abuse are filed. At times, this may mean chaperoning a child to the police station.
Social workers also visit a child’s home, ensuring that medical examinations are done accurately and efficiently while also seeing to it that the child’s family understands the legal processes, and validating the child’s willingness to file the case in court.
The pandemic paralyzed their work, but social workers would soon realize that some of their most crucial services could not wait until the lockdown was lifted.
Take the case of a CSJ social worker who had to accompany a child and her family to a hospital around 15 kilometers from central Delhi for a medical termination of pregnancy procedure, even as COVID-19 was raging in the city at the time.
The child’s family needed the social worker’s assistance in understanding the legal ramifications of the medical procedure, so despite the great personal health risk, the latter still opted to go with them.
Arguably most importantly, though, is that relationship-building, and providing psycho-emotional support to a child—all integral to a social/support workers’ job—are very personal processes, not the kind that one can readily carry out over the phone.
In Priya’s case, she and her mother could not speak the language used by the doctors and social workers attending to them. They needed an interpreter, but since contact was mostly by phone, the coordination effort among the concerned parties proved to be circuitous.
Meanwhile, when social workers deal with law enforcement officers, there are instances wherein leaving children—even with their families in tow—is not an option.
For instance, Tilak believed that the police officer assigned to interview Naina, who also suffered from learning disabilities, was “trauma-uninformed,” not having the training to deal with such cases. Police took four days to file the First Information Report, instead of immediately, as required not only by the POSCO Act, but also by the extremely sensitive nature of the incident.
The limitations on social workers’ ability to carry out their functions under today’s pandemic lead to some unintended, albeit not surprising, consequences. This leaves victims and their families at the mercy of a cold, inconsiderate law enforcement system and a confusing bureaucracy.
Until critical measures are set in place, and enforcement of existing ones is strengthened, justice for Priya and Naina will remain elusive. ●
Editor’s note: All names of children in the story were changed to protect their identities.
Prerna Barua holds a master’s degree from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University. She has been conducting field research on issues of politics, peace, and conflict in South and West Asia, Africa, and the United States. Her research interests include gender-based violence, restorative justice, transitional justice, transformative justice, and resilience and trauma work.
