]]> http://anamikasana.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/contemplate-love/feed/ 2 anamika http://anamikasana.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/year-of-enlightenment/ http://anamikasana.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/year-of-enlightenment/#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:29:05 +0000 Anamika Srivastava http://anamikasana.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/year-of-enlightenment/ ]]> This year is supposed to be the year of inner sense. Let us enlighten ourselves and move to achieve our goals… morally and professionally…

Dive deep into your inner sense and try to find the light… a light to wake all of us from the deep sleep…let each person be COLUMBUS!

In spite of gains in education, longevity and income for some groups of women, Punjab remains the heart land of pre-natal sex selections and post-natal gender discrimination, in the country. The sex ratio in Punjab has been skewed since 1901 as is evident from the census figures that the sex ratio in the state has been consistently lower than the national average ever since. As per Census 2001, the child sex ratio in Punjab is 793 girls per 1,000 boys. This is the lowest child sex ratio in the country as compared to 1991 census it shows a decline of 82 points. The basic reasons for such an adverse situation, lies in the socio-cultural fabric of the society.

The birth of a son is always preferred over that of a daughter since ancient times. The whole Mahabharata was for the want of sons to rule kingdoms. Being a patriarchal and patrilineal society, the sons are charged with the responsibility to carry on the family name… whether they carry with pride or not. They have to support their parents during the old age. And after death they are assigned the duty to perform funeral rites. The daughter cannot do this because after marriage, they live and become a part of the groom’s family. The daughters cannot even support the parents when the sons are not able to take the responsibility of parents or are not willing to do so. I wonder, what is the problem if the girls provide help financially or morally to the parents after marriage? It was they who had brought them up also and made them capable of earning! Why in the twenty first century we remain conservative in the matters of girls over boys? Why?

The prosperity has, in fact, increased the peoples’ aspiration for a son. Even if there are five children in one family and all are girls, men do not feel ashamed forcing their wives to bear the sixth child for the longingness of a boy. These days, men do not even fear of killing the unborn child in mother’s womb after knowing that it was a female. Even the educated elite of the society does not stay away from this. Height of shame!!!

The country’s social structure is disturbed. When in this age we have come out with new technologies of determining the pre-natal sex, it is sad to say that the technology is being used for social destruction. An awareness campaign to educate the society is the call of today. To contribute in society and for country’s future, a woman needs to be educated. If a woman becomes literate, the whole family would be educated. If a boy is educated only one individual is educated. And above all, women need to bring about change in the life…give birth to more girls. STOP female foeticide.

On the arrest of Dr. Talwar, the father of Arushi, the whole world had made different views about the father and daughter relationships. All news papers and news channels only had one news to increase their sale and TRPs. No one ever once thought what was the father’s plight sitting behind the bars who had lost his daughter and was accused of killing her? He had all tears and no words ever to speak. If ever he wanted to speak, no one was available to listen to him, his feelings, and his grief. No one could understand the feelings of the mother and what the family was going through.

This could have happened to anyone. It can be me or you or anyone in your neighbour. Why do people react immediately and believe in what is visible? The thinking of the society changes as is being portrayed. Why can’t people step into the shoes of the parents of Arushi and feel pain themselves and understand? How can we spread awareness to the community? The reaction of the society changed immediately as soon as Dr. Talwar was given a clean chit. What a pity on today’s the so called ‘educated people’ in the country.

When the dead bodies were found in Nithari, the reaction was more vibrant. Every one in the society united to fight against the heinous crime. But what is the situation today? Is the culprit punished till today? What happened to the BMW case?  The Nanda’s have bought the punishment of the crime. Jessica Lal, a model earning some extra money by working as a bar tender at a swinging party that was throbbing with people is shot point blank by a person who is refused a drink. Many must have seen this act of wanton criminality. And yet, seven years and a wobbly prosecution attempt later, all the accused walked away free. Imagine the plight of Jessica’s family. Only when Manu Sharma was sentenced life imprisonment, the family must have slept.

Jessica’s murder case was not a hit and run case. It was neither that the killers were anonymous or unknown. They were the rich and powerful elite of the country. This was murder at close range, in a crowded restaurant, where everyone knew everyone else. The problem was the legal system in the country. This was not a riot situation where murders are committed by faceless people.

There can be no doubt that the police do not do a proper investigation. Not to recover the murder weapon is the first trouble. Then, the forensic report does not support the theory that only one weapon was used or which weapon was used to commit the crime. The forensic reports are bought!  Our institutions have such low credibility that it is difficult to come to any conclusion if the reports are manipulated. If they were not manipulated, then there is a huge failure of investigation. The silence is bought by the rich and the powerful from the key witnesses. Who takes the responsibility?

