Court panel shocked with 'no abuse' report

MUMBAI: Can a person detect sexual abuse through an examination of eyes, nose, throat, heart, liver and tonsils? Or can one say a girl was sexually assaulted in 2011, through a medical examination conducted in 2010? The state government certainly seems to think that it can be done. Moreover, it also believes that a child's ability to calculate has bearing on whether or not she was abused.
After experts stumbled upon incidents of sexual abuse in two shelter homes for mentally challenged children in Maharashtra, the chief justice of the Bombay high court directed the government's department of women and child development to conduct medical tests on all 1,000-odd children living in the 27 shelter homes a across the state.On April 1, less than three weeks of the order being passed, the government apparently finished all the tests and claimed that it had found no trace of sexual abuse at any of the homes. During the hearing on Thursday, even Chief Justice Mohit Shah seemed shocked with the findings. "You should not conduct these examinations only because you want to comply with the court orders, but because it is your duty to do so," he told the department.
TOI trawled through the medical reports, only to find an absurd list of documents submitted by the government. Many of the reports included observations on children's IQ and behaviour, with no mention of any check on sexual abuse. The government even submitted medical reports conducted in 2010, a year before the court order.
For instance, at the home for mentally deficient children in Satara, Asha Bhavan, the children were taken to a medical camp for their tests of sexual abuse. The report stated that there was no abuse and mentioned 'stable' or 'aggressive' against a child's name.
The reports of the Shankarlal Mundada Home in Jalna, mention details of the children's IQ levels but do not have anything to do with sexual abuse. Some reports focused solely on a child's behaviour. The one prepared for children at Prem Daan in Navi Mumbai had observations like "snatching things and hitting others" and "habit of stealing", but the persons concerned never seemed to have checked if those children were ever assaulted or molested or raped. There was clearly no examination of sexual abuse.
At the Ekvir Home in Nagpur, the medical reports dealt solely with the tests of chest, eyes, nose, tonsils, teeth, heart and glands. From that, the officials could not possible detect sexual abuse.
The reports for the Sojar Home and the Shri Hanuman Shikshan Prasarak Mandal, both in Solapur, included a column for 'injuries or marks of violence', but the space was left blank. Similarly, the column of "urogenital examination" in the reports of Shri Hanuman Shikhsan Prasarak Mandal was mostly left blank or filled with an illegible scrawl. In some cases, the column bore cryptic comments like "higher functions could not be tested".
Shocked by the claim that none of the children in the shelter homes was sexually violated, Asha Bajpai, chairperson of the court-appointed panel investigating the condition of children's homes, slammed the government for the method of checks adopted by it. "You cannot detect sexual abuse of a mentally challenged child at a medical camp. You need to build a rapport with these children and meet them a number of times before they open up to you," she said. Psychiatrist Dr Harish Shetty, who is also on the panel, called the state department callous and being criminally negligent in executing health check-ups. "The hurry reflects a lack of sensitivity and fear of exposing the corrupt collusion between the department of women and child development and the home department officials," he said.