Why we cannot ensure safety to our kids, toddlers &
teenagers?
Why everyday small kids have to face the brutality of monstrous
pedophiles?
What kind of pleasure
those beasts’ gets by inflicting pain on those tender souls?
Who would take care of the scars, the wounds which would
remain etched in her mind for her life?
Why any incident needs to have horrendously atrocious to elicit
our outrage?
Why I have to feel terrified every time my toddler is out of
my sight?
When would the victim blaming stop with the pleas that
accused ‘got carried away’, ‘was staying away from family since long’, ‘never
wanted to rape but the girl provoked her’?
When would the victim blaming stop with the excuses that ‘she
was drunk’, ‘she was wearing exposing clothes’, ‘she was asking for it’?
Why we have to listen to our politician’s bull shit &
mechanical speeches every time after any heinous brutal incident takes place?
Who defines the time line of judgments in Fast-track courts
of Indian judiciary system – actual how fast they are?
Why we cannot teach our sons to treat the female clan with equality
and respect the diversity of culture?
When would the law enforcers of our country understand their
responsibilities rather than scaring, harassing, passing judgmental remarks and
sometimes even raping the victim?
Who can be blamed when a rapist slips from the hands of
law-enforcers with the plea of being a juvenile?
I can continue these questions endlessly as there are so
many which are staring at our face, but right now feeling too numb & disgusted
to write a single word more.
Fear, guilt, anger, frustration, pain, hate and above all helplessness....these assorted and jumbled feelings numbed their existence. In some cases, multiple times, repeatedly they went through the trauma. Devastated & shattered they suffered those nightmares alone. Few of them were not even able to understand that something wrong is done to them.
A popular talk show hosted by Amir Khan last year - 'Satyamev Jayate' gave few of them a chance to open up their heart. The show startled many of us by highlighting the huge percentage of Child sex abuse victims. Yes, in India, almost every fifth child unfortunately has been abused sexually.
I heard somewhere which was quoted on a funny note "We are descendants of monkeys....but the problem is that still we have not stopped descending!!". On a serious tone this is so true...those pedophiles have descended far below the human level.....just that these sickos roam around freely in our society in the garb of a human face. SMJ tried to negate many myths involving CSA. Those who are in blog world might have already been aware of the facts behind these CSA myths through well penned posts during CSA Awareness Month. But for rest of the people it was indeed an eye-opener. I am sure there would be many parents who are not comfortable with 'sex education' of their kids must have been shuddered with the horrifying tales of the victims in that show.
We need to understand that nor are the CSA victims from any different world neither the abusers. Here at this platform now I can also admit being a CSA victim once. I was never able to muster the courage to tell anyone about it that time. But why?...I shared a very open relationship with my parents especially with my dad. Even then I never opened up with him about this matter. I gave subtle hints but they went unnoticed.
So, you see it is not only healthy & open relationship with your kids that would help but you have to be observant about their body language & changed patterns of behavior as well. Communicate, be aware & come out of your shell of ignorance. Those scars maul the soul of the child which they carry throughout their life...I might have escaped with a bruise but everyone is not so lucky. However memories of those incidents still leaves sour taste in my persona.
Once hubby told me that they were discussing episodes of SMJ in his office when one of his colleagues said that "Man, What this Amir Khan is serving as Sunday Brunch, they are showing too much reality, It is so depressing. These cases are only there in newspapers...He could have chosen some other theme for his show". Poor man, I think his taste of reality show is limited only to Big Boss or Splitsvilla!! This mindset of 'ostrich in the storm' would only keep up the spirit of heinous monsters. We can always be in our La-la land and believe that it can never happen to our kids but would that make the issue disappear!!
One very important quote mentioned in the show was "Respect the behaviour, not the age". This can be quite a controversial statement in reference our Indian Culture. But I personally support its validity.
