Monsters in the closet
The baby that does not exist
"Bring out Adnan*!" the social worker in charge of the government orphanage instructed an attendant. A woman sitting across the desk from her, shifted in her seat.
"Does he walk? Or talk?" she asked the social worker. Before the social worker could reply, an excited toddler trotted into the room. He was only around two years old but tall for his age, his hair shorn into the dreaded bowl cut that parents and caregivers are so fond of giving.
The woman scooped him into a tight embrace and burst into tears. She began crooning his name over and over again while the child gaped at her thoroughly confused by this interaction with a complete stranger.
"Do you know me? I am your grandmother, your grandmother," she whispered to the boy but got cut short immediately by the social worker.
"You cannot tell him you are his grandmother. You are nobody to him. He only has us," the social worker told the woman, motioning to an attendant to take the child away.
"Oh, can I take a photo before you take him inside?" the woman then requested. The social worker shook her head from side-to-side.
"It is better if there are no traces of his past, considering how he was born. If he gets adopted once his court matter is settled, the adoptive family might not like that," she said.
What she was trying to explain, is that since Adnan was born of rape, it is best to have as little evidence of his past as possible, in case his future adoptive family do not want the truth to be divulged.
Adnan was born out of rape, to a mother who was not yet 11 years old at the time of giving birth. Adnan's biological father was his mother's 32-year-old neighbour who she called "uncle" and had known from the time she was six years of age.
"I work at a school and my husband lives abroad in Saudi Arabia. There have been a couple of occasions, when I've had to leave my daughter alone at home. On days when she was sick, for example. That is when he would come into the house," described the mother of the 11-year-old rape survivor. The doctors at Dhaka Medical College Hospital's One-Stop Crisis Centre (OCC) physically examined her, and surmised that the perpetrator raped her around seven or eight times.
"The man and his whole family used to visit us often, and we would do likewise. I think that is why she let him inside in the first place."
A short survey taken by Star Weekend magazine in 2017 found that for a majority of child sexual abuse cases, the perpetrator is a person close to the family, with unbarred access to the child, for example, uncles, cousins, home tutors, and domestic helpers. And for most of these cases, the place of abuse is also the place where they are supposedly the safest—at home.
The rapist compelled the then 11-year-old into keeping quiet about the situation with death threats levelled against her and her mother. "You both live alone. If you tell anyone, I will kill you both."
Trapped in that terrifying situation, the little girl sat for her primary school certificate examination. "She had not even had her periods yet, so I had no reason to believe she could be pregnant. She did not either. There was no morning sickness, no loss of appetite, no bleeding. She is also naturally a little larger than the other girls, so the pregnancy remained hidden until the very last stage," described Adnan's grandmother.
When she first noticed the bump, she thought it could be an ovarian cyst or tumour, but her daughter was going through her exams, so she decided to delay a medical checkup until those were over.
When she finally took her daughter to the doctor, the child was 32 weeks pregnant. "When the doctor informed us that he has bad news to deliver, we thought he was going to tell us it is cancer or something—but instead we find out she is pregnant."
The sky fell on her head. She rushed her to the OCC where they decided to conduct a C-section and take the baby out. "My daughter was given medication to stop her body from producing milk. The baby, we handed over to the orphanage. Nobody, not even our immediate relatives, were told what happened because of how they would perceive her. If they ever get to know, it will be disastrous. We simply told them that my daughter is sick with a virus that is very contagious so nobody can come to see us," described Adnan's grandmother. To protect her young child from the aftermath of being a rape survivor, she made it seem like the rape never happened and that the baby was never born.
And why would she not—for even protectors within the system continue to doubt the child. A gynecologist who assesses rape survivors heard the mother's case outside the tribunal two weeks back and wondered aloud how the child—a girl who is now only 12—will get married in the future.
"I don't care about getting my child married! I will make her a high-ranking government official who is so powerful that everybody defers their head in respect!" spat out the mother when the doctor left.
Meanwhile, the social worker taking care of Adnan, questioned whether Adnan's mother—a 10-year-old at the time of the incident—was raped, or whether it was a romantic entanglement.
"I mean, was she really raped? When we were growing up in the village, we did not know how babies are born before university but city girls…" started the social worker in an attempt to victim-shame.