But there are questions still unanswered. What is our legal system doing? What are the police doing? Why are the accused not punished especially when they rich and powerful?

Tampering with the prosecution is not taken seriously. There is no witness protection programme in the country. There is a serious lethargy in the system. Many wake calls have gone unnoticed. The most pathetic case is the failure of Civil Society.

When will we wake up? When our children grow up tomorrow and the situations are worsened, what will we, who claim to be the responsible citizens do to secure their lives and future….this is high time to think.

The abuse of a child involves a manipulative process that traps the victim in a secret relationship designed only to provide sexual gratification to the predator. Despite greater awareness today, the common perception still seems to be, ‘it doesn’t happen in my home’, or ‘it just happened once’.

The trauma suffered by 35-year old Rakesh in his school days shows how abusers never stop with one child. “My dad was diabetic so he couldn’t play with me.” His father had heard of a coach who trained boys for free in volleyball. “The training started when I was in class six. From the first day, my coach became my hero.”

“After training, he would always make me sit on his lap. Now I know that he would get an erection whenever I sat on his lap. But at that time, I didn’t understand what it was. To me, I was just happy that my coach thought I was special,” Rakesh recalls. The coach was a regular visitor to the family. When Rakesh’s father had to be hospitalised, he stayed in the coach’s house until his father returned home. Rakesh recalls that the coach made him scrub his back in the bath. Worse things happened, he says.

“I was too terrified to go back there and refused to attend training.” His older brother Ram, however, continued training until he reached high school. It wasn’t until Ram was in college that Rakesh could talk about it. And what they discovered was shocking. “Because I had stopped training, coach used Ram the same way,” he says with tears in his eyes.

Rakesh learnt that some of his teammates in school too suffered the same fate. “Nobody blames me for not telling. But I can’t help feeling that if I had told someone, maybe somebody could have stopped this. I feel ashamed that I let it happen. What’s worse is that he sodomised my brother and other kids repeatedly for many years.” The last he heard, the coach had moved to another country.

Vidya Reddy of the Tulir-Centre for the Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse, Chennai says she has never heard of a one-time offender. “Abuse happens repeatedly. More often than not, the abuser is from the family or a friend of the family. Until we stop protecting the abuser, he/she will never stop.”

“If an incident of sexual abuse in a school, for instance, is reported, the management may fire the abuser,” Vidya adds. “But what’s stopping him from getting a job in another school in the same city or another city? Many schools don’t do background checks or crosscheck credentials.”

For every case that is reported, many others go unreported. “We get almost a dozen calls every day, but in the end the victims are too scared to file a report,” says a volunteer at a help centre.

Another problem in the effort to check this phenomenon is getting a verdict. “When the report is filed, the abused is a child. By the time the case comes to court, he/she is an adult,” reasons Pooja Taparia of Arpan. “Trials take a long time and they’re well into their adulthood, also shouldering societal stigma.”

Vidya cites an incident in Chennai. “The lady is the principal of a well-known school in which abuse was reported. She told me her son was getting marriage proposals and if the intended bride had been sexually abused, she would not accept the proposal. To say I was stunned is an understatement.”

Often, children conceal the fact of abuse to protect a loved one. “There was a girl who was abused by her best friend’s father. Whenever she visited her friend’s house, the father would fondle her,” says Pushpa Venkatraman, counsellor and trainer at Arpan. “When she informed her friend, the girl implored her to not complain.” The reason her friend gave was that her parents were always fighting and something like this would only make it worse. “The father abused the daughter too, hence the fights between the parents. Can you imagine this child’s condition?”

Sometimes the abuse takes place with adults in the same room. Vidya highlighted the case of a swimming coach who fondled children while teaching them, in plain sight of parents and guardians all around the pool.

“Many parents stopped sending their children to this coach. But just because you stop sending your child to this particular person, it doesn’t mean he’ll stop what he’s doing. Adult offenders never stop with one kid.”

School authorities play a significant role in educating children and parents on sexual abuse. “The parent-teacher associations should evolve a specific sex education programme,” says Pinki Virani, author of Bitter Chocolate. Parents need to educate kids by answering questions about body parts. “We use every word other than the simple biological ones for penis, vagina, breasts and anus. If you don’t use the right words you cannot teach your child the difference between a ‘good touch’ and a ‘bad touch’.” For the cases that are reported, identification and prosecution of molesters presents a serious dilemma to lawyers and activists.

The recent acquittal of the two Britons accused of paedophilia by the Bombay High Court in the Anchorage Shelters case shows that a new law needs to be formulated to handle CSA effectively.

