The brutal rape aboard a moving bus in Delhi in the waning
days of 2012 took sub-continental society by the scruff of the neck and forced
it to confront many taboos, many inconvenient truths that have conventionally
been brushed underneath the carpet per dint of habit. Finding the intellectual
environment in the wake of the Delhi rape conducive, I aim to shed light on
another insidious cruelty rife under our very noses: child sexual abuse.
In 1993, at the age of 10, I was informed about all manners
of sex by a domestic servant, a boy not out of his teens yet. At the threshold
of puberty, my reaction to the stories he had to tell ranged from disgust to
some sort of guilty excitement because it all sounded like so much fun and
adventure. One day, after probably concluding that my verbal education was
complete, he casually told me that whenever he found me home alone, he would do
all those things to me. The bewilderment and the fear I felt then, I have no
words to describe. After 2 days of literally hiding behind people, and a night
of high fever and incomprehensible babbling, I mustered the courage to tell my
mother, who in turn told my father, who dealt with that servant in a manner
befitting an enraged father and a ‘zamindar’. Perhaps this incident permanently
sensitized me towards the phenomenon of sex and adult-child relations and I
felt later experiences more acutely.
In 1994, 7th grade, unhappy at my lack of
interest in sports, my mother moved me from co-ed to a renowned all-boys
school. One of the first things I noticed at the new school was the warped
gender notions the boys held, and the almost universal tendency towards
prurience of thought and lewd, homoerotic innuendo in conversation. One day the
entire school erupted into commotion. The local press descended upon the
Principal’s Office, and the entire administration block was sealed off for
students. It was later revealed that a boy, the son of a journalist and a year
my junior, had missed the school-bus home a few days earlier. The P.E.
instructor, a mountain of a man and a Hafiz of the Quran, had lured the boy
into his quarters and then proceeded to sodomize the child. To avoid ‘shame’
both for the school and the child’s parents, the offending instructor was
quietly fired. He later found gainful employment at another school. The press
had been brought as a pressure tactic by the boy’s father. No mention was made
of the incident in the papers. Even those directly involved in the matter
refused to look beyond the incident into the wider problem. When the abused boy
returned to school a few days later, he became the object of both sympathy and
ridicule. However, he did not shy away from discussing his ordeal, and soon
everyone knew what had happened. It is now in hindsight that one can really
understand the gravity of what had happened, and the meaninglessness of the
action taken over it. Be that as it may, some days afterwards, and perhaps
emboldened by events around him, a classmate of mine, built like an ox but
jittery and retiring in disposition, confessed to me how he had been similarly
abused multiple times by a person called ‘Tohfa’, a peon at his father’s
office. Somehow I can still remember the sadness in those bespectacled eyes. In
early 1996, I moved to another school for my O levels, and lost contact with my
aggrieved friend.
In 1999, that entire sordid saga of horrendous child abuse
surfaced in Lahore, where a man by the name of Javed Iqbal used to entice
homeless boys from Data Darbar to his home, sodomized them, murdered them and
then disposed the bodies off in acid. When finally caught, the demon narrated
his entire operation to the authorities in every gruesome detail, and confessed
to murdering more than a 100 boys, with not so much as a missing child’s report
filed for a vast majority of them. His placid demeanor became a fixture on the
media, and the nation’s sensibilities were wracked with disgust and dismay. Yet,
no real measures were adopted to address the conditions that facilitate the
commission of such heinous crimes. Javed Iqbal was sentenced to death by the courts,
but was found dead under questionable circumstances in his jail cell a year
later with appeal pending.
