Save Your Child From Unicef

SAVE YOUR CHILD FROM UNICEF
A study of UNICEFs biased and false claims about Indian parents

By Suranya Aiyar
About the Author: Suranya Aiyar is a 41 year-old Indian housewife. She has two children,
aged 6 and 3 years. Her husband is a corporate lawyer. Before quitting her career to take care
of her children, Suranya Aiyar was a lawyer. She started her practice in 1998 as a litigator in
the Delhi High Court and Supreme Court. In the year 2004, she shifted to corporate law,
joining the firm J. Sagar Associates. She was a partner at J. Sagar Associates of three years
standing when she left in 2010 to become a stay at home mother. Suranya Aiyar was
educated in India, England and America. She obtained a BA Honours degree in Mathematics
from St Stephens College, Delhi University in year 1995. In 1997, she obtained a BA
Honours degree in law from Oxford University, England, where she studied on a
Radhakrishnan Scholarship. She completed her studies in 1998, with an LL.M from New
York University, USA. Since 2012, Suranya Aiyar has been writing and critiquing Westernstyle child protection laws as advocated in India by UNICEF and Save the Children. On a pro
bono basis she has given support and advice to Indian families facing confiscation of their
children abroad by child protection authorities. She also writes and illustrates childrens
books.
August 2015, New Delhi
suranya_aiyar@yahoo.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
S. No.
Description
Page No.
1.
Part I: Introduction
2.
Part II: Basic Statistical Errors
3.
Part III: Physical Abuse: Bias, Exaggeration and Rigged

Statistics
4.
Part IV: Sexual Abuse: Bias, Distortion and Rigged

Statistics
22
5.
Part V: Bias and Lies on Emotional Abuse and Girl Child

Neglect
36
6.
Part VI: Misleading Parents and Manipulating Children
40
7.
Part VII: Conclusion
42
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.

It is their distinguishing characteristic.
Oscar Wilde
PART I
INTRODUCTION
In the year 2007, the Ministry of Women and Child Development published a report called
Study on Child Abuse: India 2007 (Report).1 The Report was published with the
involvement and support of a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and
some mental health consultants, led by the United Nations International Childrens
Emergency Fund (UNICEF), Save the Children and an Indian NGO called Prayas.
The logos of UNICEF, Save the Children and Prayas are stamped on the Report. Their
officials are named as part of its research team.
As is well known, UNICEF is an international United Nations agency and Save the Children,
is an international NGO.
Position of UNICEF-Save the Children on child policy
UNICEF and Save the Children advocate an approach to child welfare whereby the welfare
of the child is framed as a question of the legal and human rights of the child; rights that it
can claim directly from the Government. The idea is that children should be enabled to speak
for themselves.
A key tenet of this approach to child welfare is that in societies where children are seen as the
sole or primary responsibility of the family, their voice is suppressed by authoritarian parents
who do not see them as individuals in their own right.
A key strategy of UNICEF, Save the Children and allied child rights bodies in propagating
this vision of child welfare, is to claim that families are widely abusive of children: sexually,
emotionally and physically. On this basis, the argument goes, there is urgent necessity to put
in place governmental institutions and processes that will allow children to escape the family,
and allow the Government to supersede the family in enabling children to do so. These
Government institutions and processes are given the name child protection.
In the world of child rights, therefore, child protection is a term of art, a technical term for
a certain type of governmental machinery empowered to supersede the family in taking
decisions and actions about children.
Why we have made a study of the 2007 Report
For reasons discussed in the body of our paper, we believe that the Ministry of Women and
Child Development, and hence the Government of India, has endorsed and adopted the
UNICEF-Save the Children version of child protection. Although their specific
recommendations on child protection are yet to be fully implemented by the Government,
The Report is available on the internet at: http://wcd.nic.in/childabuse.pdf.
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many steps have been taken to lay down the institutional infrastructure and legal provisions
for it.2
The Report discussed in this paper spans the entire UNICEF-Save the Children framework of
child protection: dealing with physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, the case for
police and Government intervention, and the reasons why the family fails to protect children,
and in most cases perpetrates and abets, child abuse.
The Report is a foundational document of the Ministry of Women and Child Development. It
was one of the first projects to be undertaken when this Ministry was formed in the year
2006, by taking the Department of Women and Child Development out of the purview of the
Ministry of Human Resources, to be constituted into a Ministry in its own right.
At this point in time, the newly formed Ministry was looking for a framework, or a basic
vision, on which to define itself, and set the agenda for women and children in India. The
Report lays down some of the basic concepts based on which the Ministry has since devised
policies and suggested laws regarding children.3
As we will see in the paper, the basic position of the Report is that the children of India
urgently require protection and rights against adult members of society, in particular their
parents, teachers and members of their community. The Report argues that governmental
intervention is required because Indian families are patriarchal, violent, stifle the voice of
children, leave children vulnerable to sexual abuse, and are hostile, neglectful and
discriminatory of the girl child. In this manner, according to the Report, the rights of Indian
children are being violated, and the safety of Indian children is being compromised.
The harsh condemnation of Indian family and society is justified in the Report by claiming
that there are alarmingly high rates of abuse of children in India, with almost every other
child suffering some form of abuse, the majority of which is perpetrated by family members.
This is, ofcourse, of a piece with the key tenets and strategy, mentioned above, of the
UNICEF-Save the Children approach to and advocacy of child protection.
In this paper we will attempt to demonstrate how the high rates of child abuse claimed by the
Report were rigged by manipulating statistics and exaggerating the responses of respondents
surveyed for the Report.
We analyse the Report as an example of everything that is debatable, misrepresented and
blatantly false in the UNICEF-Save the Children presentation of the state of Indian children,
Some of these are discussed in Part VII of this paper.

The Report says at page 20 that: The study has been able to throw light on many important findings that will
serve as the benchmark and support the Government to formulate legislations, policies and schemes for child
protection. In its final chapter, Conclusions and Recommendations, the Report says (page 121) that the
purpose of the study was to establish that child abuse exists and also to provide the information base that will
help government to formulate, legislation, schemes and interventions to deal with the problem.
3
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and their suggested solution in the form of Western-style child protection, which the
Government has apparently endorsed.
We intend to take out a series of papers to engage people, especially ordinary people with
children and families to care for, on the issue of Governmental interference in the raising of
children, egged on by racist and anti-family international NGOs. This paper is our first step in
that direction.
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PART II
BASIC STATISTICAL ERRORS
In this part of our paper we discuss errors in the statistical methods and consequent flaws in
the data gathered for the Report. Broadly, these involved the incorrect use of purposive
sampling to make nation-wide claims, unsystematic and arbitrary choice of respondents, and
a failure to account for admitted errors and flaws in the quality of data obtained.
Misuse of Purposive Sampling
The Report is based on a survey of 17,220 respondents of which 12,447 were children of ages
5 to (under) 18 years; 2324 were young adults of ages 18 to 24 years and 2449 were so-called
stakeholders (including teachers and NGO workers). The Report states that a method
known as purposive sampling was used for identifying respondents for the survey.4
For the uninitiated, purposive sampling, also known as non-probability sampling, is not a
sampling method used to make generalisations or predict probabilities of behaviour for an
entire population based on the sample, but to observe patterns in a small, well-defined class
of persons. For research questions spanning an entire nation or subcontinent (such as India),
purposive sampling can at best be used for preliminary studies to enable the researcher to
better design his research, or articulate the types of questions he needs to ask to test his
hypothesis.
But in the Report, data gathered from purposive sampling of 17,220 respondents is applied to
the entire population of India, including 44 crore Indian children and their families.
The child respondents were sub-divided into five sub-groups groups of between about 2200
and about 3100 in size. Much of the data that is applied to the whole country is taken from
these small sub-groups, and not even from the overall sample of children participating in the
survey.
Failure to corroborate findings
Since to a certain extent, all research, even that using non-probability sampling, makes some
generalisations about the group under study, even when purposive sampling is used, the
convention is for the researcher to apply a combination of non-probability sampling methods
and other verification procedures, to get corroboration for her findings. However, no such
steps were carried out by the authors of the Report.5 The Report merely quotes in support of a
few of its findings, a couple of child abuse studies that were carried out on groups of children
to which the respondents surveyed for the Report bore no resemblance, except that they were
children.
Page 15 of the Report: A multi-stage purposive sampling design was adopted for the study.
Page 20 of the Report: The lack of comprehensive research studies on different forms of abuse made the
corroborative analysis difficult.
5
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Arbitrary and unsystematic selection of respondents

The selection of respondents for the Reports survey was arbitrary and unsystematic. As we
will see below, very little, if any, thought appears to have been given towards developing a
rationale for the selection of respondents.
Before starting the survey, a target of 18,200 respondents was set for the survey sample.6
However, in the end data was obtained for only 17,220 respondents. Yet there is no
explanation of how this would affect the research or what steps were taken to account for the
variation.
In order to arrive at the sample,7 the country was first divided into six zones: North, South,
East, West, Central and North East. The Report does not explain the basis for demarcation of
the zones. Two States were selected from each zone.
The selection of States and districts within States is said to have been done by comparing
literacy quartiles and literacy rates. Crimes against children as reported in the National
Crime Record Bureau were also looked at, it is claimed that all quartiles of offences/crimes
against children were represented in the States. Based on the above, the following States
were selected: Mizoram, Assam, Goa, Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal,
Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh.8
Hindi-speaking States were disproportionately represented, but there is no accounting for this
in the sample selection.9 None of the hill states, other than Mizoram from the North East,
seem to have been included. The Report says of Uttarakhand that it was ignored, even though
it fell in the uppermost literacy quartile of the Central Zone, because of problems of
accessibility owing to difficult terrain and widely dispersed population.10 It need hardly be
said that convenience of access is no rational basis for including or excluding a State from the
survey.
By cutting out Punjab, the survey practically ignores an entire religious group the Sikhs. It
is puzzling that the Report chose to ignore Punjab when the country is worrying over the
drug-problem among the youth being reported from there.
In the States left out, entire linguistic communities have been ignored, such as Oriya and
Tamil speakers.11
Maharashtra is said to have been chosen because it has a large number of children on the
streets and at work, showing the assumption of the survey that these are groups that will show
higher rates of child abuse. But there was no conscious selection of States with comparatively
6
Page 17 of the Report.

From page 15 of the Report.
8
9
Page 35 of the Report: 45.2% of the respondents were Hindi-speaking.
10
11
For languages represented among the respondents, see page 35 of the Report.
7
-5-
lower numbers of children on the streets or at work to temper or test this assumption about
abuse rates among such children.
Blocks within districts were identified based a comparison of literacy quartiles one block
was selected from the upper quartile, and the second from the lower quartile. Fifty children
were selected from each block. The Report gives no explanation for looking at this particular
number of children. So we are left in the dark as to why fifty, and not any other number of
children, were selected per block.
The child respondents were divided into five so-called evidence groups: children in family
environment not attending school; children in schools; children in institutional care; working
children; and street children. But many of the children in schools were also children with
families. Similarly for working children and street children. Some of the street and working
children may also have been attending school. The Report does not clarify this aspect. So the
division into evidence groups also seems to have been arbitrary.
The Report claims that the selection of child respondents for each evidence group was as
representative as possible.12 But there is nothing in the sampling methods to show how, and
of what, each evidence group was representative.
Children in institutions are said to have been identified on the basis of government records
and with the help of NGOs. 13 No explanation is given for these categories of selectors or
these methods of selection. Schools are said to have been selected through purposive
sampling, a non-probability sampling method that is, as explained above, not used to make
generalised claims about an entire population.14 Child respondents for the evidence group
children in family environment not attending school are stated in the Report to have been
selected by quota sampling, again a non-probability sampling method. Quota sampling
involves sub-division of the population under study into mutually exclusive sub-groups, and a
selection of candidates in proportion to certain chosen characteristics (for example, religion)
in the population. But no such steps are reported here.
The Report also surveyed young adults of the ages 18 to 24 years about their childhood and
took the views of so-called stakeholders on child abuse. Again, the choice of respondents in
these categories was arbitrary, both as to number and type. Apart from their age, the only
description of the Young Adults is that they were engaged in work in the government and
private sector, agricultural sector, business etc.15 The stakeholders selected are listed as
people that held positions in government departments, private service, urban and rural local
bodies and individuals from the community.16
12

14
15
See page 16 of the Report.
16
13
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Arbitrary variation in size of different classes of child respondents

The number of child respondents varied arbitrarily from one evidence group to the other.17
The evidence groups are said to be of fairly equitable sample size18, even though, in fact,
the variation between some of these so-called equivalent categories was as high as 40%.
The sample size of children in the age group of 5-12 years is stated to have been consistently
higher than in the other two age groups,19 being 12-15 years and 15-18 years, but the Report
fails to state how this variation was accounted for in the final analysis.
Lack of independence, objectivity and relevant experience of persons conducting the
survey
Independence and relevant experience seem to have formed no part of the data gathering and
collation for the Report. The only qualification that seems to have been required for people
carrying out the survey was that they be graduates and post graduates in the field of social
sciences.20 So it is quite likely that most of the surveyors were fresh out of university, and
without any experience raising or being with children.
Not only were the surveyors possibly inexperienced in interacting with children, there appear
to have been no controls in place to account for the limitations in the child respondents
capacities for understanding questions and articulating responses to them.
The surveyors were instructed not to fill in the Information Schedule for children in front
of them, but to only take down notes while engaging children in friendly dialogue through
group discussions and one-to-one interactions.21 After the sessions with the children for the
day were over, the interviewers were to feed data into the Information Schedule, based on
notes taken. So the responses attributed to children in the Report are based on a two-fold
interpretation by the surveyor of what the children said, first as interpreted in the notes taken
during the interactions with the child, and second, when filling out the Information Schedule.
Also, the Information Schedule was designed in question-answer format.22 So responses
attributed to children interviewed were reported by the surveyors in the form of answers to
specific and direct questions as listed in the Information Schedule. In other words, the data
attributes answers to children, even though the interviewer did not ask any direct questions,
but extracted, and hence subjectively interpreted, the answers from an apparently freewheeling dialogue with the child. Part of the so-called dialogue having taken place in a
group of several children, with the distractions and confusion typically attendant on any
group activity with small children. We are thus looking at a data collection exercise that
involved three layers of subjective interpretation by a possibly inexperienced surveyor,
and no reported controls to bring objectivity into the data gathering exercise.
17
See pages 17-18 of the Report.

