 | | Our May 2001 cover | Humankind owes the child the best it has," says the UN Charter on the Human Rights of the Child. Sadly, as the Nithari child killings show, they are often exposed to the worst of humankind. The brutality of the killings is not the agony of a village. It is every parent's nightmare. Child Sexual Abuse or CSA is an "iceberg" issue, buried beneath social imperatives that lead to parental denial and economic factors that allow thousands of such cases to go unreported. CSA is not rare. It results from the complex interplay of individual, familial and social factors that require sensitive handling since in a majority of cases the perpetrator is a family member. Studies have established the prevalence of sexual abuse of children by family members. The young victims are not, as is widely believed, children from poor sections of society. A 2006 study by the Centre for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse found that among 2,211 school-going children in Chennai, the child sexual abuse prevalence rate was 42 per cent and children of all socio-economic groups were equally vulnerable. It's not just sexual abuse. The recent case of a 10-year-old boy, a talented table tennis player, who committed suicide because of his father's punishing regime of 10 hours of practice a day, shows that emotional and psychological abuse is an equally serious problem. Parents often push their children to absurd limits so that they excel in studies, unaware of the mental trauma it causes in young minds. Every 30 seconds a child goes missing in India, mostly victims of abuse-sexual, verbal, mental or physical assault. According to who, reproductive health problems, sexual dysfunction and HIV/AIDS are among the serious consequences of CSA. Recently, paedophiles stalking children has added another dimension to the problem, as has the Internet with the growing threat of child pornography. In the wake of Nithari, parents have been faced with the troubling question we ask on our cover this issue: How Safe is Your Child? Our story, with contributions from our correspondents across the country and interviews with parents, teachers, psychologists, officials and organisations working with children, examines how serious the problem really is, what precautions parents and children can take, what schools can do to tackle the problem and the legal and social issues that complicate the issue. The authority on the subject, Pinki Virani, author of the seminal Bitter Chocolate, adds her expertise in a guest column. As our cover story shows, abuse of children is a more serious problem than any of us imagine. I have always believed that you can judge the development of a society by looking at the state of its children. Unfortunately in India, in spite of strong familial ties, its record on this is abysmal and it has taken the horrific slaughter of 40 children to bring the issue to public and official awareness. Index
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