In 2000, I began college education at LUMS. Even at that
most prestigious of universities with a reputation for catering to the upper
crust of Pakistani society, I came to know many people who had either suffered
abuse, or had witnessed or heard of it happen in close proximity. Here I
learned that most abuse of middle- and upper-class children happens in domestic
settings. In the summer of 2005, having finished my stint at LUMS and being briefly
unemployed, I took up the management of my ancestral lands in tehsil Jalalpur
Pirwala of district Multan. One August afternoon, the calm of our village was
broken by the cries and wails of a family carrying the half-charred body of a
6-year old boy. They had come to seek my elders’ assistance with the
authorities for a case against the Maulvi of the Madrassah where the hapless
child received religious instruction. The beast had so brutally raped the
little child that he had died during the act. Then to cover his crime, the
Maulvi had attempted to burn the child’s remains in the ‘tandoor’, the baking
oven, of the seminary. A case was registered, but a compromise was reached a
few years later. Poverty compelled the bereaved family to prefer receiving a
sum of money over expending whatever meager resources they had in pursuing a
case through the labyrinthine justice system of our country. And the monster
got off scot-free to continue his career in religious scholarship, and more
likely, pedophilia.
A month after this distressing episode, I went into interior
Sindh on a joint LUMS-Collective for Social Science Research field venture. The
tragedy that had transpired in my own village was still very fresh in my mind.
So, while working through a questionnaire on the causes and consequences of
poverty with rural people in Thatta, I asked whether pederasty and pedophilia were
ever observed in those parts. With one of the most unfathomably lascivious
expressions I have ever seen on any face, a man made the claim that “70%” of
all children in any given village experience sexual contact with an adult. Now,
even if one discounts for the notorious bucolic penchant for exaggeration, it
may be concluded from that man’s statement that the phenomenon is prevalent
enough to be considered wide practice. And that, in itself, is a sobering
realization.
In 2007, another heinous incident happened within the remit
of the township of Jalalpur Pirwala. A shopkeeper sexually assaulted a
pre-pubescent girl-child in the back room of his shop. After the deed was done,
he tried to finish the unconscious victim off by trying to slit her wrists and throat
with a shaving razor, and left her for dead out in the street. He was
apprehended shortly afterwards. I am not aware of what eventually became of
that case. That same year, I worked for a multinational bank as Manager Ops. On
Chand Raat, the entire senior hierarchy of the Multan branch got together to
celebrate at a colleague’s house. Two servants were present there to serve the
party of merrymakers: a man in his twenties and a boy in his teens. To add to
the revelry, the top boss decided to have both the servants drink. Once things
started getting out of hand, the second-in-command suggested that it would be
fun to have the older servant ‘do’ the younger one for the group’s
entertainment. At first I thought it was just a vulgar proposition of a sick
mind. But then when he began pushing the idea, I protested. Mercifully, the boy
had run out somewhere in the meantime, and was not to be found again that
night. The verbal exchange between my boss and I got nasty, and I walked out of
the party, sickened to the gut. In the morning, it was discovered that the boy
had run away to his home in Vehari. Things got very uneasy at work for me. A
week later, I resigned. Ironically, that deranged second-in-command had studied
at the same all-boys school I had the displeasure of attending for two years.
In September 2010, as part of my Civil Services training, I
was deputed on military attachment with an infantry unit deployed along the LoC
in Azad Kashmir. The Commanding Officer of that Frontier Force regiment, a
Pathan Lt. Colonel and a devout Muslim, recounted a horrifying experience he
had had during the Swat operation of 2009 where the unit had seen active
combat. He said that the unit arrested the head of a seminary with a reputation
not just for training and providing succor to militant combatants, but also for
flagrant pedophilia. Military intelligence interrogated him on both counts. On
the charge of sexually abusing his wards in the seminary, the cleric stated
under duress, and I quote from the Lt. Colonel’s own words, “I am a Hafiz of
the Quran and an expert on Hadith. Both of these have such miraculous powers
that they generate a very powerful force (heat) in the body that can only be
vented properly through sexual intercourse with the pupils so that they too may
partake of the miracle.” As shocked as I was to hear the Lt. Colonel’s story, I
was also instantly reminded of a cousin, whose Quran-instructor had tried to
have the poor child stroke his penis, while he enlightened him with Quranic
instruction. Such depravity among these seeming exponents of faith finds no
explanation in any rational or spiritual terms. I could see the Lt. Colonel feeling
as befuddled telling the story as I did hearing it.
And finally, in the summers of 2012, the body of a minor
washed ashore on my Grandfather’s land from the shallow waters of the Sutlej.