19
20
21
See Section 2.7.2, page 17 of the Report.
22
18
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The agencies, sub-agencies and national level committee formed to oversee and co-ordinate
data collection at each level, were all appointed by the Government itself, in all likelihood
acting on the advice of the NGOs who partnered it in preparing the Report. So there was no
attempt at ensuring independence in the data gathering either.
The strange case of Goa
In the State-wise analysis of severe sexual abuse of children, the Report says the lowest rate
was recorded in Goa.23 The Report says that this does not square with the common
understanding of the situation in Goa.
We are unable to understand this statement what is the common understanding of Goa to
which the Report refers? We are aware that there is a general idea that Goa has a problem
with substance abuse by the young and attracts paedophile sex tourism. Is the Report
endorsing this understanding of Goa? If it is, then why did it not make further and better
enquiries, particularly since this was a report about child abuse? If the Report does not
endorse this understanding of the situation in Goa, then why does it make a reference to it?
The Report also says that the number of respondents included in the survey from Goa was
much smaller than from other States. This should have prompted some redesign of the
research, or at least exclusion of the data from Goa. But the Report includes the Goa data
without any adjustment, merely stating that: data collection in Goa began late and there were
difficulties in the process.24
Admitted defects in data gathering
Some of the defects in data gathering are noted in the Report itself. At the end of the chapter
on Research Methodology it is stated that the data had impurities; that the authors of the
Report were not able to maintain a uniform standard of data collection and quality control;
and that they were unable to do corroborative analysis.25
But surely this apparent disclaimer is rather disingenuous. Either the data gathered is reliable,
or it is not. If there are defects in the data gathering, then the Report has to state how the
analysis has been adjusted to mitigate these defects.
23

25
24
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PART III
PHYSICAL ABUSE: BIAS, EXAGGERATION AND RIGGED STATISTICS
In this part of our paper, we analyse the claims in the Report about physical abuse of children
in the family. The Report also covers physical abuse of children in schools and abuse of
working-, street- and institutionalised children. But we focus on the claims about abuse by
family members, as the most insistent claim of the Report is that Indian families are
inherently violent towards children.
Misapplication of statistical principles and poor quality of data
Since the data underlying the Report was obtained through purposive and other nonprobability sampling, for the reasons discussed in Part II, it was wrong to apply its findings to
the general population of children in India. So, for example, the Report is not justified in
making the claim that two out of every three children in India are physically abused
based on its finding that about 69%26 of the child respondents in the survey were reported to
have been physically abused.27
This restatement of a finding of 69% abuse as two in every three children being abused is in
of itself a statistical misrepresentation. Such a statement purports to express the manner in
which a phenomenon is distributed in a population. But the percentage rate of a
phenomenon is not the same as its distribution. Certainly, you cannot assume that a
phenomenon is uniformly distributed based on its rate of occurrence. If random sampling is
used, then you may be able to make such a claim, always subject to stated limitations and
margins of error. But, as already discussed, random sampling was not used in the data
gathering for the survey.
To put it very simply, if you are looking at 10 families with, say, two children each, a finding
that fifty percent of the children love chocolate does not mean that one child of every two you
look at in the sample will turn out to love chocolate. If you randomly pick children in twos
from the sample, some two may both report disliking chocolate, and some two may both
report loving it. It is important to bear this point about distribution in mind, because implying
that a horrible act like child abuse is uniformly found in a population compounds the
accusation. It implies a situation where practically every family has atleast one abused child.
It implies, not just the existence of child abuse, which no one would deny, but of a nation of
abusers.
It might be said that with a high rate of 69% physical abuse being reported, the fact that the
incidence of abuse may not be uniformly distributed is not of much significance. But, as it
emerges below, this rate itself, along with all the other percentages and ratios claimed in the
Report, are highly suspect.
26
The exact figure is 68.99% (page 44).

Page 44 and Page 68: the first so-called major finding of the Report is that Two out of every three children
are physically abused.
27
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Misrepresentation and exaggeration of own data

The data gathering for the Report was unsystematic, arbitrary and unscientific. The reasons
for this are explained in detail in Part II, and are not repeated here. But the problem in the
Report is not just the failure to apply the proper statistical procedures. Even ignoring the
Reports failure to gather credible data, the Report misrepresents its own data and
exaggerates its findings in a number of ways.
Overbroad definition of physical abuse
The first is by using alarmist language such as abuse. Child abuse in the common
understanding refers to a situation where the perpetrator is an adult personally known and
trusted by the child. Hence the term abuse, rather than a more general term such as
violence or assault.
To say that the overwhelming majority of children in India are physically abused conveys
an impression about what happens to Indian children, not in the public sphere or in their
interaction with playmates, strangers or police officers, but in their personal, everyday life, in
their homes, schools and communities. It conveys an impression of aggression and violence
perpetrated, not by playmates or siblings, but by the childs adult custodians. Above all, since
abuse is generally understood as referring to things happening in a childs family, it is a
direct accusation levelled at Indian parents.
So the first manipulation in the Report is to use the expression physical abuse for instances
where the perpetrator is not an adult known to the child, but another child, such as a
playmate or sibling; or a stranger, such as a policeman.
Bullying by peers and police atrocities are reasonably a concern for anyone looking at the
well-being of children. But, given the general understanding of the term child abuse as
applying to what is done to a child by its adult intimates, it is blatantly misleading to club
peer bullying and police atrocities with parental or school abuse. The last thing on the mind
of anyone reading a report saying that two out of every three Indian children are physically
abused, is that the perpetrator of the abuse was a class fellow, stranger or police officer.
The exaggeration becomes even more apparent when you realise that the so-called physical
abuse of the Report includes, not just severe beating or causing injury, but pushing,
slaps and beating with a stave28 or stick.
Some people hold that children should never be slapped or spanked, but even allowing for
that view, there is no warrant for labelling slapping as abuse.
Serious allegations that the Report makes, such as that two out of every three children, or
69% children are physically abused in India, come across very differently when you realise
that by physically abused the Report means not just severe beatings, but a whole range of
28
The word stave is not defined in the Report, and it is not a word commonly used, atleast not among English
speakers in India. This word was probably used to bring in hitting on the palm or knuckles with a flat wooden
ruler, which is known to be a form of punishment used in Indian schools.
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acts from slapping, to disciplining by corporal punishment, to injury-causing assaults, in

which (as we will observe later) the largest proportion of so-called abuse is slapping.
Data misrepresented to portray Indian parents as highly physically abusive
The Report paints a picture of deep oppression, bordering on hatred, of Indian families,
especially parents, towards their children. We are told that [Indian] fathers and mothers,
consider their children as their property and assume a freedom to treat them as they like;29
that [Indian parents] adopt harsh methods of disciplining children; 30 that children faced
high level of physical abuse in families;31 and that often the child is the easiest target for
the parent to vent their frustration on.32
Let us take a look at the evidence for these allegations.
Reported rate of 89% parental abuse
The Report states that 89% children were subjected to physical abuse by parents. 33 Recall
that the overall rate of physical abuse of children by family and others combined was stated
in the Report to be 69%. So the claimed rate of parental abuse was clearly not calculated on
the total number of children surveyed, but on a smaller sub-set of them. Stating the rate by
looking at a smaller subset has the obvious effect of magnifying the figures. So it is
worthwhile to investigate how the 89% figure was arrived at in the Report.
With its characteristic lack of analytical rigor (or was it deliberate obfuscation?), the Report
does not state how it arrived at its claimed rate of 89% parental abuse. But other figures in the
Report give us some hints.
The Report says that: An attempt has been made to see the extent of physical abuse of
children in families as compared to the physical abuse of children by others. The study
revealed that the percentage of physical abuse inflicted by family members (48.7%) was
higher than that of others (34.0%).34 Again, it is not stated as to how this percentage was
calculated.35 But since parents are a sub-set of family members, the overall rate of
parental abuse cannot be higher than the overall rate of family member abuse. How then does
the Report claim a figure of 89% parental abuse, while at the same time claiming nearly half
that rate, 48.7%, for family member abuse?
29

31
Page 48 of the Report, second Major Finding.
32
33
34
35
This is a major gap in the Report because we are left in the dark as to how it was possible to meaningfully
compare rates of family member abuse with non-family member abuse from the child respondents surveyed. If
these are overall rates, then the comparison would be skewed by the fact that those surveyed included children
without family. If the base for comparison was the sub-set of child respondents who had family members, then a
fair comparison would also have had to take into account the fact that children with family would be less likely
to be exposed to non-family authority figures who were in a position to abuse them or discipline them.
30
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We will assume that the figure of 89% abuse by parents was calculated on the number of
children reporting abuse by a family member. In other words, the number of children
reporting parental abuse was 89% of (48.7% of X), i.e., 43.34% of X, where X could be the
total number of children surveyed, or some smaller sub-set of the total (such as the total
number of children in the survey that had family (i.e. were not orphans)).
So what appears to be a staggering claim that 89% children were subject to physical abuse
by parents36 turns out, if our assumption is correct, to be supported by data that only
evidences below half of that figure, 43.34% children (whether overall, or a smaller sub-set of
those surveyed), reporting physical abuse by parents.
Even though 43.34% is less than half the rate claimed by the Report, it would appear to
indicate a fairly high percentage of parental physical abuse, until we recall the overbroad
definition of physical abuse used in the Report. Since physical abuse is broadly defined in
the Report to include non-severe acts, such as pushing and non-severe slapping, we are not
looking at data that shows 43.34% parents severely beating or causing injury to their children.
We might even be looking, based on the discussion below, at data that merely tells us of a
substantial amount of non-severe slapping by mothers of children.
Data reveals severe cases of abuse are a minority
For some reason, the Report does not give the overall breakdown of forms of physical abuse
by parents. After setting out the overall figures discussed above, the Report goes on to give
familial physical abuse rates only for a sub-set of the child respondents, a group of 2245
children classified as Children in family environment, not going to school.37
We will not apply the rates of abuse found in the sub-set to all the child respondents claiming
family abuse, as children in other sub-sets (termed evidence groups in the Report) of the
sample surveyed may also have claimed family abuse. But if the data on all child respondents
claiming family abuse followed the same general pattern as the data on family abuse revealed
in the sub-set, then we are looking at a very different situation as to family child abuse to the
one portrayed by the Report.
Let us first look at how much severe physical abuse38 is reported in the sub-set as having
been caused by parents. If most of the parental abuse reported is not severe, then we are
looking at highly unjustified claims by the Report about Indian parents.
In the sub-set, 14.83% of the reported in-family abuse is said to be severe.39 So of the sub-set
used to study familial abuse, severe abuse occurred only in a minority of cases. We will
36
Page 47 and 48 of the Report.

The other sub-sets (or evidence groups as the Report calls them) into which the child respondents were
divided were working children, street children, children in school and children in institutions. It is not clear why
the analysis of familial abuse was restricted to the subset of Children in family environment, not going to
school as some, and perhaps the majority, of children in the other categories (except the category of children
in institutions) also lived with family.
38
Defined in the Report as physical abuse resulting in swelling, bleeding and other serious injury. See page 51
of the Report.
37
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assume that the relatively smaller incidence of severe abuse by family members (and thus by
parents) within the sub-set also applied when you looked at all the children reporting family
abuse in the survey.
Data reveals the majority of cases reported as abuse are cases of slapping
The Report on the sub-set goes on to say that 74.3% of in-family abuse was in the form of
slapping/kicking. 40
Another way the Report misleads the reader is by clubbing the data on slapping and kicking
of children. Slapping and kicking have been treated as one category of physical abuse even
though the two are widely different in severity and impact on the child.
In the questionnaire for children being asked about physical abuse by family members,41
slapping and kicking are presented as one category. So a child answering yes for slapping,
is also reported as answering yes for kicking, which is highly misleading. In the questions
for children on physical abuse by others, slapping and kicking are presented as two distinct
categories, but the Report does not disclose the numbers reporting kicking versus slapping.
It is not clear why slapping and kicking were clubbed except to make findings about
slapping, which is a relatively minor category of abuse, look like a finding about kicking,
an ugly and more severe form.
We have some clues as to the relative proportion of slapping to kicking from the data on
young adults surveyed about their childhood experiences.42 49% young adults are reported as
39
This amounts to only 2.67% of the total number of children surveyed. Since children in other groups who had
family may have also reported severe in-family abuse, this figure of 2.67% may not be the true rate of severe infamily physical abuse for the total sample.
40
Page 51.
41
Annexed to the Report at page 158 as Annexure 8. See especially questions 8.1(b), 8.1(c), 8.2(b) and 8.2(c).
Section 8.1 of the questionnaire deals with physical abuse by family members and Section 8.2 deals with
physical abuse by others. In Question 8.1(b) slap/blow/kick are given as one category, so a child answering
yes to slap by a family member is reported as answering yes to blow and kick by a family member as
well. In Question 8.2(b) (dealing with physical abuse by others, i.e. non-family members), kick is a separate
category from slap/blow; but for some reason the Report does not give the breakdown between slapping and
kicking reported for children, even for others, choosing instead to disclose only (at page 48) the aggregate figure
of 63.67% slapping and kicking by others. The Report gives (at page 48) the breakdown of forms of assault by
others as follows: slapping/kicking: 63.67%; beaten by stave/stick: 31.31%; pushing/shaking: 5.02%. At page
51, the Report also gives the breakdown of forms of assault by family members in the evidence group children
in family environment, not in school as follows: slapping/kicking: 74.3%; beaten by stave/stick: 21.74%;
pushing/shaking: 3.96%. It may be noted that on the findings of the Report itself, even though the questionnaire
to children had the category other besides listing slap, blow, kick, stave, stick and danda (Hindi for stick) as
methods for beating, not a single child reported a form of abuse other than these forms, despite the Report trying
to alarm readers by making statements such as that physical abuse can include stabbing and burning (page
49, section 5.3.1) implying that the data revealed numerous instances of stabbing and burning when in fact there
is not even one finding of such a thing in their own data.
42
See page 65 of the Report. In addition to children, the Report also surveyed 2324 persons of the age group of
18 to 24 years asking them to report on whether they had been beaten in their childhood. The Report finds that
49% of the young adult respondents reported being beaten as children as opposed to 69% of child respondents.
The lower rate of physical abuse (49%) reported by young adults than by children (69%) is attributed to the fact
that the young adults surveyed were of better backgrounds than the child respondents.
- 13 -
having been beaten in childhood, the breakdown of forms of so-called physical abuse
being: slapping - 44%; kicking - 7%; beaten by stick - 36%; and pushing 8%.43
So what we have here is data indicating that the incidence of slapping was overwhelmingly
higher, to the point of there being no comparison, to the incidence of kicking.
If we assume that this same relative disproportion applies to child respondents reporting
slapping/kicking by family members, then what we are looking at is data that evidences that
among the children reporting being beaten by family members, the overwhelming majority
being beaten in the form of non-severe slapping. Since parents are a sub-set of family
members, we will assume that the same logic applies to them.
Overall picture on physical abuse from Reports data
Let us now step back and look at the overall picture that emerges:
parental physical abuse rates were half or less than half of what was claimed in the
Report
of the cases categorised as parental physical abuse, the majority were cases of light
slapping
severe family-member, and therefore parental, physical abuse is reported only in a
minority of cases
31% children interviewed reported no physical abuse, not even light slapping and
caning 44
WE DO NOT GIVE THE ABOVE ANALYSIS TO MAKE ANY CLAIMS AS

