Molested School Girls and the Mystery of Skewed Literacy Ratios
India has one of the poorest sex ratios in the world and among the most skewed literacy rates. Statisticians, policy makers and arm-chair analysts have presented numerous arguments on how this relates to the economic growth of the country, to the overall literacy rates or government spending on literacy.
The answer, however, might be more human, as Prof. Amartya Sen pointed out .
In the following article published in Newind Press on December 16th, cases of sexual humiliation and molestation of girl children were presented to the Tamil Nadu State Commission for Women. All of these cases happened in schools in Tamil Nadu and were perpetrated by teachers.
On July 7 this year, eight-year-old Saroja, a student at
the Government Primary School, Perunthurai Taluk, Erode district,
was raped by her 50-year-old alcoholic headmaster.
It turned out that four years ago, the headmaster had committed a
similar offence in another school and had been `punished' with a
transfer. A brutally traumatised Saroja now refuses to leave home.
On January 27, Priya, an eight standard student of Government Higher
Secondary School, Villur village, Madurai, watched as her Tamil
teacher locked the classroom door and molested three of her
classmates.
The teacher was remanded for just four days.
On November 4, 96 girl students studying in the tenth standard of
the ITO Higher Secondary School, Ayakudi, Dindigul, were stripped
naked and searched by their teachers, who wanted to know which of
them was having her menstrual period.
The reason? A soiled sanitary napkin had been found in the school
premises and the girls were unwilling to confess whose it had been.
After protests from parents, four teachers were suspended for just
five days.
The horror stories don't end here. At the end of nearly three hours
of a public hearing on `Violence against girl students in
educational institutions in Tamil Nadu', organised by the National
Commission for Women and the Tamil Nadu State Commission for Women
in the city on Wednesday, what emerged was a gut-wrenching picture
of how sexually unsafe government schools in the State have become
for girl children.
As a shocked audience and a panel consisting of Poornima Advani,
chairperson, National Commission for Women, V Vasanthi Devi,
chairperson, Tamil Nadu State Commission for Women, retired High
Court Judge Janardhanan and former DGP V R Lakshminarayanan
listened, parents and relatives from nearly every part of the State
deposed on how child after child was stripped of her dignity in
State-run institutions. The public hearing had only children of
government schools and their parents/relatives deposing.
In most cases, the abuser - who almost always was either the
headmaster or a school-teacher - went scot-free. The most
serious `punishment' was a transfer to another school, where the
offender invariably repeated the crime.
Details of thirteen cases of sexual abuse had been collected by one
NGO alone--the Madurai-based People's Watch. Even as the parents
deposed in public, the brutalised children themselves gave in-camera
deposition before Jayam, former Director, Institute of Child Health,
Chennai.
It is important to note that these were crimes perpetrated in Tamil Nadu – a state with high overall literacy rates and high economic growth. This state also has a lower-than-average female-to-male literacy ratio and a lower sex ratio, with a known practice of female infanticide.
This is not to malign Tamil Nadu – perhaps the fact that these stories made it to the public through investigations by the State Commission on Women is significant. This may not be possible in numerous other states.
The critical point, however, is that perhaps women’s money needs more than money; it needs empathy and a critical change in mindset regarding the rights of the girl child.
It needs each of us to answer how we treat other women, and the girl child, in our own homes. It needs us to answer tough questions regarding our position on dowry, on the role of the women in our own homes, on testing for the sex of the fetus. Unless we can sort through those issues, the molestation of girls in schools will always be one step away. Unless we can sort through those issues, the skewed sex ratios and literacy ratios will continue mock at our claims of progress and development.
(Names of the children have been changed to protect their identity)
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Posted by collective at December 19, 2004 10:16 AM
