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Penguin Books Ltd - Pinki Virani

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124 pages

English

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A book that challenges our notions of family honour and morality Sometime, somewhere, the conspiracy of silence around Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) in Indian homes had to be shattered. This path-breaking book"the first of its kind in the country and subcontinent"attempts to give that sexually abused child a powerful voice. It provides damning disclosures about men, and some women, in middle and upper-class families who sexually abuse their children, then silence them into submission. Based on studies, reports and investigation, this book reveals that a minimum of twenty per cent of girls and boys under the age of sixteen are regularly being sexually abused; half of them in their own homes, by adults who have the child's trust. In Bitter Chocolate, journalist and best-selling author Pinki Virani travels across the country to record the testimonies of the police, doctors, child psychologists, mental health professionals, social workers, lawyers and the traumatized victims themselves. The book opens with an account"brave and devoid of self-pity"of the author's own experience. Going beyond blaming, Pinki Virani then proceeds with her insightful analysis of the issue in three notebooks. The first spells out what constitutes CSA, why and how this happens, its devastating after-effects which haunt the victims as they grow into adulthood. The second notebook describes these effects through two real-life stories of women who were betrayed as children by men of their family. The third provides practical solutions on how to counter CSA, including a framework involving the law, the parent and their child. A special chapter addresses adults who have never before disclosed their sexual abuse as children. Plus: a nationally coordinated helpline. Accessible yet comprehensive, Bitter Chocolate is written for the young parent and guardian, principal and teacher, judge and police, lawyer and public prosecutor, teenager and tomorrow's citizen.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

Child abuse

India

Informations

Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351184256
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0480€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