TO THE REAL RATES OF PARENTAL ABUSE IN THE COUNTRY
BECAUSE, AS EXPLAINED ABOVE, WE DO NOT BELIEVE THE DATA
IS RELIABLE. WE ARE HERE MERELY ANALYSING THE DATA TO
DEMONSTRATE HOW THE REPORT EXAGGERATES FIGURES AND
DOES NOT SUPPORT THE CLAIMS OF THE REPORT ABOUT
WIDESPREAD PHYSICAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN INDIAN FAMILIES.
Difference between disciplining and abusing a child
In the questionnaire used for child respondents, the entire issue of physical abuse is set up as
a question of how adults are disciplining their children.45 So we can reasonably assume that
in almost each reported case of slapping, the child was not talking about wanton and
43

Taking as valid the Reports finding that overall 69% children reported physical abuse.
45
See the questionnaire for children (Annexed at page 158 of the Report) at page 166; the questions about
physical abuse are prefaced with the question: Sometimes, a child behaves in a way which is not liked by
mother, father or other elderly persons in the family. They may scold, push or even beat the child. How about
you? With this introductory question on the issue of physical abuse, specific questions about when, and by
whom, the child was so beaten are asked.
44
- 14 -
malicious slapping, but of being slapped in the context of being corrected or restrained from
doing something that was bona fide believed by the adult in question to be wrong or harmful.
Again, some people hold the view that any kind of slapping of a child, whether to discipline it
or otherwise, is wrong. But even allowing for that point of view, when the data showed the
majority of children do not report parental physical abuse, and that most cases of physical
abuse were cases of a parent slapping with the intent of correcting an errant child, the harsh
condemnation of parents in the Report is totally unjustified.
Statistics on parental behaviour to be understood in context of their being the primary
actors in the life of their children, especially when children are young
Another point that must always be borne in mind when assessing data regarding the
experiences of children is that in any survey of childhood experiences, no matter how you
design it, the proportion of parents reported as so-called perpetrators is likely to be higher
than any other class of persons.
This would be seen especially in cases where the survey is of young children (recall that the
biggest group of children surveyed for the Report was of the age group 5 to 12, so the survey
included more younger than older children).46 The reason is simple, unless you are looking at
orphans, most children live with their parents and the overwhelming proportion of childrens
direct experiences are either with parents, or mediated through parents.
So whether it is kissing or slapping, praising or scolding, encouraging or restricting, the
maximum instances of such experiences will often be, as a proportion, higher from parents
than from other categories of persons. The younger the age of the child, and especially if you
are going to restrict your research to disciplining of children, the higher the proportion of
parental actors you will find.
Since parents are the prime actors in a childs life, to say that mostly it is parents who slap
their children is, statistically speaking, no more significant than saying that mostly it is
parents who take care of their children and it is not the same as saying that most parents
slap their children.
Children are not stakeholders according to the Report
The Report also surveys a group of so-called stakeholders to elicit their views on physical
abuse of children and measures to be taken in this regard. The Report states that the
stakeholders sought out were persons holding positions in government departments,
private service, urban and rural local bodies and individuals from the community. Majority of
respondents in this category (42.38%) were in government service, whereas 27.97% were
from the private sector. Remaining 29.65% of the respondent stakeholders were from the
46
The Report says at page 18 that: The sample size in the age group of 5-12 years was consistently higher than
the other two age groups.
- 15 -
other categories which included parents, NGOs, community leaders, elected representatives
of urban and local bodies.47
Though the Report blames Indian parents for not treating children as individuals in their own
right and for failing to give children a voice, the Report itself seems to fail in this regard
by, very patronizingly, not considering children as stakeholders in the survey.
It is ironic that the Report does not even count children as stakeholders, while its bemoans the
state of Indian children with statements about a lack of realisation on the part of parents that
children are individuals with their own rights;48 that children are traditionally and
conventionally not consulted about matters and decisions affecting their lives;49 and that
childrens views are mostly not given much importance.50
How child rights ideology actually fails to give a voice to children
This is not just a case of the authors of the Report failing to apply their own stated principles.
The apparent inconsistency is actually revealing of a deeper fallacy in the approach of the
Report to child welfare.
Since the voice of the child has to be articulated by an adult, all you are achieving by
silencing parents and other natural guardians in the name of being child centric, is that you
are replacing their voice with your own, along with your biases, ideological beliefs and other
subjective factors.
Even if you assume that all parents are biased by their patriarchy and authoritarianism, you
are not solving the issue by replacing your voice for theirs; and you are wilfully ignoring an
important factor that tempers this apparently unjust hierarchy between parents and
children - love.
Going by how the Report responds when it disagrees with what stakeholders and young
adults have to say about disciplining children, it would appear that the substitution of the
voice of the child rights ideologue for that of the childs parents, does not do anything to
reverse the adult-child hierarchy that the Report seeks to criticise.
For instance, the Report says that both young adults and stakeholders agreed with some form
of physical disciplining of children, and also that cases of physical abuse should be dealt with
by family in preference to other options, such as bringing in the police.51 The responses of
young adults and stakeholders on these issues, as stated in the Report, also show that none of
them advocated severe physical punishment, and that of the forms of physical punishment
suggested, the overwhelming majority were in favour of slapping or caning, both of which
followed behind shouting or scolding as the most favoured method of discipline.52 But
47

Preface, Page v of the Report.
49
50
51
Pages 66 and 68 of the Report.
52
Pages 66 to 68 of the Report.
48
- 16 -
despite this rather moderate response of young adults and stakeholders, the Report makes
alarming pronouncements to the effect that this indicates a cycle of abuse whereby victims
of abuse themselves becomes abusers.53
This is not only a gross exaggeration of what the respondents actually said, but it also reveals
that the authors of the Report are not really willing to recognise the child as an individual in
his own right, capable to forming opinions for himself. The authors singularly fail to concede
any agency on the part of the child by claiming that children who are slapped are potential
abusers. Where is the recognition of the child as an individual in her own right, in such a
dismissive and judgemental view of children?
Children do not blindly copy their parents patterns of behaviour. Plenty of people who were
physically disciplined in their youth choose not to do so with their own children. In fact, if at
all there is a new trend emerging in India, there is a trend away from physical to non-physical
forms of moderating childrens behaviour.
We are aware of some theories in the field of psychology that children who come from
violent homes repeat this pattern in their own adulthood. But that is not a theory that applies
to homes where mere slapping is used as a form of discipline.
Report fails to reassess its assumptions even when the data directly contradicts them
Mother-blaming
So biased is the Report, that it holds on to its assumptions about Indian families, even when
they are directly contradicted by its own findings. For instance, throughout the Report the
cause for the so-called physical abuse in the family is said to be patriarchy 54 and
discrimination against female children. The Report says that Although the study had not
gathered any empirical data which would indicate the possible reasons for such a high
percentage of physical abuse against children, it can possibly be attributed to the following
reasons: a patriarchal society that looks upon the children as the property of the father55 and
Indian society.....is patriarchal in structure where the chain of command is definite and
inviolable.56
But the data on children reported to have been physically abused by family members shows
two things that squarely contradict this rationale: first, 50.9% are said to have been abused by
their mothers.57 Second, more boys than girls report physical abuse, both overall, and in each
but two of the States represented in the sample of child respondents surveyed.58
Not only are mothers by far the majority among the alleged family perpetrators, fathers come
a distant second at 37.6%.
53

55
56
57
58
Page 45, see table called Gender-wise % of children reporting physical abuse in one or more situations.
54
- 17 -
When we recall that the overwhelming majority of cases labelled as physical abuse in the
Report are cases of non-severe slapping, the picture that emerges is of some (not all or most)
mothers slapping their sons to discipline them. This simply does not fit the Reports claims
of high abuse fuelled by patriarchy.
If anything, this kind of mother-blaming based on utterly lax research, and dressing up of
mild everyday encounters between mother and child as abuse, smacks of witch-hunting
and misogyny.
Ugly bias against small boys
The Report dismisses the difference in the rate of boys and girls reporting physical abuse as
irrelevant. It finds that: In the overall percentage there seems to be not much difference in
physical abuse being faced by girls and boys.59
But if you compare, State-wise, the proportion of boys to girls reported as physically abused,
the variation in nearly all cases is over 10%. In many cases over 20% more boys than girls
reported as physically abused.60
This is not a statistically insignificant difference. If the Report were not completely blinded
by its prejudice that the only explanation for anything involving children and the family in
India is patriarchy, then this difference should have prompted some reassessment of its
understanding of the nature of childhood and family dynamics in India.
We will see later that a similar pattern emerges in the portion of the Report on sexual abuse
of children, where more boys than girls are reporting sexual abuse. But again, the Report
persists in its assertion that all abuse of children in Indian society is guided by discrimination
against women and girls. The Report goes on to devote an entire section to gender
discrimination against girls as a category of child abuse, while ignoring the special case of
abuse of boys which appears to emerge from its own data.
WE ARE NOT HERE MAKING THE CASE THAT THERE IS, IN FACT, A
SPECIAL CASE OF ABUSE OF BOYS IN INDIA. AS WE HAVE STATED
REPEATEDLY, THE QUALITY OF THE DATA AND THE DESIGN OF
THE RESEARCH IN THE REPORT IS SO POOR THAT IT DOES NOT
WARRANT ANY CONCLUSION EITHER WAY.
But it is alarming that powerful international NGOs such as UNICEF and Save the Children,
and the Government, acting heavily under their influence, should turn a blind eye to their
own data just because it showed something about boys and not girls. This bias is
particularly ugly and distasteful considering that the boys in question were very little,
primarily in the tender age group of 5 to 12, and from humble backgrounds.
59

Page 45 of the Report, see table called Gender-wise % of children reporting physical abuse in one or more
situations.
60
- 18 -
Laws regarding physical abuse by parents

We do not criticise the Reports findings on physical abuse to make the claim that there is no
physical abuse by parents of children in India. Every now and again there are reports in the
papers of children being severely injured, even to death, by a parent. Even assuming that
parental abuse (real abuse, not the slapping and pushing that the Report is focussed upon) is
marginal or rare, there is good reason for society to take measures against such occurrences.
If existing laws are inadequate to prosecute severe abuse of children, then a case may be
made for new laws, always keeping in mind that the law should punish genuine cases of
cruelty, and not accidents, and unintended injury. The latter is no idle concern, in the
USA and UK, parents taking their children to hospital for head injuries and fractures are
routinely charged with child abuse allegations, and have their terrified children whisked away
from the hospital to foster care under emergency protection orders, based on nothing else but
the fact of injury.61
If there are going to be special laws for parental physical abuse, there should also be
consideration of whether provision needs to be made for giving second chances to genuinely
repentant parents.
These are all issues that we can have a debate about. But there was no warrant for this
pointless and judgmental Report, which apparently took over one and a half years to
complete.
The cost of the Report is not stated, but going by the numerous NGOs engaged, the exercise
being led by international NGOs, the number of people brought in to gather data and the time
spent in preparing the Report, we are most likely looking at a hugely costly, and wasteful,
exercise.
Slapping of children by parents
So far as slapping of children by parents is concerned, again, there was no need to have an
expensive internationally sponsored study on this. We can say, without having gone through
any surveys, that in India, as in many parts of the world, including in parts of the West,
slapping or spanking your child by a parent, especially a mother, is culturally acceptable.
Undeniably, some people want this to change. But that is a point for such people to convince
others of in the community. There is no warrant for bringing slapping into the domain of
public policy. Slapping is not abuse.
There is plenty of scientific research, from the West, no less, that says that children who are
slapped or spanked in an otherwise loving environment, come to no harm. Plenty of parents,
61
There have been two cases of this kind recently involving Indian families in the USA the Saha case in New
Jersey (the child was in foster care for several months, though in the end the allegations of abuse were dropped)
and a family in Portland, Oregon: http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/us-govt-takes-custody-of-indianchild-arrests-father/article7486402.ece?w=spa; http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/us-govt-takescustody-of-indian-child-arrests-father/article7486402.ece?w=spa. At the time of writing the Oregon case was
pending in court with the father being under court orders to stay away from the family home, and the mother
being permitted to stay with the children in the family home under supervision.
- 19 -
mothers especially, will testify that sometimes you have to become a child to get through to a
child, and that can include a well-timed slap. Slapping is not even always a traumatic or
negative experience for a child. Plenty of mothers will testify to their kids bursting into
giggles as soon as they start doling out the slaps.
Some young children can be quite obstinate, working themselves into hysterics when refusing
to do things that they need to do for their own or anothers sake, like getting out of the bath
so they dont catch cold, or not jumping up and down on rickety furniture, or not pulling their
smaller siblings hair. A slap can snap them out of their hysterics and tantrums.
There is a tendency these days to diagnose boisterous children as having attention disorder
or being hyperactive, or both. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, is a
familiar term to educated parents. There are reports of intolerant schools in the West, forcing
parents to consider childish high spirits as a disorder. The short step from there to
medicating children unnecessarily is often being taken.
One way or the other, children require some control. It is, atleast arguably, better and safer to
handle difficult and over-excitable children with the occasional slap, than by doping them
into submission.
Before taking an extreme position against slapping, people should take an honest look at the
kinds of non-physical practices that are recommended to extract good behaviour, which is
just a polite term for obedience, from a child. The passive-aggressive behaviour required of
the parent, the regimental insistence on being consistent (as though this were a military
drill, rather than a relationship) and the extensive overall control over the general behaviour
of the child (rules for eating, rules for sleeping, rules for playing, rules for asking for things,
rules for expressing anger or hurt) is much greater in some of these non-physical disciplining
practices, than the open, honest and momentary assertion of a parents will over a child by a
slap.
Why this issue is relevant for parents everywhere
What is telling about the UNICEF-Save the Children approach to child raising is not just
what it chooses to focus upon - slapping - but also what it misses. If there has to be a
discussion about parental behaviour, why should slapping and caning be the only kinds of
parenting practices that are subjected to scrutiny?
What about harsh practices that are common and accepted among modern, western and (in
India) westernised parents such as sleep training, where infants as young as a couple of weeks
old are forced to learn to sleep independently by being left in their cots to cry it out,
sometimes for hours together, to the point of them vomiting and choking with agitation. Or
the practice of deliberately depriving infants of milk when they cry for it, so that they learn
to feed according to a fixed schedule suitable for adult routines?
Let working mothers, who may have to schedule their babies in order to meet the demands of
work, consider whether having the Government lay down the law on child raising practices,
say by criminalising sleep training, would help or hinder them and their children. Let parents
- 20 -
with high-strung children consider how they would have managed if they had had to tip toe
around them; or what the cost to the child would have been if the only permitted intervention
was in the form of prescription drugs. Let parents whose personalities do not lend themselves
to passive-aggressive parenting techniques, or whose childrens personalities would revolt
against such measures, consider how they would feel if they were straight-jacketed into using
only those techniques in handling their children.
- 21 -
PART IV
SEXUAL ABUSE: BIAS, DISTORTION AND RIGGED STATISTICS
In this part of the paper, we discuss the falsehoods and exaggerations in the Report about
sexual abuse of children in India by family members.
Misapplication of statistical principles and poor quality of data
As explained in Part II of this Paper, since the Report used purposive sampling and other
non-probability methods to obtain its data, none of its findings as regards the small pool of
12,447 children, 2324 young adults and 2449 so-called stakeholders apply on all fours to
the entire population of 44 crore Indian children and their families. Therefore, the Report was
entirely wrong in saying, based on its findings that of 12,447 children surveyed, 20.90%
reported severe sexual abuse,62 50.76% reported other forms of sexual abuse63 and 53.22%
reported one or more forms of sexual abuse,64 that across the country, every second child
was being subjected to other forms of sexual abuse and every fifth child was facing severe
forms of sexual abuse [emphasis supplied].65
The Report was also wrong in presenting its percentage findings on the sample of children
surveyed as applying to every second and every fifth child in the country. As explained
in Part III of this paper, the Report had no statistical justification for inferring a uniform
distribution of abuse in the population based on the percentage findings claimed for the
sample of respondents surveyed.
The claim of the Report that every second and every fifth child in India faced some form of
sexual abuse, amounts to claiming that every family in the country has one child suffering
non-severe sexual abuse and almost every other family has a child suffering severe sexual
abuse. An outrageous claim, entirely unsupported by the data, as we will see below.
Misrepresentation and exaggeration of own data
As in the case of the data for physical abuse discussed in Part III, the issue with the findings
on sexual abuse was not only a misapplication of statistical principles and faulty data, but
also that the Report exaggerated and misrepresented its own data to create a false impression
of alarming levels of sexual abuse in the family. The Sexual Abuse chapter of the Report is a
study in how data can be manipulated to dress up and exaggerate what are really minor
findings.
Conflation of sexual encounters with peers and sexual assault by strangers with sexual
assaults by family members, guardians and known adults
The Reports first step in creating an exaggerated picture of sexual abuse was to, as in the
case of physical abuse, have an overbroad definition of sexual abuse. The term sexual
62

