Books: Paradise Lost


	August 07, 2000

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Paradise Lost

A chilling must-read for parents and all those who love children

By Kinsuk Mitra

BITTER CHOCOLATE
BY PINKI VIRANI
PANGUIN
PRICE: Rs 295
PAGES: 245

Interview

India Today issue dated August 07, 2000 This book is the first of its kind in India. Pinki Virani has startlingly merged facts and figures, research and analysis with real-life cases of child sexual abuse to break the silence on this criminal activity that we -- as a society -- have not had the courage to combat. This "faction" (fact and fiction) provides an exhaustive account of what we should all know about child abuse -- what it is, how we can detect it, what it can lead to, how we can prevent it and, painfully but necessarily, how we can deal with it when it happens.

And happen it does. In a 40-page author's note that launches Bitter Chocolate, Virani lays out the parameters, personal and socio-cultural, that govern the emergence of this heart-rending study. She shoots from the hip, and what stays with the reader is the author's strong and sincere plea to act to protect our children from this nightmare of childhood.

INTERVIEW
"This is not porn"

Pinki Virani spoke to Principal Correspondent Anna M.M. Vetticad.

Q. How much of a market do you think there is for faction in India?
A. Much less than John Grisham for sure. But if I worried, I would never have written any of my three books. Certainly not Bitter Chocolate, which is pure non-fiction. My work is competing with 'Joy of Cooking', 'Three Tomatoes and My Face', 'Letters to My Children That I Never Ever Sent and They Never Ever Read But What the Hell It's Now in Non-fiction'.

Q. Aruna's Story is an issue you feel very strongly about. Once Was Bombay is about your city. And you've been a victim of child sexual abuse. Will you write only about subjects that personally affect you?
A. I have never been raped. Aruna's Story is about rape. Once Was Bombay is about different facets of different people's lives ... The reason why you find me in Bitter Chocolate is that if I don't come right out and say it, then I have no bloody business doing this book ... (But) I believe I have put enough distance between what happened to me as a victim and me as a writer.

Q. Are you aware of the fact that people have called up the publishers and asked if this is a titillating book?
A. If I'm setting out to give the sexually abused child a voice, then I should be able to describe to the reader how the child has described it to me. But I didn't, because of our obscenity laws and because I will then attract the wrong kind of reader. Anybody who is looking for pornography in this book can read something else.

One is not sure which aspect of the book -- the fact or the fiction -- is more gut-wrenching. Sexual abuse could start as early as at three months, in circumstances seemingly as "normal" as they can be. Virani identifies significant physical and behavioural changes in an abused child that adults would ignore out of ignorance, and challenges the dangerous misconception that such evils, being restricted to certain sections of society, do not happen to "people like us". She clarifies that boys are as often victims of child abuse as girls. The effects of abuse -- however "minor" -- on children are devastatingly far-reaching, and through various psychological reactions may be responsible for ruining their adult lives.

Then she throws the figures at us. How child sexual abuse is rising sharply in India, with most cases going unreported. How 50 per cent of girls and 30 per cent of boys under 16 are sexually abused, half of them by family members and close relatives -- and at home. How the number of child prostitutes in India has risen to two million, generating "business" worth Rs 11 crore.

Virani attacks the serious limitations of the Indian legal framework that allow offenders to get away without prosecution. She painstakingly examines each legal section that can be invoked in such cases, considers its relevance today and suggests amendments that would help the system improve its conviction record. Extracts from a Gender and Judges Survey (1996) are shocking: 50 per cent of the judges surveyed, for instance, believed that child sexual abuse was uncommon and restricted to uneducated, depressed or oversexed people.

Virani establishes the inadequacy of the entire redressal process as "secondary victimisation", whereby the victim goes through a second round of torture at the hands of the authorities in an attempt to allege, and then prove, the crime. As a 12-year-old victim says accusingly, "You have changed my private nightmare into a very public one."

At the end, Virani offers prescriptions for seeking ways out. Sections addressing prevention, disclosure and the "exit cycle" (how to discard the notion of being a sexual abuse survivor and move on) are followed by a heartening personal message to all child-victims: "Heal by yourself."

A must-read for all parents and others who love children and hate crimes.

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