Maharukh Adenwalla, the lawyer who represented the boys in this case, says the yardstick to weigh an adult’s statement in a court of law should not be applied to a child’s statement. “How can you expect children to be as coherent as an adult? Going through the trial is traumatic enough.”

A case in point is Sakshi v. Union of India (2004). The child was gangraped when she was 10 and the case came to trial when she was 13. “The cross-examination lasted three days. She had to repeat the incident in the courtroom in the presence of the accused without a counsellor. In CSA cases, video conferencing should be encouraged with a counsellor present.”

CSA cases are often tried under the rape law (Section 376) that says the perpetrator has to be a male and the victim female. The age of consent is 16. “The major weakness of this law is that only penile penetration is considered a grave sexual offence,” says Geetha Ramaseshan, activist-advocate, Madras High Court. “The crime is considered lesser when it is oral, or through penetration with an object. If the abused is a boy, there is no law under which a case can be filed.”

In the absence of a clear law, and with convictions so difficult to get, it is no wonder that the abusers feel secure enough to continue their spree.

“why doesn’t my family believe me?”

“My music teacher would slap the insides of my thigh when I hit a wrong note,” recalls Latha, a working woman in her thirties. “He used to eat paan and slap my thigh. He would then rub his stained fingers on my panties. He would not move his hand for a while. And every time I sang a wrong pitch, he would pinch my vagina.”

The reason for such a punishment was that she was his best student and he was doing this for her own good.

Where was her mother? “My mum is a homemaker. She didn’t have anyone to help her. The only time she could buy vegetables or run errands was during my music class.”

One day, when Latha cried out in pain while she urinated, her mother asked if she had hurt herself while playing. “I told her ‘master pinched me’. The next thing I remember was a stinging sensation on my cheek. She slapped me and warned me that if I ever lied again about him, she would complain to my maths teacher.”

The abuse went on until Latha became a teenager and refused to train under him. “He used to come home every year for Diwali and Onam till I was in college. I told my family about everything but even now nobody believes me.”

He stopped visiting for a while when her boyfriend, after listening to her ordeal, threatened him with ‘serious bodily harm’. “When physical intimacy with my boyfriend became a problem, I told him everything. He made me realise, over a period of time, that it was not my fault and that I had nothing to be ashamed of. But somehow I can’t help feeling that my family betrayed me. I don’t understand why they continue to welcome this sick man to our home.”

Fact file

The Ministry for Women and Child Development conducted a study on CSA in April 2007 with a sample size of 17, 220 children from 13 states. Among the results were the following:

More than 53 per cent of children reported facing one or more forms of sexual abuse.

The majority (52.94 per cent) of victims were boys.

50 per cent of the sexual offenders were known to the victim or were in positions of trust (either family member, close relative, friend or neighbour).

Onset of abuse was as early as five years in some cases

Boys were equally at risk as girls.

73 per cent of the victims were in the 11-18 age group.

Delhi reported the highest abuse among boys – 65.64 per cent.

A study by Tulir (2006) among 2,211 school children in Chennai, revealed:

CSA prevalence rate of 42 per cent.

15 per cent of both boys and girls had been severely abused.

48 per cent of the abused were boys and the prevalence rate among girls was 39 per cent.

 Compiled by Lakshmy Venkiteswaran:

E-mail:lakshmy@epmltd.com

 Source: Mahesh Bhagwat, IPS

Posted by: Anamika Srivastava

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Dear Readers,

I was deeply moved after reading the above article and thought of posting it on my blog.

As parents, we must make our children aware of the fact of life, the hardship of surviving in the society. And the most important thing we need to do is ‘BELIEVE THEM’…

Anamika

I recall a small incident which happened recently…

We had been longing to visit Shirdi Sai Dham since the begining of this year. But somehow neither did I get to take leave from work nor Sanjeev was free. Finally, we decided to go… I managed to take leave from office and planned a short trip. It was 14 Aug 2008 and I had to wind up too much of work in the office before leaving. The weather was so pleasant and it was raining in the morning when I left from home to office. By 4′O clock, it was thunder and rain and the sky became completely dark. I had to catch my train at 7.30 pm. Somehow, I managed to leave the office in that bad weather and reached home for final touch on the packing. Sana and Ana were so excited that they did not want to wait anymore after getting ready. The taxi we booked did not turn up and no other taxi was available. Thanks to Sanjeev’s friends. He dropped us to the station. We reached the platform at 7.00 pm. “Train no. 2498 is delayed by 20 minutes from its scheduled time of 7.30″ an announcement was made. Then another…40 minutes late and then another…60 minutes late. In that humid weather, we waited with our luggage at one corner of the wet and filthy platform. Suddenly I hit some huge packages that were kept leaning towards the wall in that corner on which it was written ARMY. The two young men who were accompanying the luggage did not seem to be from ARMY. I was a bit concerned and expressed the same to Sanjeev. He asked from one of them ” what is there is these packages”. “Its beddings sir” came the reply after a minute.