64
65
63
- 22 -
abuse is commonly understood to refer to situations where the perpetrator is an adult known
and trusted by the child. Hence the term sexual abuse, rather than the more generic sexual
assault or sexual violence.
The immediate assumption when reading of sexual abuse is that the perpetrator is a parent,
teacher or some other adult in the private, everyday environment of the child. Also, the term
sexual abuse is never used when referring to sexual encounters between friends and
classmates. This is what distinguishes sexual abuse from other forms of sexual violence
against a child, such as rape by a stranger, and from sexual encounters with other minors of
its own age.
However, in the Report, sexual abuse is conflated with generic sexual violence, assault and
offences by clubbing under the heading sexual abuse sexual acts with peers, such as
friends and classmates; by unknown adults/adults not in a position of trust such as
strangers and others, and acts, which though they may constitute sexual offences or be
otherwise objectionable, are not commonly understood to be acts of sexual abuse (i.e.,
involving violation by an adult of a childs trust), such as a class-fellow or friend showing a
child pornographic pictures (the single largest instance of so-called sexual abuse of all
forms of sexual abuse reported), or forcible kissing among teenagers, or a stranger rubbing
their private parts against a child while travelling on a bus. As we will see below, this
conflation of sexual abuse with generic sexual violence and other acts has the effect of
bumping up sexual abuse figures by several times.
Reported rates of sexual abuse
The Report divides sexual abuse into various categories of sexual abuse, ranging from severe
assaults, involving sexual intercourse or oral sex; to other forms of assault involving contact
with sexual organs, such as fondling sexual organs (the Report uses the term private parts);
other contact acts such as forcible kissing and strangers rubbing their private parts against a
child in a bus; to acts not involving contact, such as exhibitionism, showing of pornographic
pictures, and taking nude photographs.
To understand how the overbroad definition of sexual abuse bumped up the sexual abuse
rates in the Report, let us take a look at some of the figures for individual forms of sexual
abuse stated in the Report:
Severe sexual abuse, i.e., in the form of anal/vaginal penetration and oral sex, was the
lowest of all categories of abuse at 5.69%, save being photographed in the nude,
which was at 4.46%. The Report blames the family for sexual abuse even though not
a single child respondent reported such assault by a parent or sibling. For further
discussion of sexual abuse by family members, see the sub-section Sexual Abuse by
Family Members, below.
The form of sexual abuse reported in the highest proportion was viewing of
pornographic pictures, at 30.22%, within which the overwhelming majority of
children (66.1%) reported being shown such pictures by a friend or classmate.
- 23 -
The second highest form of sexual abuse reported was strangers rubbing their private
parts during public travel, which was close to the pornography rate at 27.9%.
All other (i.e. not counting the rubbing during public travel form) forms of sexual
abuse involving contact with the child, were half, or less than half, the rates reported
for pornography viewing, except for forcible kissing, which was about a third
below. More than half the children reporting forcible kissing were teenagers, with the
main perpetrators being class fellow/uncle/neighbour.66
Friends and classmates were the largest group of so-called perpetrators in each
form of sexual abuse, save one, sexual assault, where they were the second largest
group
Two things emerge from the above, first that the claimed sexual abuse rates included things
that, whatever objections one may have to them, either did not involve an adult or did not
involve an adult having care of the child.
The second point to emerge from the above data is that the overall sexual abuse rates were
driven by cases of sexual encounters between friends and peers, viewing of pornography,
allegedly forcible kissing of teenagers, possibly by other teenagers (see footnote 66), and
strangers rubbing private parts during travel. In our opinion, the only reason to classify these
things in as sexual abuse of children is to give the appearance of parents and other
custodians of the child being large-scale perpetrators of sexual abuse, even though the data
showed no such thing.
Who is the abuser, according to the Reports data
In order to understand just what the Reports data showed about actual sexual abuse, i.e.,
sexual abuse by a relative or adult responsible for the child, we asked ourselves this question:
who is the perpetrator in the various forms of abuse given in the Report?
Although the Report gives overall rates for sexual abuse, it does not do so for perpetrators.
The Report states perpetrator-wise rates only within each category of sexual abuse. This gives
the impression of the overall percentage of perpetrators being much higher than they are. For
example, the Report says that 31% children reported sexual assault by an uncle/neighbour.67
But this is not a percentage of the total number of children surveyed, but of the subset of
children within the total sample who reported sexual assault. Expressed as a percentage of the
total number of children surveyed, the rate comes down to 1.75%. So you are looking at an
overall rate of 1.75%, which is presented in the Report as a rate of 31%.
66
Page 87 and 88 of the Report. For some reason the Report does not give the inter-se breakdown of these socalled main perpetrators of forcible kissing. So it could have been that maximum number of perpetrators of
forcible kissing were teenage class fellows or neighbours, which, whatever the objections to such cases may be,
paints a very different picture to one of sexual abuse, which is generally understood to involve abuse of a
position of trust by an adult towards a minor.
67
Page 81.
- 24 -
In order to better understand the perpetrator-wise figures for sexual abuse, we give below a
reworking of the perpetrator-wise percentages expressed in each category of sexual abuse as
percentages of the total number of children surveyed.
WE DO NOT ANALYSE THE SEXUAL ABUSE FIGURES OF THE

REPORT TO MAKE ANY CLAIMS AS TO THE REAL RATES OF
SEXUAL ABUSE IN THE COUNTRY BECAUSE WE DO NOT BELIEVE
THE DATA IS RELIABLE. WE ARE HERE MERELY ANALYSING THE
DATA TO DEMONSTRATE HOW IT DOES NOT SUPPORT THE CLAIMS
IN THE REPORT ABOUT WIDESPREAD SEXUAL ABUSE OF
CHILDREN IN INDIAN FAMILIES.
Sexual Assault (anal/vaginal penetration and oral sex)
Total: 5.69% of 12,447 child respondents68, i.e. 708.23 rounded off as 708 children
Perpetrator
Friend/Classmate
29%
Percentage as
Reported69
(205 children)
Actual Overall
Percentage
1.64%
Strangers/
Faint
Acquaintance
Uncle/
Neighbour
21%
(149 children)
31%
(219 children)
1.19%
1.75%
Cousin
Sibling
Parent
Employer
None
None
9%
(64
children)
10%
(71
children)
0.57%
0.51%
Percentage reporting sexual assault if you exclude cases where perpetrator is Friend/Classmate or Strangers/
Faint Acquaintance: 2.86% i.e. half the total figure reported. Further reduced to 0.56%, i.e. a tenth of the total figure
reported, if you also exclude the percentage reporting sexual assault by Uncle/Neighbour and Employer.
Child made to fondle perpetrator

Total: 14.5% of 12,447 child respondents70, i.e., 1804.8 rounded off as 1805 children
Perpetrator
Percentage as
Reported71
Actual Overall
Percentage
Friend/Classmate
Others
Uncle/
Neighbour
38.5%
14%
24.9%
(695 children)
(253 children)
(449 children)
5.58%
2.03%
3.60%
68

70
71
69
- 25 -
Cousin
Sibling
Parent
11.1%
6.7%
None
(200
children)
(121
children)
1.60%
0.97%
Employer
4.8%
(87
children)
0.69%
Percentage reporting instance of being made to fondle perpetrator if you exclude cases where perpetrator is Friend/Classmate or
Others: 6.89% i.e. less than half the total figure reported. Further reduced to, 2.60% i.e. a fifth of the total figure reported, if
you also exclude the percentage reporting this type of sexual abuse by Uncle/Neighbour and Employers.
Child made to show private parts to perpetrator

Total: 12.6% of 12,447 child respondents72, i.e., 1568.32 rounded off as 1568 children
Perpetrator
Percentage as
Reported73
Actual Overall
Percentage
Friend/Classmate
Others
Uncle/
Neighbour
44.4%
13.1%
23%
(696 children)
(205 children)
(361 children)
5.59%
1.64%
2.90%
Cousin
Sibling
Parent
Employer
9.5%
4.8%
None
5.2%
(149
children)
(75
children)
(82
children)
1.19%
0.60%
0.65%
Percentage reporting being made to show private parts to perpetrator if you exclude cases where perpetrator is Friend/Classmate
or Others: 5.37% i.e. less by over half of the total figure reported. Further reduced to 1.82%, i.e. one sixth of the total figure
reported, if you also exclude the percentage reporting this type of sexual abuse by Uncle/Neighbour and Employer.
Child forced to view perpetrators private parts

Total: 16.97% of 12,447 child respondents74, i.e., 2112.25,rounded off to 2112 children
Perpetrator
Percentage as
Reported75
Actual Overall
Percentage
Friend/Classmate
Others
Uncle/
Neighbour
Cousin
Sibling
Parent
None
Employer
40.7%
16.3%
24.4%
9.2%
5.5%
4.0%
(860 children)
(344 children)
(515 children)
(194
children)
(116
children)
(84
children)
6.90%
2.76%
4.13%
1.55%
0.93%
0.67%
Percentage reporting being forced to view perpetrators private parts if you exclude cases where perpetrator is Friend/Classmate
or Others: 7.31% i.e. less than half the total figure reported. Further reduced to 2.51%, i.e. one sixth of the total figure
reported, if you exclude the percentage reporting this type of sexual abuse by Uncle/Neighbour and Employer.
Child made to view pornographic pictures

Total: 30.22% of 12,447 child respondents76, i.e., 3761.48, rounded off as 3761 children
Perpetrator
Friend/Classmate
Other
Uncle/
Neighbour
72

Page 83-84 of the Report.
74
75
76
73
- 26 -
Cousin
Sibling
Parent
Employer
Percentage as
Reported77
Actual Overall
Percentage
66.1%
5.5%
13.1%
9.1%
3.3%
None
2.8%
(2486 children)
(207 children)
(493 children)
(342
children)
(124
children)
(105
children)
19.97%
1.66%
3.96%
2.74%
0.99%
0.84%
Percentage reporting being shown pornographic pictures if you exclude cases where perpetrator is Friend/Classmate or Other:
8.59% i.e. less than one third of the total figure reported. Further reduced to 3.79%, i.e. nearly an eighth of the total figure
reported, if you also exclude the percentage reporting being shown pornographic pictures by Uncle/Neighbour and Employer.
Child photographed in the nude: reported by 4.46% of total children surveyed.78 Report does not give detailed breakdown of
reported perpetrators, but says the main perpetrators reported were class fellow/uncle/neighbour.79 Report also says that
21% of this group reported being photographed by a brother or cousin.80 The overall rate comes to 0.93% of children
photographed nude by a brother or cousin.
Child forcibly kissed: reported by 21.06% of total children surveyed.81 Report does not give detailed breakdown of reported
perpetrators, but says the main perpetrators reported were class fellow/uncle/neighbour.82
Child experiencing strangers rubbing their private parts against them during travel situations: reported by 27.9% of total
children surveyed.83 Report does not give detailed breakdown of reported perpetrators.
Child experiencing kissing, touching, fondling during marriage or other ceremonies: reported by 11.32% of total children
surveyed.84 Report does not give detailed breakdown of reported perpetrators.
As the table above demonstrates, the overall perpetrator-wise percentages are, in almost
every case, very small compared with the percentages as reported.
Also, by including instances of sexual abuse by peers and strangers, the effect in bumping up
the numbers is immense. As noted in the table above, friends and classmates are the
largest group of so-called perpetrators in each form of sexual abuse, save one, sexual
assault, where they are the second largest group, being 0.11% behind uncle/neighbour.
If you exclude the instances reported as sexual abuse where the perpetrator is a friend,
classmate, stranger or other, the overall percentage of sexual abuse reported in each
category falls by half in each type of sexual abuse, save for the viewing of pornography,
where it falls by over two-thirds.
77

