Pushpender Yadav
Assistant Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology
Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh – 462003 (India)
Divya Shrivastava
Research Assistant
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology
Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh – 462003 (India)
Abstract
Girl child sexual abuse is a curse to society and creates an unsafe environment for children to flourish. Girls are affected more than the boys. In most of the child abuse cases, perpetrator is acquainted to the victim or person of family’s trust. This is the most challenging factor of child abuse that children are at increased risk from the people known to them and their parents. To restrict this, role of parents is pivotal as they can teach their children about appropriate and in-appropriate actions by the people who can target them. Presence of parents around is considered as the safest place for the children. They can easily communicate with their children and make them aware about the risk and vulnerabilities. But this need parents with non-ignorant attitude towards their child. Children subjected to sexual abuse have parents either ignoring the crime or not knowing that their children are vulnerable to such crime. Children with single biological parent are also at high risk of being abused. Ignorance in economically weaker sections is more due to illiteracy, lack of awareness and poverty. Parents of sexually abused children must show trust and belief to their children and must help their children to cope up with the crime by building up the lost self-esteem and confidence. For this, awareness to innovate the parental practice is very important and essential to make parents more accountable toward their children. Local government bodies, NGOs and general public must come forward to slow down the increasing crime against children by making parents to know new approaches and organizing parental programs.
Key words: Perpetrator, Intra-familial Sexual Abuse, Acquainted, Stigmatization, Self-esteem, Awareness.