But the most important point which was raised in SMJ was that CSA should be considered as a crime and strict laws should be there to punish those pedophiles. Whoa!!!...can you believe that it is still not there in our law books and this bill is yet pending (lying in dust) in Rajyasabha. My personal opinion says that these pedophiles should be prosecuted with stringent laws because they are sick...sick mentally. Otherwise why would a person has to feel up a child's body for any kind of physical pleasure!
I can continue to pour my disgust on this issue endlessly but ending here quoting Amir Khan:
I’d like to leave you with a thought: perhaps the more closed or narrow minded we are about sexuality, the more repressed it gets, and then it manifests itself in ugly ways. I’m hoping that as a society in time we will reach a stage where we are not frightened of our sexuality. Rather, we learn to deal with it in a dignified, open, responsible and healthy manner.
April 2013 is a month away, and we are gearing up for the 3rd year of CSAAM. As you are all aware, through the month of April we talk about the menace of CSA across social media, via Facebook, twitter and blogs. We count on your support and participation as always.
Partnering us in our efforts this year will be organisations working in this field like Arpan, Tulir, Human Rights Watch as well as online initiatives like Blogadda and Womens Web.
You will see personal testimonials, expert advice, twitter chats, information sources, resources, workshops, an iPhone app and lots and lots of blog posts across the blogosphere.
We need to get people talking about this elephant in the room. If you would like to post on your blogs, do send us a tentative date, so we can schedule your post in. If you would like to participate in a twitterthon, do let us know. Even forwarding this email to anyone you think might be interested in participating and contributing would be welcome.
If you would like to add to the discussion or know somebody else who would, please note that we welcome entries
• mailed to csa.awareness.april@gmail.com OR
• posted as FB notes and linked to Child Sexual Abuse Awareness Month Page OR
• posted on your own blog with the badge and linked to the main blog OR
• linked or posted on Twitter tagged twitter.com/CSAAwareness OR
• Anonymous contributions are accepted and requests for anonymity will of course be honoured.
• Please remember to send in a mail with all necessary links or just your input to csa.awareness.april@gmail.com so that we can track your contribution and make sure that it is not inadvertently lost or something.
Some guidelines
1) Please precede the title of your post with CSAAM April 2013. Then add a hyphen and your title.
2) Please insert the badge html in your post. If you carry it on your sidebar for the entire month of April too apart from just within your post, we would be honoured.
3) If you refer to sources for information kindly italicise that part of your post which is taken from the source and provide the link to the original source in a bracket.
4) And finally please avoid graphic descriptions of the abuse. Stay as factual as possible if you’re doing first person accounts.
We need all your help to make this month a success, and are counting on your support.
We as a nation love to talk, chat, discuss, debate about any issue
under the sun....and mind it without being a part of the solution of
course!!. I read an update in FB by some person after the third episode of
Satyamev Jayate was aired which states that Amir Khan should have spent more
episodes on each issue....only 1.5 hrs is not enough to discuss such serious
topics. I just fret....why we want to discuss more?? How would that have helped
more if Amir had covered these social evils like female foeticide, child sex
abuse, dowry spread across tons of episode?
Then there are these bunch of cynics who frown since the first
episode. There are so manycrapscrabs around. They shout over the top
of their voice against this 'push -button activism'. They tweet, update, blog,
speak how Amir Khan is trying to hog the limelight by pulling the strained
nerves of common man...yes saying this strangely they accept the
existence of these 'strained nerves'. I was never an ardent fan of Amir Khan ,
but liked him as a performer .....(I must admit however corny it may sound but
I had been a huge fan of SRK for many years and still have some soft corner in my 'Dil' for him !!!). But
personally I like the initiative & research done by Amir Khan to construct
this show. Even if he is trying to grab the attention but still I prefer his
choice of work to do that is better than some Yoga- guru who keeps on
oscillating between Pranayama-politics-black money. Amir is doing a fairly decent job
by making people go through those issues which we are aware of but always prefer to keep them in back-burner.