PINKI VIRANI

Bitter Chocolate
Child Sexual Abuse in India
Contents
About the Author
Author s Note
Notebook One
Vaishali: Three Months
What is Child Sexual Abuse?
Home as Hell
What the Numbers Reveal
Child Rape
A Mother on the Run
Arun: Ten Years
Boy Versus Girl Victims
Historical Ethics of Child Abuse
Unofficial Secrets
Women as Perpetrators
The Aftermath
Srilakshmi: Eleven Years
Brother Nature
Prema: Seven Years
Child Prostitution
Notebook Two
Daughters Mothers
Mothers Men
Notebook Three
Tanuja: Nine Years
What the Law Ignores
Secondary Victimization
Prevention than Cure
Dealing with Disclosure
Child Protection Units
Dimple: Five Years
Dimple s Brother
Exit Cycle
To the Victim
Healing by Yourself
Siddharth: Twelve Years
Razia: Thirteen Years
Helpbooks
Helplines
Afterword
Acknowledgement
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
BITTER CHOCOLATE
Pinki Virani, with four best-selling books, has a body of work which gives voice to individuals who have none. It also leads to landmark legislation, not just once but twice. Her tireless campaigning for human dignity has lead to laws for two of the most vulnerable times in a human being s life-in the beginning as a child and at the end as a terminally ill patient.
Her sustained crusading since 2000 has assisted in India passing a law against sexual abuse of children, The Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act 2012. The law includes four of her suggestions to the Parliamentary Standing Committee. This book, Bitter Chocolate , has been quoted by the Madras High Court. Since the book s release, there have been attempts by some courts across the country to follow a few practises recommended in Bitter Chocolate to protect the child, during trial, from his or her perpetrator and from excessive re-traumatisation.
In 2011, the Supreme Court of India passed a historic judgment permitting Passive Euthanasia in the country. This followed Pinki Virani s plea to the highest court in 2009. It s a landmark law which places the power of choice in the hands of the individual, over government, medical or religious control which sees all suffering as destiny .
Aruna s Story (first published by Penguin in 1998) is the book with which the author catalysed the law on Passive Euthanasia. It continues to be read by a cross-section of society: the medical community worldwide, right to die with dignity believers, human rights activists and gender-study students. As a first in Indian publishing in the non-fiction genre, it set a trend for journalists to follow in writing books. A leading critic described it as India s answer to Truman Capote s In Cold Blood . A noted financial newspaper said the path-breaking book-which introduced the faction style (facts presented in fiction format with underpinnings firmly in non-fiction) in the sub-continent-had changed the face of Indian writing for all time .
Once Was Bombay (1999) is reference material for sociology specialists and was cited by then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in his speech on collapsing cities. Once Was Bombay , referred to as a cult book on social networking sites, is one of the first books in English publishing to present the city in a non-romanticized, frills-shorn narrative in the faction genre. The template of Once Was Bombay -the vicious pillage of a city s cosmopolitanism by provincial politicians in the name of language, then religion-has proved particularly prescient.
Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India (2000)-which ensures inclusion of hitherto un-researched boy-children-earned the author international plaudit for being the first in the Indian subcontinent to courageously speak up as a victim of incest. For Bitter Chocolate , Pinki Virani has been honoured with a National Award by the Government of India.
Deaf Heaven (2009), her first work of fiction, was listed among international contenders for the Impac Dublin Literary Prize. This novel has earned her praise as a writer who is willing to take literary risks. Deaf Heaven subverts form and structure to experiment with a deceptively simple narrative underlining an urgent perspective on contemporary India, its internal terrorism and the superficiality of contemporary politics pushing the nation at tipping point into modern-day fascism. Critics called it a truly Indic work , a national newsweekly magazine placed it among ten best books of the year. Eminent litterateur Khushwant Singh praised the style of story-telling as ingenuous and described Deaf Heaven as profound and profane, all at once .
She is currently working on her fifth book, Bloody Hell , a literary diptych to Deaf Heaven which can also be read as a standalone book.
Born 1959, in a Dongri-chawl (ghettoized area in one of south Bombay s seven original islands), Pinki Virani began working as a typist at the age of eighteen. In journalism, she began as a cub-reporter for a newspaper and is India s first woman editor of an eveninger. She is married to veteran journalist and public intellectual Shankkar Aiyar and divides her time between Delhi, Bombay, Pune.
Author s Note
Dear Reader,
You have looked at the cover of this book, you have looked at its back cover and the question you might want to ask of me is this:
Have you been sexually abused in your childhood?
I shall be as direct:
Yes.
I could tell you, at this point, about the mostly mystical marrying of an Author with her, or his, subject matter. I could then explain how it is me who has wound up doing this book instead of someone else. I would not be lying as I lay out my procession of thought before you to consider. My first book, Aruna s Story, is about the politics of rape and the rape of women; Penguin publisher David Davidar read my newspaper article on the nurse Aruna Shanbaug s fiftieth birthday while she lay in a semi-coma, a quarter of a century after she had been raped, and asked me to develop it into a book. My second book, Once Was Bombay, is about the communal politics in what was once India s premier city and the gang rape of it by politicians. This book is about the rape of an entire childhood, of scores of innocently unsuspecting children in the upper and middle-class homes of India.
But I would also be truthful when I say this: I have no compulsion to tell the world about the sexual abuse in my childhood.
I refuse to be a victim.
This, I have attempted in all spheres of my life; each time one falls down one must simply pick up oneself after weeping a bit, brush away the tears and dirt and move on.
That s the spirit.
The flesh, though, responds to its body s nervous system: the nervous system and its intricate, treacherous circuitry.
Which begins sending out signals the moment a man, or a woman, sexually abuses a child.
I had, and still have, to deal with my-I hate the use of the personal pronoun in this context-abuser. And it is only now, after the detailing for this book, that I realize-and recollect-why I have so many marks on my legs, between the knees and calves, where they could be seen when I wore dresses and skirts. Instead of going to a beauty parlour where hot wax could be poured over my legs and the hair yanked out by their root, I declared it to be a detestable process and instead would shave my legs. I began doing this early in age, as prominently as possible at home, and as I would shave I would cut my legs. Strips of skin would shave off too, one gash went rather neatly almost to the bone; blood, lots of it, on the floor. When I would be forced to wax instead, I would develop red skin rashes and allergies on my legs so that I could keep shaving. As I shaved, I nicked, wounded, profusely scarred. I was hurting myself because my pain was not being validated, that I could not bear to have that man around me.
In 1999, too, I childishly thought my spirit and will would be victorious again.
For my second book Once Was Bombay, it was decided that if I could literally rise to the idea, the presentation would be a previously untried one in faction (facts written in story-telling style). A blend of short stories and novellas which would be connected and yet be able to stand alone as individual pieces of oral history. David Davidar added that he was very keen that one of these novellas deal with the life of a middle-class man, born and brought up in what was then Bombay, preferably Muslim, who was attacked by the rioters after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The key element in this novella, he felt, would be the slow but obvious falling down of the area in which this man lived: symbolic of what was happening to the middle class and their city.
What about your father? he asked.
Can t write about me, I protested.
It is not about you, replied David Davidar, quite brutally I thought. It is about your father, the changing times and city through his eyes.
My father. Who has known about my sexual abuser and never once told this man off. My father. Who actually holds this man the way his mother did: in thrall.
But this was not about me, it was about my father and his feelings.
I spent several hours and days with my father, questioning and cross-questioning him. I went to his shop and sat there for what appeared like forever to understand his actions and reactions. We must have made for some sight in the middle of Mumbaii s Bhendi Bazaar: the shopkeeper and his daughter.
Most times I did not like what I heard about myself and how he saw me, often I resented his problematic patriarchy and his world view. But something else was emerging, as a writer this was an exciting realization.
August 1999. Here I am reading the reviews of Once Was Bombay. The reviews are polarized, like my city and my country. The book holds steady on the national best- seller lists. The letters I receive, the phone calls, most of the reviews, refer to the section called Mazagon, Bombay-10, as being written b