Violence against children as an area requiring specific interventions and services is now well-recognised and is an integral part of missions and agendas of various funding and direct practice organisations. 

While the child and abuse within child sexual abuse are beginning to receive (much deserved) attention, it is the sexual in the term that continues to remain blurry and ignored. Is it because sexuality is an elusive and slippery concept and therefore we find it hard to discuss it, or is it because the word, when used in the context of children, generates much discomfort?

Alankaar Sharma

A few years ago I found myself sitting in a swanky cabin of a leading advertising agency, having a discussion with an executive over developing a presentation on a booklet on child sexual abuse, in order to seek funding for its bulk production. Since child sexual abuse was the theme of the booklet, the title contained the term. I thought that was very elemental, very basic, very simple. The executive, however, had different ideas. She recommended hiding the term altogether while presenting it to potential funders. I must admit that the suggestion sounded a bit lame at that point. However, I began to gradually realise that this was a pattern, and not simply an isolated incident.

In my work on child sexual abuse in India, I came across a wide variety of terms that people used as a substitute for child sexual abuse, or offered those terms to the professionals working against child sexual abuse to use: ganda kaam (dirty work), bura kaam (bad work), galat kaam (wrong work), child security, child protection, child victimisation and child abuse. While some of these terms were colloquial references to sex per se or sex with children, the rest were professional jargon referring to broad issues of violence against children. 

The thread that binds them all is the obliteration of the word sex or sexual in all these ‘euphemisms’. These are not isolated incidents, these form a pattern; and the pattern reflects its political backdrop of not using the word child and sexual in the same breath, of finding it bizarre to associate children with sex, and of asexualising children.

In the last few years, the attention given to the issue of child sexual abuse has steadily increased on the part of international, national and local non-government organisations, media and government agencies. This is heartening because child sexual abuse has been, and in many ways continues to stay, an under-addressed concern, especially in many Asian countries where awareness on the subject and interventions aimed at prevention and response are still in their nascent stages.

The increasing dialogue, largely propelled by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, has resulted in a better and more general understanding of children as people and their rights, and in developing a generic understanding of who a child is. This is not to say that debates over issues of definitional boundaries (or lack thereof) between terms such as children, adolescents and young people, and age of consent have been settled definitively.

At the same time, there has been an evident increase in visibility on issues of interpersonal violence. Violence against children as an area requiring specific interventions and services is now well-recognised and is an integral part of missions and agendas of various funding and direct practice organisations.

While the child and abuse within child sexual abuse are beginning to receive (much deserved) attention, it is the sexual in the term that continues to remain blurry and ignored. Is it because sexuality is an elusive and slippery concept and therefore we find it hard to discuss it, or is it because the word, when used in the context of children, generates much discomfort? I argue that it is the latter. 

Often it is argued that child sexual abuse is about power and not sex. However, it is about power and sex. Is sexuality by itself not a playground for power? Is it not a contested terrain where hegemony and margins are constructed, celebrated and challenged? Then why is it that we do not want to examine the role of sex and sexuality within child sexual abuse? Why are euphemisms suggested and promoted to conceal the sexual dimension of child sexual abuse?

After all, child sexual abuse is not merely abuse of children, it is the sexual abuse of children. Is this because we are scared to recognise children as sexual people? Some people would even argue that to consider children as sexual people would amount to an approval of sexual violence against them and may lead to the same. However, developing an understanding of children’s sexuality is not detrimental to prevention and responding to abuse. On the contrary, it is integral to any such effort.

In my work, I was astonished to find how many people found it surprising that children were capable of feeling pleasure while they were being abused by the perpetrators. It is understandable that it may be difficult to wrap our brain around this idea due to the connotative values of the two concepts involved here: abuse is negative while pleasure is positive, and the twain seldom meet.

However, child sexual abuse is a complex phenomenon that resists the binary of black and white. And in order to understand the greyness of the matter, it is important to recognise children’ sexuality, because the reason why people do not understand children’s abuse as potentially pleasurable for children is because the idea of children and sexual pleasure is outlandish to many of us.

Putting children and sexual pleasure together within the context of violence becomes even more outlandish. The fact is that children can, and sometimes do, find a sexual activity pleasurable, even when they may not like the activity itself. Or they may like some sexual activities and dislike others. Or they may not like the perpetrator, but like sexual activities with the perpetrator. Or they may like the perpetrator, but not sexual activities with him/her. Or they may like both. Or they may dislike both. It would again be difficult and futile, perhaps even counter-productive, to identify pleasure as solely a biological response to physical stimuli.