I saw these two young men loitering. It is not rare to see young people loitering on street corners, or outside distinct places within towns (such as shops, filling stations, liquor stores, platforms or busy public places). One of those guys, having a weird look, took out an expensive mobile from his pocket. He glared at his cell, then put it in his ear and repeated the same action again and gain. Since I was a bit suspicious, I kept an eye on at his actions.

A group of young girls, wet, holding each other feeling a bit uncomfortable, were managing their luggage to sit on it. It seems they were students and were going home during the weekend. 

Suddenly I saw the guy is clicking pictures of the girls sitting on their luggage on his mobile camera. Already suspicious, I became extra attentive. He kept on taking the picture of those girls from different angles and starting behaving like a desperate guy or a ‘broker’. I told Sanjeev the act of the guy and he became furious. He moved forward and was about to talk to the guy when my daughter called him to get water for her. I felt like snatching away his mobile and give slap to him. He saw me in great anger with furious eyes. He turned his face and stood. Then I thought to go and tell those girls what this guy was taking their pictures. In the meantime the girls rushed since their train had arrived at some other platform. Changing his location after they left, he started eying on a girl standing next to him with her brother and father. I wanted to take the picture of that guy in my cell but there was an announcement of arrival of our train. I started looking for Sanjeev who went to fetch water.

We quickly boarded the train and the incidence which took place few minutes back was disturbing me. I kept on thinking why we are not able do anything in such circumstances. Radio city is campaigning for ‘Celebrating Change in Delhi’, What change are we celebrating? Is it the roads, flyovers, malls, or the Olympics? Why don’t we think of bringing change in ourselves? Why cant we change these individuals? Why do we celebrate for a small victory and forget about the real hardships of life? What if the picture that guy had taken are misused? The life of those girls will be ruined.

Had my eight year old daughter not asked for water, a massive fight could have taken place between my husband and the guy. Why such incidences keep on taking place? When Delhi, the capital of this country is not safe for women, where do we go? What will be the future of my daughters? I will spend sleepless night when they grow up to teenagers and may have to study far from us.

There are various NGOs which are silently working for women. A few names come to my mind instantly are: Shakti Vahini, STOP, Shakti Shalini etc. who are really making the change. They might not be celebrating this change, but they are creating change in the lives of some women, girls and even minors. What are we waiting for? We need to start this at every home to bring a 100% change. So let’s begin the real journey to drive this menace out of Delhi atleast…

How many of us have Godfathers and Godmothers? I think… most of the people will have to think a lot to find an answer to this question. A right opportunity if given at the right time provides the base for development. When we look up for a new job or task, we anticipate unbelievable things on our own and expect too much from ourselves. When we get a new job we try to reach to level we have set  for ourselves. We try to excel, with commitment and sincerity, gaining from our past experiences and overcoming the mistakes we have committed in the past. We want the limelight to be on us and perform beyond our capacity and want to make a difference…to be outstanding and out perform beyond our capacity . Interestingly, far from the madding crowd there are many people, who in their own way are making a big difference. Won’t you like to reach out to these people? Do you think any one is acknowledging for what they are doing and how the meaning of many lives have been changed by them? Let me tell you, no one will even be bothered about it. But these are some individuals who are amongst us, between you and I… It may be your maid who is trying to fight for her right when her husband marries another woman and throws her and even those unwanted children out of his life. She may have turned into a leader in her community to fight for other helpless women. Or he may be a peon or office boy who is paid much less than the work he is doing may be in your own office and the contractor grabs the money out of his pocket before it reaches his hand. He is uniting his community members to raise a voice against such injustice. There are individuals who in some corner of our country are working very hard to fight for human rights, rights for women and the right to live. These are the real leaders who may not be acknowledged by the whole world but definitely in their small community or village. These are the small leaders who do not make noise while they work for the social development. They themselves are not aware of the fact that they are leaders… but actually they are.

Throughout my life till now, I have been blessed with the opportunity of being in the presence of some exceptional people, who have changed the way I used to think, changed the way of my life. These are my teachers, parents, friends, mentor, colleagues and even my daughters.

Life is such a long process that we do not find much time for ourselves. Husband, children, parents, in-laws… a never ending list of relatives who are attached directly or indirectly, friends. In present time it is very hard to look into one’s own self.

So…the need of the time is express yourself and create space for yourself to breathe. Let’s begin in a new way…