When this show took up the issue of female foeticide or child sex abuse it did not show something which we never knew but have a 'hush-hush' mindset about it.
After crabs, there are ostriches who live in their rosy world and keep on saying "Arre Amir kitna gandh dikha raha hai!!!( what crap Amir is showing!!)". This species did not welcome this concept of reality shown on TV...they prefer scripted Rakhi Ka Swayambar or Bigg Boss more!!!
Third episode Amir took up 'Dowry'....quite a balanced episode where he not only showed perils of this evil but also other crooked customs born due to it like 'Pakrauwa Vyah (kidnapped marriage)'. As per me dowry is an evil which has taken many lives till now and is the mother of 'female foeticide'.
So, in a way this show is conducting a crash course on the so called 'Gandh' of our society which has engulfed our society & lives like termites.....The whole syllabus is far more ugly but the need of the hour is requesting us to attend at least the crash course which covers the important points for final examinations.
Fear, guilt, anger, frustration, pain, hate and above all helplessness....these assorted and jumbled feelings numbed their existence. In some cases, multiple times, repeatedly they went through the trauma. Devastated & shattered they suffered those nightmares alone.
'Satyamev Jayate' gave few of them a chance to open up their heart. The show startled many of us by highlighting the huge percentage of Child sex abuse victims. Yes, in India, almost every second child unfortunately goes through this trauma.
That day I heard somewhere which was quoted on a funny note "We are descendants of monkeys....but the problem is that still we have not stopped descending!!". On a serious tone this is so true...those pedophiles have descended far below the human level.....just that these sickos roam around freely in our society in the garb of a human face. SMJ tried to negate many myths involving CSA. Those who are in blog world might have already been aware of the facts behind these CSA myths through well penned posts during CSA Awareness Month. But for rest of the people it was indeed an eye-opener. I am sure there would be many parents who are not comfortable with 'sex education' of their kids must have been shuddered with the horrifying tales of the victims in that show.
We need to understand that nor are the CSA victims from any different world neither the abusers. Here at this platform now I can also admit being a CSA victim once. I was never able to muster the courage to tell anyone about it that time. But why?...I shared a very open relationship with my parents especially with my dad. Even then I never opened up with him about this matter. I gave subtle hints but they went unnoticed. So, you see it is not only healthy & open relationship with your kids that would help but you have to be observant about their body language & changed patterns of behaviour as well. Communicate, be aware & come out of your shell of ignorance. Those scars maul the soul of the child which they carry throughout their life...I might have escaped with a bruise but everyone is not so lucky. However memories of those incidents still leaves sour taste in my persona.
Today SG told me that they were discussing episodes of SMJ in his office when one of his colleagues said that "Man, What this Amir Khan is serving as Sunday Brunch, they are showing too much reality, It is so depressing. These cases are only there in newspapers...He could have chosen some other theme for his show". Poor man, I think his taste of reality show is limited only to Big Boss or Splitsvilla!! This mindset of 'ostrich in the storm' would only keep up the spirit of heinous monsters. We can always be in our La-la land and believe that it can never happen to our kids but would that make the issue disappear!!
One very important quote mentioned in the show was "Respect the behaviour, not the age". This can be quite a controversial statement in reference our Indian Culture. But I personally support its validity.
But the most important point which was raised in SMJ was that CSA should be considered as a crime and strict laws should be there to punish those pedophiles. Whoa!!!...can you believe that it is still not there in our law books and this bill is yet pending ( lying in dust) in Rajyasabha.
I can continue to pour my disgust on this issue endlessly but ending here quoting Amir Khan:
I’d like to leave you with a thought: perhaps the more closed or narrow minded we are about sexuality, the more repressed it gets, and then it manifests itself in ugly ways. I’m hoping that as a society in time we will reach a stage where we are not frightened of our sexuality. Rather, we learn to deal with it in a dignified, open, responsible and healthy manner.
Amir Khan conducted this workshop in the show and it is developed by Dr. Bhushan Shukla