Pleasure is a terribly complex and multi-dimensional concept that refuses to fit so neatly into boxes. Denial of children’s ability to feel pleasure during abuse not only takes away from the reality and complexity of the issue for adults, it adds layers of silence and oppression for the survivors too. In the absence of a constructive dialogue that recognises and affirms their experiences, they may not even recognise abuse as abuse or may feel responsible and guilty for it. I liked it, I had an orgasm, I ejaculated, so I must have wanted it, so I must have asked for it, so I must have participated, so I must have been the seducer: these are some concerns that haunt many survivors and influence their sense of self as well as their interpersonal relationships.

Children often do not have the language to talk about their experiences of abuse. In an environment where sexuality is shrouded in silence, children are typically kept away, almost in an ‘antiseptic isolation’, from age-appropriate information on sexuality to the extent that they often do not know the names of their private body parts. One of  the reasons why most abused children never disclose is because they do not have the vocabulary or the context to discuss such matters. The use of vernacular terminology or the ‘code words’ that they may know are not considered appropriate outside of certain spaces such as peer group discussions. Such silencing of children again emerges partially, if not completely, out of adults’ resistance to discussing matters of sexuality with children, because of the perception that children do not need it and have no use for that information. Sexuality, after all, is exclusively ‘adults’ property’, isn’t it?

The non-recognition of children’s sexuality also leads to misrecognition of children’s age-appropriate sexual behaviours as either abusive or consequences of abuse. As much as it is important for professionals who work with children and children’s caregivers to learn about behavioural indicators and signs of possible sexual abuse, it is even more important to learn about children’s ageappropriate sexual behaviours and expressions of sexuality. This, of course, cannot happen in the absence of recognising children as sexual beings. 

Since sexuality is not about the acts of sex alone, it also affects the meanings survivors make of their abuse. Many male survivors blame themselves for initiating the sexual relationship with their abuser and/or for not being able to stop it, especially if the perpetrator was a woman. This is influenced by how sexual relationships are constructed within society and the norms that inform them. 

Men are constructed as initiators of sexual activity, they are supposed to always want and like sex, they are supposed to be in control during sex, they are the doers. In an abusive situation, children are not in control, they are not the doers. This conflict between their actual experiences and societal notions of masculine sexuality is often hard to resolve for survivors in a social landscape where discourses of sexuality typically exclude plurality of experiences, and are premised upon the gender binary of the ideal masculine and feminine subject. In the context of homophobia, they may think they have been ‘made gay’ through their experiences if the perpetrators were males. 

Experiences of women are also informed by the social construction of feminine sexuality where they are denied both vocabulary and voice to articulate their experiences. In a society characterised by patriarchy, girls and women do not have the space to say no, especially when most perpetrators of sexual abuse are men. In any case, their no to sexual activity does not mean much: If she says no, she’s just acting pricey; If she says no, it means she wants it but she’s shy.

These instances illustrate how sexuality is an integral part of child sexual abuse, and influences it strongly in ways more than one. Understanding it will help affirm survivors’ experiences and extend the kind of help they want and need. 

However, adult society often resists focusing on the sexual dimension of the issue. Adults, including professionals in human services that form the frontline of interventions for survivors, many times do not want to listen to children’s stories of sexual abuse because they find them ‘too graphic’, they do not want to talk to children about sexual abuse because they think children are ‘too young’ to learn about it, they do not want to nurture the development of a healthy and affirmative sexuality in children because they think children are ‘asexual’. And, while adult society is busy cocooning itself against the realities of children’s lives, children are getting abused, blamed and silenced. 

Sexuality is an integral part of people’s identity, and children are people too. Their understanding and subjective realities regarding sexuality are not the same as adults’. They have different ways of being sexual and of articulating their sexuality. As adults, as much as it is crucial not to sexualise children in adult ways, it is critical to not asexualise them either. 

Understanding children’s sexualities and affirming them in age-appropriate, caring and healthy ways will help prevent and address child sexual abuse, not fuel it.

Alankaar Sharma is a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, U.S.A., and has worked in the areas of child sexual abuse and gender-based violence in India. His professional interests lie at different points of intersection between masculinities, sexualities, childhoods and violence. He can be reached at alankaar@aol.com.Violence against children as an area requiring specific interventions and services is now well-recognised and is an integral part of missions and agendas of various funding and direct practice organisations. 

While the child and abuse within child sexual abuse are beginning to receive (much deserved) attention, it is the sexual in the term that continues to remain blurry and ignored. Is it because sexuality is an elusive and slippery concept and therefore we find it hard to discuss it, or is it because the word, when used in the context of children, generates much discomfort?