Tell me of a child’s beauty that waits inside, lying dormant ready to grow.
Is this the beauty, not stolen but wrongly borrowed,
the spirit and the treasure hidden?
Or is this the false beauty of the person whole,
lost behind walls of secrets, lies and truths to be told.
Beauty is the peace, the mended holes in body and soul.
The time of knowing, of feeling, of being and understanding all that has passed and making it one.
The above poem is the pain and abuse that a girl or boy goes through after he or she gets mature enough to realise that whatever happened to them was wrong and an unacceptable crime. I have tried to express the journey that a sexual assault victim goes through. The smallest of things that happen to us every day in the form of abuse makes us uncomfortable and we never speak up. At that tender age we don’t even realise something bad is happening to us.
I talked to around 10-12 people. 6 were my relative and my elders. But it was quite difficult to speak to them about this issue as they are not comfortable talking about it. But the rest of the people were my peers and friends aged between 19-25 years old. Out of those six, three of them had been a victim of sexual abuse. It was shocking to see the number of people who have gone through sexual abuse in their childhood and did not really know how to deal with it and who to share it with.
The main problem that I found was children think that it is their fault and it was their mistake to allow the accused to let them do such heinous crime and they were a victim of abuse. But we need to make them understand that it is not them but the person’s fault who committed such a heinous a crime.