Forget the fact that the social worker is overlooking the fact that the girl was so young she was not even menstruating; even if it is at all possible for a 10-year-old to get involved with a 32-year-old man, any sexual encounters with a minor will be considered rape as long as the law of the land prevails, and it is astounding how even social workers forget that.
"This is why I did not agree to keep the baby, even though it breaks my heart to give him over to an orphanage," said Adnan's grandmother.
Taking their secret to the grave
A total of 562 children were raped last year, as per the calculation of Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK). That makes for 1.5 rapes for every day of the year, meaning every day at least one child, potentially more, is getting raped somewhere in the country.
The calculation is more or less the same as that of the year before—in 2018, 571 children were raped. These are of course, only the reported cases—for example, the case described above was kept so hushed, it was never reported to the media, and so, never turned up in the statistics.
But that is precisely the crux of the problem—because of a lack of conversation about these topics, neither child abuse survivors, nor the caregivers find the voice to speak out. The topic lives in the realm of news, media and NGO advocacy; how many take it home to their children to introduce them to possible threats? How many parents and caregivers, after finding out that their child has been abused, help the survivor take a stand?
Why does the mother, whose story is narrated above, feel compelled to make the biggest sacrifice and give her blood and kin up for adoption, just to keep quiet about the sexual abuse?
In a piece titled "Intimate acts of violence: My experience with sexual assault as a seven-year-old" published in Star Weekend magazine in April last year, the author describes how her mother found out that her cousin was sexually abusing her, and still continued to expose her to the cousin at gatherings, and even employed him as a house-tutor for her. Even though her mother protected her from the cousin in many ways, having to face one's perpetrator is in itself a jarring experience.
Of the 258 respondents of Star Weekend's survey taken in late 2017, 147 of the respondents had never told anyone of the experience, and this number included 22 rape survivors. When asked to provide a reason as to why they never told anyone about what happened to them, they threw out responses littered with words like "shame", "fear", "disgust", and "guilt".
Most of the respondents were between five and 12 years old, when the incident happened to them. How badly are we failing our children, if they get sexually abused, and even at that young age, feel shame, fear, disgust, and guilt? How early does our social conditioning ingrain the concept of victim-blaming in the minds of our children?
85 respondents reported telling their family members or friends, and at least a third of them were either not believed, rebuked, or had no action taken.
One survivor describes how her religious teacher would abuse her under the pretext of fixing her clothes, but when she told her mother, she rebuked her instead. "Slapped me and said I shouldn't make up stories to get out of studying," is what the survivor writes.
Another survivor who was raped at the age of six, was "ordered not to speak of it again". A survivor who was molested for a year by a librarian in the year 1997, told her parents, who immediately let the school know—but the librarian continued being in employment.
What use is it anyway?
It has been two years since Adnan was born and a legal case filed, and one cannot be sure when this will end. But when it does, Adnan will be able to be adopted by a family—no matter how long it takes.
While we do not have the most recent statistics on convictions in rape cases, a book published in 2018 by Prothoma titled "Shaja Matro Tin Shotangsho" points out only three percent of all rape cases between 2002 and then, managed to get convictions. The book also states that of all the types of cases being dealt with by the Women and Children's Tribunal, the least amount of progress is seen in sexual harassment cases—i.e. cases of sexual violence where the survivor hasn't suffered the maximum injury.
In such a bleak situation, how does one expect child sexual abuse survivors to speak out?
"Compared to all rape cases, the courts are more proactive when the victims are minors," reassures Fahmida Akhter, the lawyer of Dhaka's One-Stop Crisis Centre.
That is poor consolation for Tuni's* father Lokman. More than two years ago, Star Weekend reported the rape of a child who was about two years old at the time of the incident in a piece titled "Not seen, not heard, not believed". By the time the report was done, Tuni had already been fighting for a year and half. In the two years that have gone by since then, nothing has changed for the family, except for the fact that Tuni is now older.
"She used to stutter and stumble to explain what happened to her before, but can describe everything clearly now," said her father.
But the burden of pulling a case bears heavily on him.
"The rapist's family has already come to us with offers of money to settle the issue. It has been so long—we had to leave the area where we used to live in, I had to change my profession to be a rickshaw puller, and he continues to threaten us. I don't know how much longer this will take," he lamented.
He is on the fence about taking the money and settling out of court. If he does cave in, Tuni's rapist too, threatens to slip away into the mass of faceless sexual abusers encircling our children, striking under the security of anonymity and impunity.