Children are, easily the most precious and finest part of all civilization and social structures. In children there is embodied the ability of all animals to bear great sacrifices in the present towards building a future where the best of traditions are preserved and continued. In children there is hope for the mortal life to escape the ephemeral existence just for a bit and have a taste of immortality. The innocence and purity of children are a reminder to all of us on what we can be if we re-learn to enjoy the simplicity of life. There is no wonder then that child abuse is the worst form of crime that can be wrought. It affects not only the present of the children, it damages them for a long term period, destroying their future, creating maladjusted individuals who in turn create broken social systems. Is destroys the values of honor, trust and faith, some of the finest human values from very memory of such individuals. These people in turn hurt others, perpetuating a cycle of destruction.
Given the seriousness of the matter, one of the most appalling developments that have happened in recent times is the trivialization of the crime by those who ostensibly speak the loudest for it. The new self-described liberals, have taken on the agency of being social justice warriors forcing their ideological and political agendas on every social construct, including the protection of children from abuse, and like their influence on other topics, they have done greatest of disservice to it. As what always happens to on ground world problems when an ideology divorced from reality is forced on it, the problems of child abuse by any metrics have only increased and not decreased.
There are many examples of above we could discuss, but instead of getting into an academic approach, let us consider a real example. The exhibit was a clip here. The video clip now stands deleted. It was published by a Facebook page called Feminism is Cancer and the original video url was – https://www.facebook.com/FeminismIsCancr/…/2078588178840686/.
The video clip had young women, dancing sexually as would be done in a strip club, but with clothes on (thank god for small mercies) rubbing their bodies on a *very young* boy, no more that 10-12 years of age, seducing the little boy. The child is getting physically aroused and the girls are having a good laugh about it. The boy is unprepared to be in that kind of state, his face clearly flushed and his body is being forced into a physical response which he is completely unequipped to handle at the level of emotional and biological maturity he is at.
If this was per chance, a video of young men, feeling up and sexually grooming 10-12-year-old girl, would this be considered a joke? If were to replace the girls with a few drunken men and the kid with little girl imagine the kind of global outrage it would have caused (and rightly so) but this video couldn’t garner that kind of response because we have been turned into a morally depraved society. A society which checks the race, religion and gender of the criminal before worrying about the crime. A cultural of liberalism where some groups can do no wrong. Feminism being taken to mean that women get a free pass for most horrible conduct without a chance of question. In fact the crime would be to even consider the thought of asking women to be judged for the consequences of the action. A culture where someone can empty an automatic weapon on a crowd while shouting religious verses upholding the superiority of the only true religion, and then have society fall over themselves trying to explain why the harassment by others caused the poor chap to be mentally disturbed and how he needs to be protected and not persecuted. Where the church can get away by paying money to settle cases of sexual abuse of young boys by its clergy and it does not call for the full might of state to descend on the criminals.
It is this viewing of the world through ideological prisms, and not at the action as it stands alone, which has resulted in a situation where even when a boy is sexually abused for every two girl victims, you never hear about the boys. You never hear how the statistics for sexual abuse are 18% for girls and 7.6% for boys or by some other estimates 1 out of 3 girls and 1 out of 5 boys will be sexually abused before they reach age 18. You never hear about them because the media will never run their outrage factory when the victim are boys, since women can never be wrong, even if by some chance the church accidentally is once a while. You never hear about it, because sexual abuse is buried in a deep report on child abuse where a 12-year-old learning a traditional craft at father’s workshop is as much a child abuse as rape is. A father scolding a young one to study is a much much bigger crime of patriarchy than the sick clip of young women using a little child as a sexual plaything.
One can only hope that we get to a world where these acts do not go unpunished, where the need for justice ensures that women a found and charged with most serious sections of law against rape. We can only hope where an act of crime is not seen through the prism of the identity of those involved but based on what the event actually was.