79
80
81
82
83
84
78
- 27 -
It is noteworthy that in a Report that makes alarming claims about sexual abuse in the
country, the highest type of so-called abuse that the data shows is viewing of
pornographic pictures with a friend or classmate 19.97%.
Sexual assault as defined by the Report (penetrative sexual assault and oral sex) is zero to
below two percent for all categories of perpetrators. In the two categories of sexual abuse that
involve touching the child (penetrative sexual assault, oral sex, and being made to touch the
perpetrator), the overall rates of such instances in the data de-segregated by perpetrator, are
below 2 percent for all classes of adult perpetrators, except the following categories being
made to fondle an uncle or neighbour: 3.60%; and being made to fondle other: 2.03%.
The confusing category of uncle/neighbour
One puzzling category of perpetrators named in the Report is the category of
uncle/neighbour. If uncle was used to refer to a male relative of the child, then it is not
clear why uncle has been clubbed with neighbour, who not being a relative, belongs to a
different class of perpetrators altogether. But it is likely that uncle here does not refer to a
relative at all. In India, in most vernacular languages, a male relative who is an uncle has his
individual title such as mama, chahcha, chitappa, taaya, and so on. Typically, Indian
children use the appellation uncle for grown-ups who are not their relatives.
So it is worthwhile noting that if you eliminate cases of non-family perpetrators, i.e., if you
eliminate the incidents of sexual assault reported as having been caused by perpetrators
falling in the category of uncle/neighbour (assuming uncles were not relatives) and
employer, as well as those where the perpetrator is friend, classmate, strangers or
other, the figures for sexual abuse in each category show another dramatic fall from the
percentages reported: 1/10th of the Reports figure for sexual assault, 1/5thth of the Reports
figure for child made to fondle perpetrator, 1/8th of the Reports figure for viewing of
pornographic pictures and 1/6th of the Reports figures for child made to show private parts
to perpetrator and child forced to view private parts of perpetrator.
Sexual Abuse by Family Members
The data in the Report shows that these are the only results about parents, siblings and
cousins85 found by the Reports own survey (for working, see table above):
Parents: Of the child respondents interviewed, not a single one reported sexual
abuse of any sort by a parent. Of the young adults interviewed 86 0.12% (or 2.88
respondents) reported sexual assault by their father.
85
We have not included uncle/neighbour figures in this sub-section as we have assumed (see the discussion in
the preceding sub-sections) that uncle did not refer to a relation, and also because the figures have been
clubbed with neighbour, which we assume is a non-family category. For discussion of the uncle/neighbour
findings, see the sub-section The confusing category of uncle/neighbour, above.
86
For some reason the Report only records the percentages for penetrative sexual assault of young adults (at
page 100 of the Report), the overall figures for which (calculated as a percentage of the total number of young
adults surveyed) are 0.12% by father, 1.03% by brother, 1.85% by cousin, 0.43% by caregiver, 0.38% by
teacher, 1.03% by stranger, 1.85% by other and 3.70 % by class fellow/friend. In the Report, these results are
presented as a percentage of the number of young adults reporting childhood sexual assault, which, ofcourse,
- 28 -
Siblings: the following table sets out the rates of child and young adult respondents
reporting one or other form of sexual abuse by a sibling:
Form
As reported
by child
respondents
As reported
by young
adult
respondents
Sexual
Assault
Reports Findings on Sexual

Fondling
Being
of private
made to
parts
show
private
parts
Abuse by Siblings
Being
Being shown
made to pornographic
view
pictures
private
parts of
sibling
Being
photographed
nude
NIL
0.97%
0.60%
0.93%
0.99%
Exact figure
not given (see
first table,
under this
head) 0.93%,
including by
cousins
1.03%
Not stated
Not stated
Not
stated
Not stated
Not stated
Cousins: the following table sets out the rates of child and young adult respondents
reporting one or other form of sexual abuse by a cousin:
Form
As reported
by child
respondents
As reported
by young
adult
respondents
Sexual
Assault
Reports Findings on Sexual

Fondling
Being
of private
made to
parts
show
private
parts
Abuse by Siblings
Being
Being shown
made to pornographic
view
pictures
private
parts of
sibling
Being
photographed
nude
0.57%
1.60%
1.19%
1.55%
2.74%
Exact figure
not given (see
first table,
under this
head) 0.93%,
including by
brothers
1.85%
Not stated
Not stated
Not
stated
Not stated
Not stated
So even though the family is blamed for sexual abuse of children, the data showed no sexual
abuse by parents, except for a very small rate for the young adults surveyed. The rates of
sexual abuse of various forms reported by child respondents as perpetrated by brothers and
cousins are either zero or relatively low, being mostly below 1 % for brothers and well below
2% for cousins, except for the viewing of pornography with cousins, which is at 2.74%.
has the effect of magnifying the percentages by nearly ten times as only 10.33% of the 2324 young adults
surveyed reported penetrative sexual assault.
- 29 -
Some rates were slightly higher for young adults who reported penetrative sexual assault by
brothers and cousins, at 1.03% and 1.85%, respectively.
The Report speculates that higher rates in some categories of sexual abuse reported by young
adults are owing to children not being able to talk about sexual abuse experiences.87 We
believe that this kind of speculation is only enlightening of the bias of the authors of the
Report, and their inability to look beyond their firmly held belief that abuse is rife in Indian
families. The young adult rates were not, in any case, comparable with the child respondent
rates as there was no parity either in the numbers, or the categorisation of young adult
respondents on the one hand, and child respondents on the other, in the survey. The young
adults are also said to have reported facing sexual assault at the age of 2 years.88 Since adult
memories do not in general stretch to that age, we are inclined to speculate that there were
serious faults in the data claimed to have been obtained from young adults.
Regarding the reported instances of sexual abuse that did not involve touching, viz., viewing
the perpetrators private parts, having ones own private parts seen, being shown
pornographic pictures or being photographed in the nude, there is nothing to indicate from the
Report, or the questionnaire used in the survey, of any filtering to distinguish between
instances where the child was forced, and where these were accidental (such as being seen
during a bath, or while going to the toilet), playful (in a non-sexual way) or between
consenting minors of the same age (such as viewing pornographic pictures with a cousin of
the same age). Although the Report uses the word forced, in the questionnaire the questions
are put thus: has anyone shown you such dirty pictures; has anyone tried to photograph
you in the nude, without clothes; has anyone made you show your private body parts; has
anyone shown you his/her private body parts.89
The predominant adult class of perpetrator in the Reports data was uncle/neighbour and in
each form of sexual abuse the category of non-family perpetrators (assuming that uncle
does not refer to a relative, see discussion on uncle in the preceding sub-section) is higher
than the family perpetrators. But the final chapter of the Report, called Conclusions and
Recommendations, falsely states, in relation to sexual abuse, that it has also very clearly
emerged that the largest percentage of abusers are persons within the family...90
Despite friends and classmates being the largest group of perpetrators, the Report says
that the study has indicated beyond doubt that schools as compared to other situations are
the safest place for children.91 We are not here claiming that schools are unsafe for children,
but merely pointing this out as yet another example of how the claims and conclusions of the
Report bear no relation to its own data.
Significantly, despite the data not showing a single case of sexual abuse by a parent from
among the child respondents, and showing only 0.12% cases among young adult respondents,
87

89
90
91
88
- 30 -
the Report sets up the entire issue of child abuse as one of parents and the Indian family
being the culprits.
The Report opens with various critical observations about attitudes to sex and sexual abuse in
Indian society. For example, that: The subject of child sexual abuse is still a taboo in India
(a rather weak taboo it must be if the Government is openly devoting one and a half years of
research and employing large numbers of outside consultants and NGOs to speak about it);
that Indians think child abuse is a western problem and that child sexual abuse does not
happen in India.92
From this generalised criticism of ignorant Indians being in a state of racist denial about child
abuse, the Report quickly grabs at its favourite whipping boy, the family. The Report says:
The girl, whose mother has not spoken to her even about a basic issue like menstruation, is
unable to tell her mother about the uncle or neighbour who has made sexual advances
towards her.93
The authors of the Report seem to be utterly ignorant that in many parts of India, especially
rural areas of the South, the onset of menses is seen as a coming of age for a girl and
celebrated throughout the village with prayers and a feast. There is no silence surrounding
menstruation, atleast in South India. It is really surprising that no one pointed this out when
even the Minister for Women and Child Development at the time, Mrs Renuka Chowdhary,
was from Andhra Pradesh in South India. Perhaps it is because neither she nor anyone else in
the Ministry actually read the Report fed to them by UNICEF and allied NGOs.
The gratuitous reference to mothers, who are not anywhere reported as perpetrators in the
sexual abuse data, is consistent with the Reports general anti-mother bias. Recall that in the
physical abuse chapter, the Report classified as physical abuse, slapping by mothers of
their children94 and we will see how in the emotional abuse chapter, the Report labels as
abusive mothers who ask their daughters to help in household chores such as dusting and
drawing of water.95
The Report also makes other gratuitous, and frankly bizarre statements, about Indian families
such as alleging that there is some deep seated fear that moves Indian families to keep
their girls and their virginity safe.96 This is particularly incomprehensible, even as a
hypothesis; is the Report implying that non-Indian families are eager for their girls to lose
their virginity? Is the Report saying that families are keeping girls safe only to protect their
virginity and not to protect them from sexual abuse?
Dismissive attitude to young boys
Another pattern in the data is that in almost all categories of sexual abuse, the boys report
higher rates of sexual abuse than the girls. Even when being forced to acknowledge that this
92

94
See Part III of this paper.
95
See Part V of this paper.
96
93
- 31 -
is an issue for boys, and not just for girls, the Report merely says There is evidence ....that
boys are equally at risk.97 In fact, the numbers show boys being abused in much higher
figures than girls consistently over almost every category of sexual abuse.98 14.6% more boys
than girls reported severe sexual abuse of more than one form; 8.4% more boys than girls
reported penetrative sexual assault, 16.8% more boys than girls reported being made to
fondle perpetrator and 11.16% more boys than girls reported being forced to view
perpetrators private parts.
Despite these findings the Report fails to look beyond its formula of the allegedly violent and
abusive patriarchal Indian family as the explanation for all abuse of children.
WE ARE NOT HERE MAKING THE CASE THAT THERE IS, IN FACT, A
SPECIAL CASE OF ABUSE OF BOYS IN INDIA. AS WE HAVE STATED
REPEATEDLY, THE QUALITY OF THE DATA AND THE DESIGN OF
THE RESEARCH IN THE REPORT IS SO POOR THAT IT DOES NOT
WARRANT ANY CONCLUSION EITHER WAY.
But it is alarming that powerful international NGOs such as UNICEF and Save the Children,
and the Government, acting heavily under their influence, should be so casual about findings
just because they showed something about boys and not girls. This bias is particularly
ugly and distasteful considering that the boys in question were very little, primarily in the
tender age group of 5 to 12, and from humble backgrounds.
Alleged conspiracy of silence about sexual abuse
The Report claims that the vast majority of children who reportedly faced sexual abuse did
not tell anyone about it (except, surprisingly, the strangers conducting the survey). Again,
Indian society is blamed for this. Time and again the Report says that there is a conspiracy
of silence about abuse and that it is shrouded in secrecy.
You dont have to be an expert on child rights to know that given the nature of sexual abuse,
children may keep silent about it for a host of reasons confusion, manipulation, fear and
guilt. This silence, this inability initially to recognise the manipulation, and then the inability
to speak about it, is the issue with sexual abuse cases.
But is it fair to blame society for this? The silence of children, born of the manipulation of the
abuser, and the fear and confusion of the child, is not a conspiracy. There are any number
of instances of parents, especially mothers, including from socially disadvantaged
97

Sexual abuse of boys versus girls: Overall, of the children reporting sexual abuse, 52.94% were boys and
47.06% were girls (page 74); of the children reporting severe sexual abuse in more than one form, 57.30% were
boys and 42.70% were girls (page 75); of the children reporting penetrative sexual assault 54.4% were boys and
45.6% girls (page 80); of the children reporting being made to fondle the perpetrator, 58.4% are boys and 41.6%
girls (page 82); of the children being forced to view private parts of the perpetrator, 60.25% are boys and
39.75% are girls; of the children reporting being photographed in the nude 52.01% were boys and 47.99% were
girls (page 85); of the children reporting being forced to view perpetrators private parts, 55.58% were boys and
44.42% girls (page 91); more boys than girls reported being made to watch pornographic pictures (page 94).
98
- 32 -
backgrounds, reporting sexual abuse of their children to the police, even when the abuser is a
spouse or other close relative. According to the Report, where children do confide in an adult
about sexual abuse, the largest category of adults to which they turn is their parents. This
indicates that the class of adults children most trust, and to whom they feel confident
reporting such incidents are their parents.99
Clearly, there is some merit in warning parents about sexual abuse, and enabling them to
establish channels of communication about it with their children. More importantly, parents
have to be warned to be vigilant. But why could the Report not have made the case for
engaging parents and the wider community on this issue instead lashing out at Indian
families patriarchy being responsible for sexual abuse, which their own data showing
higher rates of sexual abuse of boys, appears to contradict?
Many Indians are not as open talking about sex as are some liberal people, but that does not
imply a conspiracy of silence about sexual abuse. The Report itself is quite coy in the
language it uses. Private parts is a rather timid choice of words for penis, vagina, anus and
breasts.
Moreover, it is not at all certain that the volume and loudness of talk about sex, and the open
sexuality of liberal societies, has eliminated or deterred sexual deviance there. If anything, for
many of us as parents, hearing near pornographic film songs on the radio, censorship of
which is opposed by powerful film industry lobbies, and the ubiquitous advertisements for
everything from cars to chocolate through highly sexual images of models, creates a
pervasively unhealthy and hyper-sexualised environment for children.
The scandalous role play and story telling to elicit responses on sexual abuse
The manner in which children were surveyed on sexual abuse displays everything that is
wrong about approaching the issue of sexual abuse by targeting the child, rather than adults
responsible for the child.
The questionnaire for child respondents sets out fictional scenarios for sexual abuse which
the surveyor is meant to narrate to the child.100 These so-called stories include descriptions
of an uncle touching a child all over the body, trying to fondle the child, taking off the
childs clothes in a locked room, touching the childs private parts and doing something
which hurt from where blood came out.101 In the Reports section on how to break the ice
with children participating in the survey, the surveyors are advised to engage the children in
role play showing a poor family with a drunk father trying to get intimate with the
mother in front of the children.102
How was it permitted for such disturbing stories to be told and enacted before unsuspecting
children as young as 5, 6, 7 and 8 years old? Imagine the horror and confusion of the younger
99
A rate of 11.6% is stated on page 81 of the Report.

