Bengaluru: Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) is a “silent violent epidemic,” which requires a “protocol-based systemic response to ensure that the child’s agenda, that is, healing and recovery, is at the core of it,” states an advisory issued by the National Institute for Mental Health (Nimhans), to all the stakeholders, including parents, police, media and schools on how to tackle the "national menace" of CSA.
The advisory, issued by the Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Nimhans, in the wake of recent reported cases of CSA, states that the continuous reporting of such cases by the media “raises the challenge of how to tackle the national menace of this ‘silent violent epidemic’ which warrants systemic approaches that are uncompromisingly child-centric”. The advisory emphasises on “preventive programmes in schools and other childcare agencies to reduce sexual victimisation and even sexual offences in the general population.”
According to the country’s apex mental health institute, when a case of CSA is reported, it is “addressed by systems of criminal justice, police, schools, families, and healthcare, which generate a flurry of incoherent activities, albeit in good faith, thereby compromising the child’s best interests and (tilting) the balance between the need for justice and empowered rehabilitation of the child,” states Nimhans.
Schools should include life skills education and personal safety workshops and a “clear protocol” to handle with sensitivity instances of CSA and should have a trained counsellor. The parents should not ignore or undermine a child’s statements and innocuous remarks. “When in doubt, it would be prudent to corroborate the information from various sources. An open, supportive stance, assuming a position that child is right would be helpful to facilitate further disclosure on abuse,” the advisory states.
It also mentions the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2013 (POCSO) under which, the child should be provided with emergency medical services (EMS) within 24 hours of filing the FIR by the State Registered Medical Practitioners (RMP) in government hospitals and other hospitals in the absence of the RMPs, the role of the Special Juvenile Police Units (SJPU) and the Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Nimhans in providing therapeutic and forensic interviewing (of the victim) to assist both the healing of the child and the necessary justice processes.
On the role of media, Nimhans has stated that while being “proactive in responding to crisis, media should instill hope and confidence in the public instead of fueling cynicism as the latter may only serve to increase the child’s trauma, and the family’s fears of social stigma,” states the protocol code.
