Incidence of sexual abuse highest among minors: Study

Thirty-year-old Vijay Shinde was convicted to ten years rigorous imprisonment and fined for Rs 5000 for raping his 14-year-old daughter by the Mulund Sessions Court on July 23.
Last Wednesday, commuters witnessed the rape of a mentally challenged minor in a suburban train. Later, a 19-year-old girl was gang-raped by youths in Mumbra. According to a study, the incidence of sexual abuse is the highest among minors.
A 1999 report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), based on a study of 150 minor girls in Mumbai, found that 58 of the girls had been sexually abused before the age of 10.Of these, 50 had been abused by a family member or friend of the family.
A counsellor told Bombay Times on condition of anonymity, "Another study, conducted by Rahi, a Delhi-based organisation, focused on 1,000 English-speaking, middle and upper class women of four metros and Goa found that 76 per cent of the respondents had been sexually abused as children; 31 per cent of these by someone they knew and 40 per cent by a family member. About 71 per cent had been abused either by relatives or someone they knew and trusted."
She added, "While 48 per cent of the victims were to have one abuser, 52 per cent had been abused by two or more individuals. Abuse in the case of 11 per cent of the survivors occurred once in their lives, while 42 per cent were subjected to the abuse on several occasions, either by the same person or by different people. 50 per cent of the abuse took place when the victims were under 12 years of age, 35 per cent had been abused between the age of 12 to 16."
Says the counsellor, "It must be noted that the victims were almost always in the care of some family member or caretaker. 68 per cent of the abused children were living in nuclear families and 54 per cent of the survivors had told someone about the abuse compared to 36 per cent who did not."
Clinical and counselling psychologist, Arti Sharma from the Child Guidance Centre at Seva Niketan says, "Parents in our society view sexual abuse as a stigma. So they don''t want to come out in the open with it. It all depends on how open the parents are. Where families placed great emphasis on virginity and equated it with purity, virtue and family honour, the victims felt a greater sense of shame, self contempt, anger, and felt compelled to keep quiet about the abuse. Sexual abuse is prevalent in all social classes of our society. One has to watch out for the signs in their child like sudden aloofness, preoccupation or discomfort in the presence of the opposite sex."
The study also revealed that the overwhelming responses to disclosure of abuse by the victims were anger at the perpetrator, disbelief in the victim, and denial. The actions that followed most often did not involve confronting the perpetrator. The most often cited long-lasting effects of sexual abuse were lack of self-confidence, inability to express feelings and trust people, and feeling anger towards the world on most occasions. Other effects included aversion of sex or compulsively seeking it out, experiencing chronic aches and pains, use of drugs and alcohol. In spite of the high number of rape cases registered with the Mumbai police, every year coupled with high detection rates, the number of convictions remain abysmally low due to lengthy court procedures.