101
102
100
- 33 -
children. If such a survey had been conducted in any middle class community, parents would
have been outraged.
The Government must undertake to never abuse the trust and confidence of parents and
children by conducting such research. It has to be made clear to UNICEF, and all child
rights bodies, that they do not have the liberty to outrage the innocence and modesty of little
children in this manner. We will show in Part VI of this paper, that parents were in all
probability not even informed of the kinds of questions, stories and enactments, their
children were going to be subjected to in the survey.
Not only was this so-called research offensive and disturbing for children, it is entirely
unclear to us as to why such questioning was required in the first place. This was not an
exercise in sexual abuse awareness (which, in any case does not require such role play and
stories to be told to children), nor was it an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse,
where such intrusive questioning may be unavoidable. There seems to have been no point to
the whole exercise other creating junk data to make misleading claims about sexual abuse for
presentation in the Report.
Sexual abuse in marriage situations
The battering of Indian ways is carried out to absurd lengths in the portion of the Report that
talks about sexual advances during marriage situations.103 Firstly, it is not clear how this is
a sensible choice as a form of sexual abuse, or even what it really means.
The Report defines this category as comprising cases of kissing, touching and fondling during
marriage and other ceremonies. The only purpose for including this as a category seems to
have been to criticise Indian marriages and ceremonies; the Report disapprovingly says that:
in a marriage situation where there is general bonhomie, teasing and jokes all around, the
chances of someone taking the childs reporting seriously are low. In many situations it is
also difficult for the child to distinguish whether the incidence [sic.] as meant to be a joke or
take advantage of the child.104 What exactly is the Report suggesting? That Indian marriages
and ceremonies are a covert orgy for incest? Or that children should not be taken to attend
marriages and other functions?
Reports response to young adults and stakeholders
The chapter on Sexual Abuse ends with a gnashing of the teeth on how many of the young
adult respondents and stakeholders preferred community or family intervention over police
action in cases of sexual abuse of children. Considering that the study was not looking only at
rape or severe sexual assault cases, or even at a majority of such cases, but at sexual
encounters of a range of severity and culpability, an overall preference for community
intervention over police action is not so alarming.
103
104

- 34 -
In recent years all over the world there has been criticism of over-criminalising situations,
especially where the perpetrator is a minor. Given the insistence of the child rights groups in
India (including the ones who participated in the Report) that the 17-year-old rapist-murderer
in the infamous Nirbhaya case should be let off after a couple of years in a reform home (as
he was a few weeks short of majority at the time of the crime), the Reports discomfort with
the response on community or family intervention once again displays the biases of its
authors any response that did not fit with their own ideas is taken as a sign of complicity in
child abuse in society.
Laws on sexual abuse
As in the survey on physical abuse, it is not clear why the survey on sexual abuse was
required except to make false claims about Indian families.
There have always been laws against sexual abuse of minors in India. The rules on statutory
rape are based on the principle that sexual intercourse with a minor by an adult is a crime
regardless of consent, whether real or imagined, on the part of the adult. If the law required
changes, the case for this should have been made, instead of castigating Indian parents for a
problem that concerns them about their children, atleast as much as any NGO.
Some years ago, a special law against sexual offences against children was passed in India. 105
It is an extremely strict law that some human rights activists have criticised for reversing the
traditional burden of proof by presuming the accused to be guilty. On our reading, the new
law opens up the possibility of adult care givers being prosecuted for innocent acts such as
bathing a child, or cleaning it after it goes to the toilet. We also believe the new law could
discourage parents from seeking help for sexually abused children, as Child Welfare
Committees have been given wide powers to remove children from parental custody, and
keep them in hidden locations, based on mere allegations of sexual abuse, even before an
investigation into allegations has commenced, and even where the alleged perpetrator is not
in the family home. This is not the place for a detailed discussion about this law. We mention
it here merely to point out that Indians have accepted a strict law against sexual offences
against children, which indicates their concern and ready engagement with this issue,
contrary to the claims of the Report that Indians want to shroud child abuse in a conspiracy
of silence and that they believe this is a Western problem.
105
The Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act, 2012.
- 35 -
PART V
BIAS AND LIES ON EMOTIONAL ABUSE AND GIRL CHILD NEGLECT
In this part we scrutinise the Reports claims about emotional abuse and neglect of
female children.
What is emotional abuse
Emotional abuse is defined as treating harshly, shouting, belittling, name calling and using
abusive language while addressing children and comparison, which is described as
comparing siblings or other children with each other.106
What is girl child neglect
Girl child neglect is defined by the following so-called indicators: less attention, less
appreciation, less food, fault finding, household work compared to other siblings and looking
after siblings.107
Regarding this portion of the Report, we will not repeat the exercise of scrutinising the
statistics as we have done on its claims about physical and sexual abuse. We believe that
regardless of whether or not the stated statistics stand up to scrutiny, the matters discussed in
this portion of the Report have no place in a study on abuse.
Misuse of concepts of child abuse and child neglect
Shouting, comparing children and swearing are not child abuse; no matter what delicate
sensibilities about children are offended by these things.
Telling your daughter to watch over her baby brother while he sleeps; an impoverished
family making hard choices about the division of scarce food among siblings; and the manner
in which a parent expresses herself to a daughter; no matter how much fault you may find in
these things from the point of view of gender discrimination, these do not constitute neglect
or abuse.
There is absolutely no justification for giving these things the label of abuse, a term that
shouts out something sick and depraved; or neglect, a term that implies something utterly
and deliberately callous on the part of Indian parents and other adult custodians towards their
children.
Prejudiced questioning; blocking of contrary viewpoint and pre-conceived anti-family
assumptions
In this portion of the Report, the authors do not even make a pretence at any kind of
objectivity in eliciting responses from the respondents. Children are asked have you ever
106
107

- 36 -
been upset/angry on being compared with other children by your father or mother;108 in
your family have you ever been treated harshly, in favour of other children; 109 is it a matter
of advantage or disadvantage to be a girl in the family setting; 110 do you sometimes wish
you were a boy, generally do you get the same amount of attention and love from your
father and mother as your brother(s) do; do your brothers dominate over you in play
activities; do your brothers physically tease/punish you in day-to-day activities, if yes, do
your parents take your side to prevent teasing/punishment.111
According to the Report, girl child neglect is evidenced by so-called indicators such as
forced to leave tasty food for brothers and parents finding fault for no reason.112
In the questionnaire for young adults we get some further insight into the kind of non-serious
encounters the Report labels as abuse: respondents are asked whether as a child anyone
called them budhu, idiot, ganwar, jalil or pagal.113 These are expressions that are
as often as not used affectionately or jokingly among Hindi-speaking Indians.
Adult respondents of 18 to 24 years of age are asked whether in their childhood their parents
or relatives ever (we assume this would include even once) asked you to leave tasty food
items for your brother or sister. Leading questions are asked such as: In day-to day life did
family members do fault finding more in your activities than that of your brother and
sisters?114
Antipathy towards young boys and brothers
The hostility of the authors of the Report to the family, and their especial antagonism against
boy children, is evident in the questionnaire itself. There is no attempt to objectively assess
family dynamics of the respondents surveyed. This is particularly evident in the leading
questions about brothers and the fact that only girl children were asked these questions.115
Fair research would have required that brothers and parents also be asked how they perceived
reported instances of boy child preference.
Portraying ordinary childhood experiences as abusive
Have we not all felt resentful at some point or the other about parents preferring one sibling
over another, regardless of whether that sibling was a brother or sister? If a child gets into a
fight with a sibling, does not each one emerge from being admonished by the parents feeling
that the other one was favoured?
108

110
111
112
113
114
115
The Gender Differences section of the questionnaire for child respondents (at page 159 of the Report)
specifically instructs the researcher that the questions are only for girl-child.
109
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On the question asked of young adults about being told to leave tasty food items for a sibling,
should there not have been a follow up question about why: for instance, was there a special
occasion for the child for whom the treat was left, such as a birthday or a religious ceremony.
In comparing how much food was given between siblings, would it not have been fair to ask
whether the food was unequally divided because one child was ill, or medically advised not
to take that food?
In the questions about comparison, was it not fair to ask why a parent was making a
comparison? Whether, for instance, a parent was pointing out that one child lied, while the
other did not; or that if one child worked hard like the other, then she would also do well in
school; or that one child should learn to share his toys, like the other one?
We also recommend as an exercise to Hindi speaking readers, to translate the questions in the
emotional abuse section116 into Hindi (recall that the Report says that nearly half the
respondents surveyed were Hindi-speaking). Things that sound severe in the choice of
English words in the questionnaire (eg. have you ever been shouted at and humiliated [by
your mother]?) have a completely different ring to them in Hindi (eg: kya aapki ma chillati
hai? Aur phir aapko bura lagta hai?).
Taking advantage of relatively backward social and economic status of child
respondents families
The Report says117 that the child respondents questioned came from relatively humble
backgrounds. Does not the design of the questionnaire smack of classism and a wilful
blindness to the incidents of poverty? Would the authors of the Report have been able to get
away with asking such intrusive and biased questions of children in a middle class family,
with educated working mothers? Would they, for instance, have been able to get away with
asking a child: Do you cry when your mother goes to work? Do you want your mother to stop
working and stay at home with you? When you grow up, will you also leave your baby at
home and go to work?
If it is unfair and prejudiced to ask a child such leading questions without considering the
adult rationale for things children may not like, then the same applies to the kinds of
questions that children were asked in the Report.
Stigmatising household work as abuse
The Reports terming as abuse the reported phenomenon of girls being asked to do
household work and help care for younger siblings is unacceptable. Why should children not
assist their mothers in housework? Especially the kind of work the questionnaire speaks of:
cleaning, dusting and drawing of water.118 Many children delight in helping around the house
and kitchen; it makes them feel like they are grown-up. If some children consider this a
chore, that is no different a situation than a Western child being told to clean up its messes.
116

118
Page 159, Point 2.6 and Page 115 of the Report.
117
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While the Report takes the position that caring for baby brothers or sisters is abuse, most
children are proud of their infant siblings: parading them around and dressing them up like
dolls. If the point of the Report was to show that boys are not enlisted in household work,
then calling household work abuse is not going to help the cause.
It may be that in impoverished families that cannot afford domestic help, mothers rely more
heavily on their children to help with the housework. But that is poverty, and not abuse.
The Report had no business calling women needing help with household work as abusers.
This is another example of unjustified mother-blaming in the Report, which we also noted in
the chapters on physical abuse and sexual abuse where slapping by mothers has been termed
abuse and mothers are blamed for sexual assaults on children by others.
Some NGOs argue that impoverished mothers relying on children for help in housework is
responsible for low school attendance and poor results in children. If that is the case, then
what we have here is a situation where a family-centric view has to be taken to promote
schooling, and the focus has to widen from merely counting the number of girl children out
of schools, to giving mothers the helping hand they need in the home if they are to lose the
help of their children owing to the demands of school.
Are we headed towards a Cinderella Law
So far as the claims of emotional abuse are concerned, there is every reason to be
concerned about the Government being convinced by UNICEF and Save the Children to treat
this as a form of child abuse.
A few months ago in England, a law was proposed, popularly called the Cinderella Law,119
which will allow criminal prosecution of parents for things such as ignoring a child, making it
feel unloved, and comparison with siblings. Laws like this will empower child protection
officials (and not just the allegedly abused children) to prosecute parents for being
unloving.
Apart from the possibility for misuse, these kinds of laws reflect a cultural attitude towards
the family, towards adult issues with depression and loneliness (that are blamed on their
childhood experiences), and towards the role of psychology in addressing these issues. These
ideas are not uncontested, even in the West, where they currently hold sway. This is not the
place to get into this complex debate, but what is clear is that the Government appears from
this Report to be convinced of this point of view. A point of view of which no one in India,
other than a few extremist child rights organisations, is even aware.
119
This was widely reported in the British media and also discussed among academics. Some examples are the
following: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-cinderella-law-emotionalcorrectness-gone-mad-9231233.html; http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-27693587,
http://theconversation.com/cinderella-law-proposals-are-unhelpful-and-draconian-25106.
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PART VI
MISLEADING PARENTS AND MANIPULATING CHILDREN
Failure to take informed consent
Apart from its errors in data gathering and wilful misrepresentation, the authors of the Report
also breached their own Ethical Guidelines regarding informed consent from the
respondents surveyed. 120 The chapter on Research Methodology refers to informed consent
having been taken from the child respondents and their parents.
Informed consent indicates that consent was taken not just in relation to participation in the
survey, but as to the purpose and substance of the research. In plain English, this means that
the respondents and, where they were children, their parents, were required to be frankly
informed as to what the respondents were going to be questioned about and why.
However, the consent form for parents gives no description of the research intended to be
conducted.121 It merely seeks the consent of parents to conducting a group discussion and
interview with the children, with an undertaking that personal information of the respondents
will be destroyed at the end of the study.
Misleading respondents as to the nature and intention of the research
The consent form refers to an Information Sheet given to the parents (though it is really not
clear how many, if any, of the parents were literate). Very suspiciously, this Information
Sheet has not been annexed to the Report. A glaring gap in disclosure which gives rise to
doubts as to whether any material information about the research was given to parents of the
children surveyed.
The Report refers to something called an Information Schedule;122 this is the term used for
the questionnaire that was administered to child respondents surveyed for the Report. If by
the Information Sheet, the consent form meant this questionnaire, 123 then we might be
looking, not just at a failure to obtain informed consent, but a much more culpable breach of
ethics, viz., deliberately misleading child respondents and their parents as to the nature
of the research being conducted.
120
The Reports Ethical Guidelines listed at Annexure 6 (page 152 of the Report) say:10. No participant should
be made to participate without having first given informed consent. 11. It will be important to explain .........
what use the research will be put to when it is completed. The researcher needs to positively sell his/her
research to adults and children in the community.
The Informed Consent Form given to children to sign states I understand why this research is being done and
what kind of questions will be asked (page 157 of the Report).
In the checklist on seeking consent of child respondents in the survey (page 154 of the Report) it is stated: seek
the informed consent of children and seek consent from parents and caretakers.
121

