When a 4-year-old is booked for raping his classmate the shame is ours
Does a four-year old boy understand the difference between aggression and a sexual act? Would he know beyond the boundaries of an act that could be inspired from experience or make-believe and in his books probably just deserves a rap on the knuckles?
Revolting is probably too mild a reaction to the unfathomable act by this boy of inserting a sharpened pencil and his finger into the private parts of a small girl in a Delhi school. It is yet another reminder for those of us living in the National Capital Region where innocence is bludgeoned every other day, that if you have children do not ever take your foot off the pedal.
It is doubtful that a kid this young will understand the repercussions of his actions, but that does not lessen the trauma of his victim, a child who is just in kindergarten enjoying the butterflies, but far removed from the world of birds and bees.
When you read a mother’s account of how this little boy so casually inflicted such heinous injuries, physically and emotionally to her daughter, you want to stop mid-way and not read any further yet you continue as though by self-inflicting someone will leave our children alone.
When a four-year old is booked for rape, there is not much behind which we can hide, when a child who is probably still watching Peppa Pig cartoons needs swab tests, you realise that degeneration of our society is almost complete.
This ghastly incident comes at a time when we are still grappling with the twists in the murder of seven- year-old Pradyuman Thakur in Ryan International School allegedly by a senior who slit his throat perhaps just to postpone his exams. As easy as that.
Like the mother of the four-year old wrote in her letter, schools are second homes for our children, it is where they spend as much time as they do in their house and where we let them go with full trust. Yet a little child was left to button up by herself with not one elder in the vicinity while she was assaulted, that is an age when we dress them up lovingly ourselves. The shame is ours.
How did a young boy behave so debauched?
In our society, it is easy to point fingers, look for a target and just as easily move on. But before criminalising him, we need to look within ourselves. Is sexual abuse something that he is aware of and experienced himself or is it just negligent parents who have under- played the importance of discipline and as is rampant today, substituted some quality time with gadgets that open up a whole world of graphic content?
Even if it is the latter, dismissing it as a naughty prank gone horribly wrong is not an option because when a society breeds monsters this young, self-introspection can no longer be pushed for another day.
Last year, in my daughter’s class, two four-year old boys literally got into a brawl. It was no child’s fight, while one had his hands around the other’s neck, the second one tried to hit him with a guitar on his head. Such was their aggression that it took a bunch of elders to separate two boys but in a reflection of why they become what they become, instead of some tough love their mothers consoled them and rewarded them with a hug.
There is something really rotten in the way we are bringing up our children today. While it is impossible to copy our parents' time and bring up kids the way they brought up theirs, yet the lack of parental attention, substituting love for iPads is contributing to a generation that is short on discipline, but is rolling in money. When you leave kids with a "didi", a gadget and none of your own precious time, don’t expect model citizens. Working mothers have it tougher, but despite their own long hours they are some of the most conscious, refusing to loosen the grip.
When my children’s school tightened security norms after the Ryan school murder and disallowed domestic staff from entering, the first ones to crib were mothers who had no patience to stand in line to pick up their children. They are also the first people to clutch their faces in horror when MMS of school children make the rounds yet allow their teenage children to drive fancy cars and look the other way when they attend parties where drugs are overflowing.
Juvenile crime in India is a steadily jumping statistic and can no longer be dismissed as something that happens only where there is poverty. Around us, well-to-do folks are struggling to rein in their children, but when you over-indulge and over-expose at a young age then there will be violent resistance to change later.
If parents don’t have a pulse on peer pressure, which is no longer about just scoring a perfect 10 and instead choose to shield their children from any punishment, then the buck stops with them.
Troubled teens, drugs and alcohol are now the new norm, especially in the capital where everything seems to be flowing except parental responsibilities. On any given day, there is a real-time crime novel in the making. Today for instance, a 15-year old girl has been rescued after an attempt to sell her for more than three lakhs, yesterday there was another rape.
Inured as we all are to these daily stories, I take heart from a 30- year-old who recently volunteered to be a liver donor for a family member. His parents shrugged it off, as though it was no big deal but it is.
In a society where increasingly the most common trait amongst youngsters is to be self-centred, where violence is as quick as their accessibility to the latest video game and where the police doesn’t know how to treat a four-year-old accused of rape, here is a set of parents who did something right. They taught their son how to grow up.