HYDERABAD: Remember the Bollywood movie BA Pass which shows rape of a young man bleeding between his legs? Or the little boy Hassan raped in Khaled Hosseini’s book ‘The Kite Runner’? But again, not many movies or media reports talk about male rape or sexual abuse of baby boys!
As International Women’s Day approaches, talks on women’s sexual abuse and rape get spotlight, but there are victims of rape and sexual abuse who go about their lives silently without sharing anything with anyone. And there are not many who want to talk about it while there are some, whose stories even if heard, are brushed aside. Why? Because they are men and can’t be raped or sexually abused even when they were little children. For many men, it becomes a lot more difficult if they have gone through the trauma during their childhood. At the recent staging of a play Positively Shameless at Lamakaan on child sexual abuse (CSA), the silence on men’s pain was raised by Rehan, one of the victims and among the attendees.
A UNICEF report released to India goes as: “It is alarming that too many of these cases are children. One in three rape victims is a child. More than 7,200 children, including infants, are raped every year; experts believe that many more cases go unreported. Given the stigma attached to rapes, especially when it comes to children, this is most likely only the tip of the iceberg.”
To add to this, a survey conducted by GoI says that 57 per cent of sexually abused children were boys. But why do these cases not get reported? Why the silence?
Says 33-year-old child sexual abuse survivor Rehan, “I was barely 10 years old when I was sexually abused by a female
neighbour. She’d pretend to play with me and it hurt. I would bleed while urinating. Nobody paid attention to it nor to the inner wounds that developed inside my psyche. When I tried speaking up, the elders hushed up the matter saying: ‘You must have had a bad dream. These things do not happen in respectable families.’” He grew up with the pain, the hidden shame and decided to leave his family one day. The dark demons come back to haunt to him even though he has worked hard to make a good life for himself as the profile manager of VVIPs.
Rehan isn’t alone who was sexually abused by someone close that also a woman.
Story of Raman is equally haunting. Born in Anantapur to a poverty-stricken family of 10 members, he was sent to Hyderabad to assist a rich relative’s household. He was just 12 when he arrived and was fondly accepted by this ‘extra-loving’ aunty. “She would always complain of tiredness and ask me to massage her back. First it was affection then it grew worse. She would get naked and ask me to fondle her in places and later it would be my turn,” he shares. He ran away from the house when this aunty started calling another ‘aunty’ to ‘play’ with the boy. Now at 27, he runs a cyber cafe in the city and is studying B.Com. He doesn’t want to get married. “I don’t think I can connect to any woman after this. I tried telling my family, but of no use. They thought I was alleging the ‘poor’ lady out of laziness. Even my friends laughed at me,” he further adds.
The laws are there, but one hardly sees the perpetrators being caught. In the year 2011, Parliament of India passed the ‘Protection of Children Against Sexual Offences’ Bill. The law recognises several forms of abuses as sexual abuse perpetrated against children. “Only 11 per cent of the cases get reported. It’s a social stigma for many. For a male the dynamics are different which stops him to talk about it,” says Ramesh Kidambi of ‘Break The Silence’ – an initiative by citizens to raise awareness about child sexual abuse. But it takes a lot for the victims to come out and speak up because society doesn’t allow or there’s not much awareness about it. That’s how during the play, in one of the scenes, a counsellor-cum -therapist is shown incompetent while handling the victim’s crisis.
Elaborated Maitri Gopalakrishna the director during the Q&A session, who also does some counselling work, “This can have many connotations. Maybe the counsellor himself/herself perpetrated some acts that s/he isn’t comfortable with. And handling therapy/counselling of child sexual abuse definitely needs more specific training.”