123
Page 158 onwards of the Report.
122
- 40 -
The questionnaire states the purpose of the research as follows: We are studying the
situation and difficulties faced by our children in the country. It is important that information
on childrens background, health and other childhood experiences is gathered. This will
greatly help in having programmes and schemes for their betterment. This suggests a runoff-the-mill inquiry into the health and background of children, which is anything but what
this research was about. Given that the Report itself states upfront that it was prompted by a
belief that there is widespread, hidden abuse by Indian parents of children, informed consent
required that this belief be conveyed to the respondents, or if this would be confusing for
little children, to their parents and guardians.
Can young children meaningfully give consent?
Even if consent had been taken, and the Report makes much of the fact that consent forms
were also given to the children interviewed, given that this is supposed to be a Report about
respecting the child as an individual, it is surprising that its authors should believe that it is
ethical to claim that they had consent of children for their research, especially when their
child respondents were as young as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 years old.
If this research respected small children as individuals, then it should have stated honestly at
the outset that there is no equivalent to obtaining adult consent or adult comprehension of
questions asked from small children for any research, and that the reader must always have
that caveat in mind when noting the responses of children in the Report. This is the reason
why the law does not recognise a child as a competent contracting party.
The claims of the Report to ethical research and being respectful of the child are
particularly hypocritical when we recall the kinds of role play and scenarios of imagined
sexual abuse and bloody sexual assault that were put to the children, as young as 5 to 12
years in age, in the part of the questionnaire dealing with sexual abuse. As discussed in Part
IV of this paper, if the authors were concerned about sexual abuse, they should have made the
case for new or stronger sexual assault laws regarding children in India. There appears to
have been no reason to survey children on this issue, and in this intrusive manner, except to
manipulate their responses to make exaggerated and biased claims about abuse of children in
India.
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PART VII
CONCLUSION
As stated in the Introduction, we have surveyed the Report in this paper as an example of the
biased approach of UNICEF, Save the Children and other child rights NGOs towards Indian
families, especially parents, and the falsity of their claims about pervasive abuse of children
by Indian parents.
False and exaggerated claims about abuse in Indian families
We have shown you that the Report used the wrong statistical methods for the kinds of
nation-wide claims it was seeking to make. We have shown you that the data gathered was
unreliable, based on woefully unsystematic and arbitrary sampling.
Even accepting the Reports highly suspect data at face value, we have shown how it does not
support the Reports claims of alarming levels of child abuse in Indian families.
Regarding physical abuse, we have shown you that, at best, the data shows a tendency among
Indian parents, mostly mothers, to lightly slap their sons. We have shown you that the
Reports data shows that severe physical abuse by parents occurs in only a minority of cases.
We have shown you that on the Reports data, the majority of persons interviewed about how
to discipline children preferred scolding and non-physical means.
We have shown you that the data reveals zero to negligible rates of parental sexual abuse. We
have shown you that once you eliminate cases of sexual abuse by friends, class-mates, peers,
strangers and non-family adults, the rates of sexual abuse shown in the data fall to a fraction
of what has been claimed.
We have shown you that the Report uses overbroad definitions of abuse by including cases
that are never understood to be abuse, such as watching pornographic pictures with a friend
or class fellow, having strangers on buses rub their private parts against you, being physically
or sexually abused by a stranger, neighbour, faint acquaintance or other person not in a
position of trust or authority, being compared with another child by a parent, being told to
help with household work such as dusting or minding a younger sibling, or being slapped by
your parents. We have shown you that these overbroad definitions of abuse have the effect of
inflating the rates of physical and sexual abuse claimed in the Report.
None of the Reports data even remotely suggests a crisis of child abuse in Indian families,
yet the Report concludes with blatantly false statements, defied by its own reported data, such
as it has also very clearly emerged that the largest percentage of abusers are persons within
the family or persons in position of trust and authority124; the majority of abuse cases take
place within the family environment, the perpetrators being close family relatives125 and,
124
125

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most unjustified of all, the results of the study suggest that somewhere parents have not
lived upto ...expectations.126
Hostile and prejudiced view of Indian society
What the Report chooses to ignore when it looks at Indian parents and family life, is
revealing of its limited understanding of what it really means by child protection. Is there
not something to be said, from the point of view of the happiness and security of children, for
the fact that Indians are still largely family-minded; that the culture still favours marriage as
the foundation for raising children; and that despite rapid modernisation we have not adopted
the highly atomised, materialistic and individualistic cultures of some Western societies?
How does this state of affairs in Indian society compare with, for instance, Scandinavian
societies, where the overwhelming majority of children are born out of wedlock; with
children having to accommodate, in their hearts and their homes, a stream of changing
boyfriends and girlfriends of their birth parents? How does the state of affairs in India
compare to the total material and spiritual isolation of second and third generation
impoverished single mother families found in countries like the UK? Children of such
families literally have no one to call their own, apart from their deeply vulnerable mothers.
When looking at Western child protection laws and policies, we must bear in mind that these
were evolved as a response to a special vulnerability among Western children that was
brought about in great part by the breakdown and rejection of the institution of the family in
that part of the world.
In the context of what those societies have lost and are denying their children owing to the
breakdown of family life there, and what we Indians continue to give to our children in our
commitment and belief in family, UNICEFs and Save the Childrens pre-occupation with
slapping, scolding and giving the girl child household chores in India is laughable.
We, ordinary parents and families in India, have to insist on a sense of proportion among
child rights ideologues when they condemn our child raising practices. We have to be more
assertive about the value of what we give to our children, even while we keep our minds open
to change, where appropriate.
Child protection measures do not have to rest on an ideological hostility to families
We can agree to bring in measures against child abuse and exploitation, but we must not
concede the anti-family ideology of UNICEF and Save the Children.
As we have argued in Parts III and IV of this paper, the alleged concerns of the Report
responding to sexual and physical abuse of children could have been dealt with adequately,
and better, by making the case for amendments to existing laws, or introducing new laws to
deal with genuine cases of crimes against children.
126
- 43 -
There have always been laws in India against sexual interference with a minor (such as the
laws on statutory rape) and children are not excluded from the purview of laws dealing with
physical injury and other malicious assaults. Contrary to what the Report claims, it has never
been the case that Indian laws have left children unprotected from their purview.
If there was a need for improving the existing laws, then a case may have been made for that.
As stated, in Part IV of our paper, a strict law on sexual abuse of children was recently passed
in India, which indicates the publics concern and ready engagement with this issue, contrary
to the claims of the Report that Indians want to shroud child abuse in a conspiracy of
silence.
Instead of engaging with the real issue, which is how best to respond to the instance of child
abuse, the Report states its aim was to establish that child abuse exists.127 Why did the
authors of the Report feel it necessary to establish something that no one denied?
We believe the only reason for the entire project was to portray Indian parents as being
abusive, and as failing their children. The target of the Report was, in fact, not Indian
children, but Indian parents.
Why would the Report deliberately misrepresent Indian families as abusive?
The question may be asked as to why the Report would deliberately misrepresent Indian
families as being abusive when the data suggested otherwise. The answer to that lies in the
biases evident in the Report. The opening line of the Reports chapter on Research
Methodology gives the game away by stating: The study assumes that child abuse in India,
as in other developing societies, is a phenomenon which is widespread....128
This bias against Indian and other developing societies is typical of the mindset of UNICEF,
Save the Children and many child rights activists in India. They assume that people from
third world countries and traditionally-minded people are innately abusive of children. Being
highly moralistic is taken as an indicator of being an abusive parent.129
Naturally, such a prejudiced and hostile attitude to parents and families, especially towards
impoverished parents, whose only joy and reason for living is often nothing but their
children, would not find much support in India. Hence reports such as the one under
discussion that try to present ordinary parenting situations as ones of gross abuse.
As discussed in Part I of our paper, the whole approach of child rights as articulated by
UNICEF-Save the Children is to enable the Government to supersede parents and take over
the power of making decisions about children because parents are seen, in the words of the
Report, to look upon children as their property to be treated as they like. 130 In addition,
127

129
130
Page 43 of the Report. In our view, this characterisation of Indian families itself reveals a fundamental
misunderstanding about family life in the Report. Families are not a mere aggregation of independent
individuals. Filial ties are made up of a sense of belonging and oneness among the individual members of the
128
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poor parents are seen as not having the wherewithal to make the right decisions for their
children. Economic stress is listed in the Report as an indicator of parental and familial
abuse.131 In the Reports chapter on emotional abuse, matters that could be influenced by
economic hardship, such as distribution of food among siblings, or relying on daughters to
help with housework, is labelled as abuse and neglect.
Even the choice of the evidence group Children in Family Environment, Not Going To
School, which was primarily used to study patterns of child abuse by family members,
demonstrates the bias of the Report that poor families, and more particularly poor parents,
abuse their children. Well off, westernised families in India are not likely to have children
that do not go to school.
In another example of its classist bias, the lower rate of physical abuse reported by young
adults reflecting on their childhood, than by the child respondents, is attributed to the fact that
the young adults surveyed were of better backgrounds than the child respondents.132 As
discussed in Part V of this paper, the questions asked of respondents relating to so-called
emotional abuse in the family also indicate a bias against impoverished families. To anyone
acquainted with the pattern of life in poor or rural Indian homes, the questions on emotional
abuse, indeed the entire approach to the issue of emotional abuse and girl child neglect,
showed that the Report had only impoverished and socially backward families in mind when
studying these so-called categories of abuse and neglect.
Stigmatising the poor
Is the Report making a case that poor families are inherently abusive? This is no idle
speculation - there is a high correlation in Western countries having severe child protection
regimes, between poverty and unfair accusations of child abuse.
Impoverished families, especially impoverished black families in the United States, and
working class single mother families in the United Kingdom, claim they are more frequently
targeted than better off families by overzealous child protection authorities.
Anti-CPS (Child Protection Services) and Anti-SS (Social Services) websites and
community groups have mushroomed in the US, UK and other developed countries, with
most of their members being impoverished and socially disadvantaged people.
Their palpable resentment and fear of social workers in the child protection system should
lead us in India to question whether the Western approach to child protection, as advocated
by UNICEF, Save the Children and the Report, actually benefits or compounds the problems
of impoverished children.
family. To liken the sense of filial possession to property ownership is perverse. What is family if you take
away the sense that our parents, children and siblings belong to us, as we belong to them?
131
132
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Government policing of ordinary family life

The scrutiny of ordinary family life by the Government in the Report is also disturbing. The
Reports inquiries into slapping by mothers, and sibling comparison by parents, show that
unbeknown to the millions of families and children in India, the Government, in the name of
child welfare, is entering upon areas of everyday, personal life that have never previously
been understood to be in the domain of governmental scrutiny.
The National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), a body constituted
at the recommendation of UNICEF and allied parties, openly states that its agenda is to
intervene in families and communities. Its website states: In order to touch every child,
[NCPCR] seeks a deeper penetration to communities and households and expects that the
ground experiences gathered at the field are taken into consideration by all the authorities at
the higher level [emphasis added].
If the so-called ground experiences are going to be gathered from the field in the biased and
unscientific manner of the Report, then we have a taste of what to expect from the NCPCR.
Since the inception of the NCPCR, UNICEF, or one or other like-minded NGO has sat in on
virtually every meeting of the NCPCR, and been involved in virtually every report and
recommendation issued by this body.
Bear in mind that the NCPCR was set up by the Ministry of Women and Child Development
to implement the agenda of the so-called rights based approach to child welfare with the
active instigation of UNICEF. As stated in Part I of this paper, in the world of child rights,
child protection is a term of art, a technical term for a certain type of governmental
machinery empowered to supersede parents and take decisions and actions about children in
the name of child rights. So the assault on the family in the name of rights-based child
protection has begun in India.
We wish to emphasise that we are not making a simplistic claim here about the private sphere
being off limits to discussion. Nor are we claiming that families should be above questioning
because of patriarchal notions about the sacredness of family life, or any other reason.
People have strong ideas about raising children and gender discrimination; and questioning of
family dynamics in this context is legitimate. But this is something for us to discuss, advocate
and campaign about in society. There is no call for bringing in the Government, and its
policing apparatus, on these issues.
The authors of the Report are well aware of this, which is why they brought gender politics
and family dynamics under the heads of abuse and neglect. Once you accept that
something is abusive or neglectful, then it is hard for anyone to object about using the
Government to address it.
Not only is this an unfair attempt to gain the upper hand in a debate over a cultural issue, it
will also not be effective. The law and police are blunt instruments. They are not the proper
tools for unpicking the complex and finely balanced things - personalities, attitudes, fears and
aspirations - that make up family dynamics.
- 46 -
Moreover, laws do not change attitudes. All that will be achieved is the criminalisation of
family life.
UNICEF, Save the Children and local Indian NGOs supporting their line on child rights, first
have to convince people on the ground of their philosophy. And they have to do so in a
transparent manner, engaging educated people like us who hold the opposing view, and not
just bamboozling impoverished, socially backward families into accepting their agenda
offered in the guise of charity and welfare measures.
Playing politics through children; manipulating their responses
What is particularly distasteful about the Report is the manner in which the child respondents
were surveyed to unwittingly incriminate their parents for acts and attitudes (such as
slapping, scolding, disciplining and help with household chores) that are not immoral; that
neither the children surveyed, nor their parents, nor the public at large, perceives as abuse;
and that were not intended with any malice by parents towards their children.
Not only were children duped into unknowingly condemning their own parents, no provision
seems to have been made, when processing their responses, to account for the limitations
inherent in their still developing capacities of comprehension and articulation.
In this respect, the Report abysmally fails to uphold its own stated commitment of placing the
child at the centre of child welfare policy. The entire Report was an exercise in placing the
authors prejudiced and debatable child protection ideology at the centre of child welfare
policy through covert, motivated and fraudulent research practices, not to mention the
pervasively careless and shoddy statistical analysis underlying all of its claims.
The exaggeration and misrepresentation of the responses of the children surveyed, to give a
false impression of pervasive abuse of children by Indian families, is a sorry example of the
UNICEF, Save the Children and its supporting Indian NGOs playing politics through
children. That, if anything, is abuse. Abuse of trust, and abuse of innocence.
Hostility to boys and mother-blaming
The hostility towards young boys in the Report; the failure of its authors to take note of the
pattern that emerged in their own data of more boys than girls being physically and sexually
abused; and the stigmatisation of mothers as abusive and neglectful for ordinary acts like
slapping a child, being reticent about talking of sexual matters, and seeking the help of
daughters in minor household chores, shows a perverse and irrational attitude towards women
and little boys.
If this is truly the attitude of the Ministry of Women and Child Development towards Indian
mothers and boys, then steps must be taken by ordinary citizens to force the Ministry to
explain itself. In particular, mothers must join forces to ensure that they are not subjected to
overzealous and biased policing by the Government over the manner in which they choose to
raise their children.
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Child protection is an industry, not just an ideology

