India US, Child Sex Abuse

(brought over from Pelle's DNA thread)

 

David: There was apparently rampant incest and abuse of all kinds. In India, I have read, incest is still so common that women don't want to leave their daughters alone with their fathers or brothers.

e: David, India has over 1 billion people. On 1 street you will see all the vmemes represented … What you would find is incest will be in the lower uneducated economic classes like in any culture. India as a whole is not rampant with incest.


David: I was surprised as well, but I was referring to real research that had been done; I wasn't pulling it out of my hat.

One government study in 2007 found that 53% of children had been sexually abused. The BBC wrote it up here.

Here's another article that lists several studies. I will paste an excerpt:

Another study was done in 1997 by RAHI, a Delhi-based organization. This study focused on 1,000 English-speaking middle and upper class women living in Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Goa. Majority were graduate and under-graduate students. Findings from this study showed:

• 76% of respondents had been sexually abused as children; 31% of these by someone they knew and 40% by a family member. So 71% had been abused either by relatives or someone they knew and trusted.
• While 48% had been abused by a single abuser, 52% had been abused by two or more abusers - meaning the majority of women had multiple perpetrators.
• Abuse for 11% of the survivors occurred once in their lives while 42% were subjected to the abuse many times at different times of their lives either by the same abuser or different abusers at different times.
• 50% of the abuse took place when the survivors were under 12 years of age, 35% had been abused between 12-16 years of age. The significance of this is that victims were almost always in the care or company of some family member, caretaker or known person.

Here's one from the Times of India.


There are similar statistics from Pakistan, and probably other places as well. The point is simply that the paternal instinct is still very much a work in progress around the world. Mating is a really deep morphogenetic groove for sure, and that may have begun at Infrared, but actual fathering, love, and care is something else. You will find alarming statistics from the U.S. in the middle article as well.

OK after some digging, it seems the ‘experts' don't agree on the causes which more than likely means it is a combination of factors and the truth is somewhere in the middle. Here is some data to consider:

Poverty threshold in the US for 2005 (same year as India below). $27.32day

Wealth distribution in India is fairly uneven, with the top 10% of income groups earning 33% of the income. Despite significant economic progress, 1/4 of the nation's population earns less than the government-specified poverty threshold of $0.40/day.  (yes 40 cents!!)

So when the above says “ This study focused on 1,000 English-speaking middle and upper class women living in Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Goa.” By whose standards are we saying middle and upper class?

When I was in India last, I did not see abuse etc. that would be considered epidemic in the news (papers or TV). I asked my wife (she is Indian) if the info above on abuse makes sense. She said it could be accurate. She said Indians like Americans don't like to talk about sex. Also, in India the purity of being a virgin is very important and homosexuality is highly stigmatized. So, you won't get young people speaking out if they are abused.

I found this from Statistics Surrounding Child Sexual Abuse .Fabricated sexual abuse reports constitute only 1% to 4% of all reported cases. Of these reports, 75% are falsely reported by adults and 25% are reported by children. Children only fabricate ½% of the time.

I was surprised about the Children only fabricate ½% of the time. I asked my wife, she is a social worker in a high school, and she said, “yes, I trusts the kids more than the parents when child sex abuse is concerned”. She said this is a very big problem, kids are not believed even when they do tell!


David, thank you for raising my awareness on this very important topic!!

<3 e

Re: India US, Child Sex Abuse

Thanks, e. It is an interesting and important topic. Robert Godwin, in the interview I linked to in the other (DNA) thread, said that originally fathers hung around the mother long enough to raise the baby and protect them for sex, that the mother made it available to them year round, unlike other mammals to encourage them to stay. So, when you see father's going after their daughters, it seems to be a continuation of that emergence; they haven't fully developed to the next stage of fatherhood, haven't fully negated/integrated the earlier stage in the proper way.

