Child Abuse in India
BY: HRISHIKESH DASA (HENRY DOKTORSKI)
Feb 12, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA (SUN) — I congratulate "A Concerned Party" for his/her article "India Is a Very Dangerous Place for Women." I might add "women and especially girls," and I won't mention the sorry state of women in ISKCON, or girls in ISKCON gurukulas, during the recent past. (Thank God things have improved somewhat.) No, I won't go there; but let's look at India before ISKCON. Perhaps we might get some historical perspective on this persistent problem which today finally seems to be getting some well-deserved recognition in the news.
Some innocent (or perhaps illusioned) souls may believe that India is at heart a pious and religious nation and such things as child molestation rarely happen, but upon closer inspection it seems that child abuse may actually be more prevalent in India than in America. In India the abuse is carefully hidden from outsiders by both abusers and victims. The victims are afraid to speak about their abuse because of the shame it will bring to them and their families, and therefore the abusers continue to get away scot-free. At least in the Western world, victims today are more and more encouraged to speak out about such things, and society is more apt to take their accusations at face value rather than automatically condemn such victims, as opposed to in India where family tradition and worship of elders is more prominent, and the words of children more often ignored.
For instance: I personally know one Indian woman born over forty years ago into a very highly-respected Vaishnava family. Once she told me that she had been a victim of incest; she had been sexually molested as a child by a family member. This was not something that she casually revealed to me; it was a terrible secret between her and her abusers which gave her great pain and torment, even 30 years after the abuse had ended. And this woman was not born into a low class sudra family; no, her family members were university-educated high-caste Vaishnavas who became quite prominent and influential as ISKCON preachers and trusted advisors to ISKCON gurus even to this day.
Molestation of Indian girls by boys and men, even among family members, is not unusual, but quite common, as attested by Lloyd De Mause, the president of the International Pyschohistorical Association. In his thought-provoking article "The Universality of Incest" published in the Journal of Psychohistory (Winter 1991), he described some of the abuse (even institutionalized abuse) heaped upon unlucky girls in Indian society:
Child marriage has been the rule in India at least as far back as 300 BC. The rationalization for child marriage-like that for extreme seclusion of girls, purdah-is that it is necessary to protect the girl from the seductive males around her. Indian mothers of higher castes admit that they are "afraid to leave their daughters of [age eleven] at home, even for one afternoon, without a mother's eye and accessible to the men of the family. Far down the social scale the same anxiety is found. The Hindu peasant villager's wife will not leave her girl child at home alone for the space of an hour, being practically sure that, if she does so, the child will be ruined." Therefore, the child has traditionally been married off as early as six or seven years of age.
While child marriages are consciously excused as defenses against seduction by males, they also, of course, carry out the seduction, since child marriages have generally been consummated right away and since the groom is almost always decades older than the child bride. As the Mahabharat says, "Let the man of thirty years wed a ten-year-old wife, a nagnika (one that has not yet menstruated), or let the man of twenty-one get one seven years old." Since prior to the 1929 child Marriage Restraint Act most Indian girls were married and began sexual intercourse before age twelve, they moved from familial incest to sex with older men chosen by the family while they were still children.
Fathers who allowed their girls to reach puberty without being married were condemned by their religion to hell. Therefore, the first child usually was born shortly after the onset of puberty, almost always dying during childbirth because of the physical immaturity of the mother. When attempts to outlaw child marriage were made in 1929, nine volumes of testimony were published by the Age of Consent Committee, most of them defending child marriage. The complaint was that it was the foundation of the Indian family, since "the girl-child must 'get herself disciplined' [raped] through actual consummation of marriage 'to look upon one individual . . . as her lord and husband.'"
Mayo said most of this committee testimony was too obscene to even repeat in its insistence on the necessity for child sex. The Committee was overwhelmed by those who insisted that the children were so oversexed that by the time they were seven years old that child marriage was their only salvation. "Little children, both boys and girls, they lament, naturally develop an unnatural, perverted and exhausting precocity, under the stimulus in which they are steeped"-that is, the family incest during the first seven years. Mayo reported numerous testimonies that blamed the little girls for their rape, claiming that early marriage was an absolute necessity, since "Cupid overtakes the hearts of girls . . . at an early age. . . . A girl's desire for sexual intercourse is eight times greater than that of males. . . . When there is appetite, it is the best time for giving food."
The result of this early incest was a society where adult sexuality was considered extremely dangerous, where people suffered agonies of guilt every time they engaged in sex with their spouses, where all sexual intercourse between men and women was considered polluting and where popular movies still frequently need detailed rape scenes to satisfy the male audience. As might be expected, Indian religion has been permeated by perverse sexual fantasies, worship of the penis and extreme fears of loss of semen, including the worship of an incestuous penis-god, Shiva-where women were expected to kiss in public the genitals of naked priests. Even today in cults such as the Hindu Shakti sect incest is advocated as "a higher grade of sexual intercourse and an advanced step toward religious perfection."
Granted, De Mause most likely does not chant Hare Krishna or follow the regulative principles, nor is he surrendered to a bona-fide spiritual master in disciplic succession, and he may not be in complete accord with everything that Prabhupada taught about lust and women and child marriage and Indian society, but I believe De Mause's perspective should not be routinely dismissed. Perhaps we, who supposedly understand the conclusions of the Vedas, might learn something from his insights? And could it be possible that a culture in which women are usually able to travel alone in safety without fear for their lives, such as in the West, is actually the more progressive and enlightened culture?