Pitilessly ravaged and killed, the child was the son of a neighboring
landowner. Suspicion was immediately cast on the father’s political rivals
within his ‘biradri’. However, because of the family’s refusal to allow an
autopsy and insistence on quick burial, all forensic evidence was lost. As of
today, the suspects roam free, and legal proceedings on the case remain a
non-starter. The bereaved probably await the right moment to extract vengeance
in blood, an act that will inevitably kick off a vendetta. Nonetheless, the
innocent child suffered his inhuman fate alone, forced into an untimely grave
in eternal, ungodly silence. Had he been allowed to live to reveal the identities
of his molesters, would he have been believed? Would the word of a ‘mere child’
have stood for anything in the rule-bound, paper-driven modern justice system?
These are questions that will never now be asked, much less answered.
The intention behind recounting all these horrifying stories
was not to make the reader have a constant knot in the stomach. I, in fact,
want to make a very specific point: if in my 30 years, I have had all these
run-ins at a very personal level with the phenomenon of sexual abuse of
children, how deep is this social sickness really? How widespread is the
malaise? With the singular exception of the Data Darbar case of 1999, none of
the others was reported in mainstream media. It is all firsthand knowledge. Add
to this those countless cases that are daily reported in the newspapers and on
TV? And yet, we, as a society, obstinately refuse to have open, honest
intellectual discourse over the topic? Who are we deluding here? And what of
all those cases that go unreported? All the instances that I have related are
particularly vicious in nature. But what of ‘milder’ abuse; abuse that becomes
a lifelong secret between predator and prey; where an adult uses the innocence
or natural curiosity of a child for some sort of perverse gratification without
the child even realizing the severity of it? And yet, it may leave an
everlasting psychological imprint. I still sometimes grapple with the legacy of
my premature education in all matters sexual by a wannabe pedophile. And what
about all those instances that are hushed up for concerns of ‘shame’ and
‘family honor’, or due to the exigencies of poverty and social disempowerment? Where
child molesters walk free in an intrinsically flawed judicial system, and where
parents are compelled by some twisted notions of love to keep silent and avert
their gaze from the trauma their child has been through, just so that he or she
could avoid being stuck with the stigma of having been made impure by the evil
act of another? In our dysfunctional society, the emotional and psychological
baggage of sexual abuse becomes the victim’s burden alone to haul through life,
if at all they survive the ordeal.
Child sexual abuse has much in common with another horrendous
social crime: rape. Both have a lot to do with perceived notions of power and
control, and the practical exercise of such pernicious concepts. Rape has to do
with power disparity between the sexes; child abuse is about the abuse of power
disparity between adults and children. Both carry fatal consequences, not just
for the victimized individual, but for society in general. There are a few
differences too, however. When an adult is sexually assaulted, he, or as is
most often the case, she, is better equipped to resist than a child. Case in
point being the heroic girl on the Delhi bus who resisted till she could. A
child does not even know that there is something seriously wrong until it is
too late. Adults are forced into involuntary sex, mostly at pain of death or
severe physical torture. Unless it is outright child rape, most children are
lured or sweet-talked into the act. Perceptions of some guilty fun are planted
into their heads which is in stark contrast to the actual physical pain they
are eventually made to feel. This creates a feeling of being betrayed and
exploited that a child is simply incapable of dealing with. Furthermore, adults
are more capable of dealing with sexual harassment, as they have a voice and a
better understanding of reality. In cases of ‘mild’ abuse like improper
touching, rubbing, fondling and lewd talk with children, the child, more often
than not, doesn’t even realize something’s awry. In such cases, even if the
child does complain to a responsible adult, it is ultimately the child’s word
against the grown-up’s, who with his wits and senses about him, can spin the
story to his advantage. Observation suggests that in our society, such kind of
‘mild’ abuse is either widely condoned or not considered abuse at all.