The negative portrayal of Indian families, and of family life in general, is not just a matter of
ideological belief, but also part of the economy of child rights that has been fostered by
UNICEF and Save the Children all over the world. They fund local child rights groups, they
design public policy courses for child welfare, they fund government projects for child
welfare, and they advise philanthropists and businesses wishing to contribute to child welfare.
So at each step of the way, whether you are teaching or studying child welfare; forging a
career in the world of child rights; a public servant working in child welfare; or a
philanthropist, you are presented with the UNICEF-Save the Children version of anti-family
child welfare policies and their exaggerated claims of child abuse.
The Report itself testifies to how UNICEF-Save the Children set up a self-perpetuating cycle
of highly partisan child protection ideologues to devise, teach, advocate and implement child
related public policy measures. In its concluding chapter, the Report recommends so-called
capacity building for the formulation of a new policy, legislation, scheme...[by] the
creation of a cadre of trained personnel, sensitized to child rights and protection of children.
In order to create this cadre, in the first instance, schools of social work and universities
should offer specialized courses on child rights, protection and counselling. Further, child
rights and protection issues should be integrated into the curricula of administrative institutes,
police training academies, law colleges, medical colleges, teacher training schools etc. So that
the professionals passing out of these institutions have both the sensitivity and the knowledge
to deal with these issues.133
Here you have in clear language the blueprint for implementing the version of child
protection favoured by UNICEF, Save the Children and allied NGOs. Trained exclusively in
their child protection ideology, and without any significant counter discourse or questioning
of the factual basis of its claims, you create an environment where almost every professional
coming in contact with children, parents and the child protection system is biased in favour of
the system and against the parents.
The names of the government servants, NGOs and child rights activists who participated in
the Report are listed there itself. If you follow the work of any one of them, you will see that
most of them are adept at mouthing the UNICEF-Save the Children line on child rights: it
gets their names into international reports of the UNICEF, they are admiringly quoted as
beacons of light in an otherwise anti-child society, they retire from government to plum posts
in corporate sponsored charitable foundations, and so on. So advocating this version of child
rights is not even just a matter of ideological narrow-mindedness, but also one of career
advancement.
Each time a case of foreign child protection authorities taking children of Indian families
abroad into foster care has been reported in the media, Save the Childrens India desk has
made it a point to come on national television to support the removal of the children, and
133
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advocate for a similar system in India. We have been closely following such cases, and seen
that in each case either the parents are winning the cases against them abroad, or analysis of
the case documents shows the allegations to be completely unfair, biased, and often racist. In
each case the forced confiscation of the children into foster care has been found to be nothing
but a totally unnecessary and traumatic experience for the children.
Save the Children has sided against Indian families abroad without making any attempt to
contact the affected parents or children, or ascertain the facts of the case. Their partisanship
in the matter is abundantly clear, and it is they, UNICEF, Save the Children and allied child
rights NGOs who are, at the moment, the chief public interlocutors with the Indian
Government on child-related policy.
The dangers of Western-style child protection
The agenda of UNICEF, Save the Children and other child rights NGOs in India is to
establish a Western-style regime of child protection in this country. As stated in Part I of this
paper, in the UNICEF-Save the Children vision of child rights, the issue of child welfare is
set up as a question of legal and human rights that the child can claim directly from the
Government, and the institution of child protection authorities with the power to supersede
the family in taking decisions about children is justified as the necessary machinery for
giving effect to these child rights. In its Conclusions and Recommendations, the Report says
that there is a clear and established need for a separate National Child Protection Policy. In
addition, every state should set up a State Commission for the Protection of Rights of the
Child and formulate Plans of Action for Child Protection at the district and state levels.134
The Report also asks development of standard protocols on child protection mechanisms at
the district, block and village levels to build a protective environment for children in the
country.135
The language and view point of child protection is thus already an integral part of Indian
child welfare policies.
Severe child protection regimes that allow child protection officials to confiscate children
from their parents can be found most Western countries, including the United States of
America and the United Kingdom. In our opinion, child protection in these countries has been
an unmitigated and cruel disaster. We hold this view based on our direct experience of Indian
families with child protection services in Norway, the UK, USA and Ireland.
Ever since the dramatic case in 2011 of a Bengali family in Norway having their children
forcibly taken into foster care by Norwegian child protection authorities,136 we have been
working with Indian families similarly threatened with child confiscation abroad. We have
also been closely studying the rules, procedures, philosophy and judicial decisions of child
protection officials and family courts in this field.
134

136
Commonly known as the Bhattacharya Case or the case of the Norway Foster Kids.
135
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We have observed in Western child protection regimes, a systemic preference for removing
children from families, rather than enabling families to provide better for their children;
findings of parental abuse or neglect on woefully inadequate evidence, including hearsay,
conjectures and speculations, that would be inadmissible in other types of legal proceedings;
rubber-stamping by courts and lay tribunals of the findings of care workers who function for
all practical purposes as adversaries of the parents in care proceedings; bullying and
intimidation by child protection officials acting under cover of their powers of child
confiscation; parents being blamed for developmental and other disorders in their children;
the misinterpretation of medical evidence, or the application of medical theories that are
vigorously contested within the medical community, in findings of abuse, neglect or the like
against parents; parents with mild mental disabilities such as learning disorders being denied
the right to raise their children; and poor parents and parents belonging to racial minorities or
socially disadvantaged classes being targeted by overzealous and culturally biased child
protection officers.
In countries such as the UK, the role of child protection agencies in preventing child abuse
has taken the form of social workers being empowered to remove children from parents, even
when they are thriving with their parents and there is no allegation of actual harm, based on
assessments of risk of future harm. Assessments of risk of future harm are made based on socalled indicators of parental incompetence such as having a minor learning disability, or
being short tempered, or having a history of depression. Based on these so-called indicators
of risk of future harm, social workers are actually empowered not just to remove children
from families, but even to identify pregnant women and remove their babies to State custody
within minutes of birth.
In this context, plans expressed in the Report for having a Scheme on Child Protection that
would identify vulnerable children and families are worrisome. We have in the West a live
example of how such schemes have unleashed a virtual pogrom against families, where
almost anything a parent does or doesnt do can land the family in a situation where the
children face enforced confiscation by the State.
The indicators of abuse listed in the Report confirm every apprehension that we are looking
at plans to implement a child protection regime in India that would catch innocent families in
the net. Indicators of physical abuse as listed in the Report137 include the child seems
frightened by parents, often late or absent from school, plays aggressively, has little
respect for others, and also its opposite: overly compliant, withdrawn, gives in readily and
allows others to do for him or her without protest, has difficulty getting along with others,
[refusing] to undress for gym, [giving] inconsistent versions about occurrence of injuries
and comes early to school, seems reluctant to go home afterward. Indicators of parents
being abusive include economic stress, highly moralistic, easily upset, have a low
tolerance for frustration138, blames child for injuries. As anyone can see, these are highly
137
Page 43 to 44 of the Report.

Some critics of Western child protection claim that case workers are instructed to deliberately provoke
parents to see how they respond. Most parents, unaware of the consequences and already antagonised by the
138
- 50 -
subjective assessments. Even if made correctly, they cannot reasonably be taken as

establishing that the child is abused or that the parents are abusive.
In our opinion, the issues with Western-style child protection are not individual instances of a
well-intentioned mechanism gone wrong. We believe these problems are built into the
understanding of the child and family that underlies Western-style child protection. A hostile
and suspicious approach to the family, which is fed by the general understanding that there is
rampant and hidden abuse in families, particularly by parents.
UNICEF and Save the Children have begun to lay the foundations of an oppressive
Western-style child protection regime in India
If the Report is anything to go by, the Ministry of Women and Child Development, and hence
the Government of India, has endorsed and adopted the UNICEF-Save the Children version
of child rights. Although Western-style child protection has not yet been fully instituted in
India, many steps have been taken to lay down the institutional infrastructure and legal
provisions for it.
Lobbied by UNICEF and allied NGOs, Parliament amended Indias juvenile justice laws to
provide for a network of child welfare committees (CWCs) empowered to intervene for
children in need of care and protection. The legal definition for children in need of care
and protection under the amended laws is quite loose. On our reading, CWCs have wide
powers to intervene in cases of slapping or girl child doing housework under some of the
heads of child in need of care and protection enumerated under the law.
As in the case of Western child protection bodies, although these CWCs are given wide
powers of taking over the custody and guardianship of a child, their members are not required
to have any legal or investigative expertise. They also operate away from the public eye
under cover of secrecy laws that were meant, in the West, to protect the privacy of children,
but have in fact served to give a free reign to incompetent, corrupt and misguided child
protection officials. The head of the family courts in England, a senior judge, 139 has
repeatedly expressed the need for full transparency in the British child protection system.
The manner in which our laws were amended to bring in secrecy provisions from Western
models of child protection, without even any consideration of how they have caused systemic
dysfunction there, shows how lax our Parliament and Government have been in properly
unwarranted intrusion into their homes by case workers, respond with anger and frustration, and are promptly
reported back as fulfilling the indicator for abuse.
139
Sir James Munby on the need for judgments and case documents in child protection cases to be made public
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Speeches/pfd-speech-society-editors11112013.pdf (Note that in the British system, child protection cases are dealt with by the family courts and the
Court of Protection deals with cases regarding incapacitated adults). See particularly, pages 3, 8 and 9 of the
speech. Sir James Munby repeated his call for transparency in child protection cases in the context of the case of
a pregnant Italian woman on a visit to Britain who was forced by child protection authorities to undergo a CSection, with the baby being immediately removed for adoption: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/lawand-order/11043704/New-plan-to-end-secrecy-in-family-courts.html.
- 51 -
evaluating and applying Western-style rules for child protection in India.140 There seem to be
only advocates for this version of child welfare, and very little questioning of it from
responsible quarters in India.
Not only does this place us in danger of repeating the mistakes of Western-style child
protection, it also hinders us in India from enlisting resources that exist here, which may not
exist in the West, for the support and protection of children. A glaring example of this is the
provision in our juvenile laws (included at the instigation of UNICEF and allied NGOs) for
what is to be done with children found by CWCs to be in need of care and protection. The
options listed are adoption, placement in a shelter (institutionalisation) and foster care. There
is not even a mention of placement in the extended family. How did this happen in India, of
all places, when the extended family is so much a part of our social fabric?
The need for ordinary citizens to organise against UNICEF and Save the Children in
India
The answer lies not just in the biases of the UNICEF and other NGOs that have monopolised
the conversation in India on child welfare, but also because no one really questions
measures suggested in the name of child welfare. There is an assumption that activists and
organisations devoted to the cause of children must be noble, and that their suggestions can
only be good for society.
In our opinion this assumption is proving to be dangerous not just for families or parents, but
also for children. Children placed under state protection have fared terribly in the West
most of them face a fate of total social isolation, unemployment and drug addiction. Many of
the girls supposedly protected by the State, end up in prostitution. Most children in State
care attain majority as school drop outs, and many proceed swiftly on a path that lands them
in prison. There are alarming reports of the wide powers given to child protection officials to
remove children from their families, being misused to funnel children into adoption rackets
and seedy paedophile rings.
So we cannot afford to allow UNICEF, Save the Children and other NGOs to continue on the
course they have set for Indian children and Indian families. This paper is our first step in
building an informed critique of their approach to child rights and child protection.
__________________
140
A few months ago in New Delhi, there were reports in the newspapers of the Chairman of the Delhi Child
Welfare Committee objecting to the police publishing photos of missing children. The police responded with
surprise saying that the publication of these photos within the first few days of a childs going missing was the
key factor in atleast half the cases where they were able to trace lost children. This is an example of how
counter-productive a formulaic approach to child welfare, especially confidentiality laws, can be.
- 52 -

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SAVE YOUR CHILD FROM UNICEF

A study of UNICEFs biased and false claims about Indian parents

Part II: Basic Statistical Errors

Part III: Physical Abuse: Bias, Exaggeration and Rigged

Part IV: Sexual Abuse: Bias, Distortion and Rigged

Part V: Bias and Lies on Emotional Abuse and Girl Child

Part VI: Misleading Parents and Manipulating Children

Part VII: Conclusion

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.

The Report is available on the internet at: http://wcd.nic.in/childabuse.pdf.

Some of these are discussed in Part VII of this paper.

Arbitrary and unsystematic selection of respondents

Page 17 of the Report.

Page 15 of the Report.

Arbitrary variation in size of different classes of child respondents

See pages 17-18 of the Report.

Page 76 of the Report.

The exact figure is 68.99% (page 44).

Misrepresentation and exaggeration of own data

acts from slapping, to disciplining by corporal punishment, to injury-causing assaults, in

Page 43 of the Report.

Page 47 and 48 of the Report.

WE DO NOT GIVE THE ABOVE ANALYSIS TO MAKE ANY CLAIMS AS

See page 66 of the Report.

Page 67 of the Report.

Pages 66 and 68 of the Report.

Page 48 of the Report.

Laws regarding physical abuse by parents

Page 75 of the Report.

WE DO NOT ANALYSE THE SEXUAL ABUSE FIGURES OF THE

Child made to fondle perpetrator

Page 80 of the Report.

Child made to show private parts to perpetrator

Child forced to view perpetrators private parts

Child made to view pornographic pictures

Page 83 of the Report.

Page 94 of the Report.

Reports Findings on Sexual

Reports Findings on Sexual

Page 99 of the Report.

Page 73 of the Report.

Page 73 of the Report.

A rate of 11.6% is stated on page 81 of the Report.

Page 90 of the Report.

The Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act, 2012.

Page 105 of the Report.

Page 168 of the Report.

Pages 103 and 168 of the Report.

Pages 155 to 157 of the Report.

Page 122 of the Report.

Page 123 of the Report.

Page 121 of the Report.

Government policing of ordinary family life

Child protection is an industry, not just an ideology

Page 123 of the Report.

Page 121 of the Report.

Page 43 to 44 of the Report.

subjective assessments. Even if made correctly, they cannot reasonably be taken as

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