I don't know about standards of wealth between the two countries. I know that there is more and more money in India, particularly in Bangalore apparently, but I'm not really sure. The article also said that the majority of the women were undergraduate or graduate students, so that tells us that there are significant resources there, schooling, some level of parenting. It's a good point about money, though: a boost in any of the quadrants, Ken has said, can boost the other quadrants.

Yes, that's interesting about kids being more reliable. When I was about 8 or so, a man tried to get me to come into an alley with him—“Come on, your shirt's on backwards. I'll help you set it straight.” I eventually decided it was fine as it was and walked on. But I never told anyone about it, let alone fabricated anything. I think I didn't want to be treated like a victim.

David

Re: India US, Child Sex Abuse

Hey David,

I was talking to a co-worker not too long ago. I told him I was driving to work and saw the shape of this really attractive woman. When I got closer, it was a teenage girl. I told him, “I felt like a dirty old man!” He said, “yeah when I was 16 I was having sex with these girls, you see them now and you have to stop yourself.” I talked to my wife about this and she said men are wired differently, that they are wired to react to visual stimulus. So, we can't de-value that Blue meme, how very important it is to really be considered a “grown up”.

I always thought there was a high correlation between economics, education and these social issues. There is but there is no consensus by the experts in terms of the causality. The rule of thumb for India was that 30% of the population lives below poverty. If you go there, you can see this with your own eyes. But the Indians define poverty as living below 40 cents a day!!! So, by our standards ($27.32 is how we define the poverty threshold) that is super low!! When people here complain that the US has poor people here at home, etc. and why do we give money to other countries, I would say, many of our poor would be considered royalty in 3rd world countries! We have to help these countries from not only a humanitarian standpoint but also from a political one. We cannot let the countries spiral into the hands of despotic dictators that wind up costing everyone more in the long run in more ways than one.

Good for you!! My wife said that the predators prey on kids with low self esteem. If you want your kid to be safe, try and develop their self-esteem. This will help them to not be preyed upon and will help them to make good decisions based on their own internal sense of right and wrong and not be coerced into harms way. Also, if they are abused, they will have a greater chance of speaking out and telling someone if they have high self-esteem and hopefully then are not abused more than once by the same predator.

Re: India US, Child Sex Abuse

“But the Indians define poverty as living below 40 cents a day!!! So, by our standards ($27.32 is how we define the poverty threshold) that is super low!! When people here complain that the US has poor people here at home, etc. and why do we give money to other countries, I would say, many of our poor would be considered royalty in 3rd world countries!”

Yes and no. The cost of living in India is very low. Someone can live very well on $10K/year. You can't really compare poverty in an industrialized nation and one that is just going through that process. Labor, for instance. I could afford a household staff on my salary, were I in India.

There is also the question of context. If you are in the US, and you are the poorest child on your street, or in your school, you are in a mindset of poverty, no matter what your parents' income. Studies have shown that this is how people perceive themselves, in context.

So that old saw that “there are people starving in China” has never made sense to children, because they are here, not there.

Liz

Re: India US, Child Sex Abuse

Liz, 40 cents!! In 2005 that would be about 20 rupees. 20 rupees would get you 1 meal for the day consisting of a plate of lentils (dahl) and rice, a piece of fruit and a bag of peanuts and all from street vendors i.e. not the most sanitary conditions. You would either sleep on the street or in a hand made tin shack. You would have access to running water via a dirty river or a spigot that 5,000 other people would use. You would not have access to indoor plumbing. So, the Indians are defining “poverty” as subsistence, the bare minimum to stay alive. 300 million people (about the population of the US) live below that “standard”. If that standard is so low, then what is considered middle class, $2.40 a day? The point I was making was that abuse goes hand in hand with low income. If the cost (value) of living (life) is low, abuse goes up. I did not realize how low the poverty standard was so that many more people in India are low income (as defined by anyone's standard).

<3  e

Re: India US, Child Sex Abuse

Yeah, I really understood what you were saying. Honest.