Bertrand Russell, in his famous parable of the school bully,
has neatly summed up the human condition. When asked as to why he beat up kids
younger than himself, the bully matter-of-factly replies that the older ones
beat him, and so, it was only ‘fair’ that he beat the ‘babies’. In this
perspective, and indulging crude conjecture, when a child abuse victim reaches
adulthood, the permutations in which his (her) repressed rage and frustration
and the countless painful questions haunting the psyche may manifest themselves,
may have severely negative socio-psychological fallouts. He may suffer, and
others may suffer with him, or because of him. Therefore, leaving this baleful
phenomenon unchecked, and all of its incumbent issues unaddressed, is a sure
recipe for adding dangerously to the national psychosis that is already threatening
to rip this country apart at the seams.
In this regard, I would prefer to see a few things happen
immediately, although the possibility of them ever taking formal shape is largely
absent from the horizon. I would like to see society wake up to the reality of
child abuse, to not turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to specific occurrences, and
to form a broad consensus on what needs to be done to stop it and counteract
its effects. In short, child abuse needs to be a subject of wide national
discussion and debate, rather than something taboo for conversation, something
best not even thought about, much less mentioned. An ethos needs to be evolved
where someone who has been a victim of such bestiality has the courage and the
confidence to speak out about it without fear or shame. Society should learn
from these examples so as to be able to understand and minimize its occurrence,
and victims must be given broad, open and unconditional support in overcoming
their abuse-related problems. Some non-governmental organizations are doing a
good job with regards to the latter, but given the scale of its incidence,
concerted, statewide efforts need to be made to assess and tackle cause and
effect. Interestingly, a bill for the formation of an authority for the rehabilitation of violence and abuse victims has been lying dormant in the National Assembly since 2010; shows the level of commitment our democratic representatives have towards good work that has little to do with political grandstanding or profitable division of the nation's resources among our numerous power elites. Be that as it may, meaningful and specific legislation needs to be enacted via political
consensus that fully defines child abuse down to the minutest detail so that
the provision of justice does not get lost in interpretation. Separate,
specific and draconian penal stipulations need to be instituted for child
molesters, and carried out with the full force of the law, so that deterrents
are created for future offenders. Co-education needs to be encouraged and
promoted so as to reduce the sexual objectification of the opposite sex that is
the source of much of the gender disconnect in our society. This disconnect,
and the skewed gender relations it engenders, in my opinion, is one major cause
behind rapes and child abuse as men channel their repressed desires and
frustration in all the wrong directions. If men and women interact at a social
level as equal human beings rather than one viewing the other as forbidden
fruit, perhaps this demystification of the opposite sex will lead to reduced
levels of sexual frustration. Furthermore, the state needs to find a spine and
clamp down stringent regulations on religious schools and seminaries. Every facet of Madrassah life needs to be brought under strict parliamentary supervision to ensure nothing
ugly goes on behind the veil of religion. Our instinctive deference towards a
man with a beard, or a person familiar with Arabic or the holy book, needs to
be revisited and toned down. No amount of religious fervor instilled in our
children is worth their physical, emotional or psychological well-being. And
finally, we need to recognize that we ourselves are ultimately responsible for
the protection of our under-age children. Trusting a stranger blindly with your
children, and then spending a lifetime trying to deceive yourself into
believing whatever happened was not your fault, will lead you through the same
hell your child is going through. And if you have the misfortune of living in a
society as insular as Pakistan’s, it will be lifelong denial that eats you away
on the inside.
Children are one of the few things that bring pure,
unadulterated beauty to the adults’ dreary world governed by a cynical scrounge
for resources and a mad dash for survival. I stand on the brink of fatherhood,
and to be honest, the thought of the ugliness into which I have colluded to
bring such helpless innocence gets overwhelming at times. I have had a close
brush with abuse, and I know for a fact that I will be one of those dads
constantly paranoid about the safety of their children. But such incessant
paranoia would be infinitely preferable to the regret of having failed one’s
children at a time when they had no one else to look up to. It is in protecting
their today that we can hope to secure their tomorrows. After all, parents who
fail to shield their children against the caprices of the world deserve not to
be called parents at all. Likewise, societies which fail to look out for their weak
gradually forfeit the right to exist; they invite either total destruction, or painful fundamental restructuring.
