I have recently started visiting this site and this is among one of my early reads.
Hats off to you meenakshi....
The description couldnn't get any closer to a real situation. There is a lot of innocence passing on from your child into your writing; a good piece!

The golden moments of a person's initiation into sex should be the times when the young person sits face to face , not with a prostitute, a sexy TV show or a bawdy movie, with one's own parents. Nothing can ever match that intimate encounter.

Many Asian parents cringe at the thought of their children asking about sex, as though the moment is the most stressful in their years of child-rearing. Such moment should open not just eyes and minds but opportunities for trust, further bonding and care. These are the ingredients that will pull children away from sexual adventurism and early sexploration.

Meenakshi did well in facing the issues squarely, rather than letting surrogate parents (called TV, literature and other media) take over, with disastrous results.

Hats off!

Great ! u cud convey the needed so alearly and in such a subtle way..... amazing !! u hav that art of conversation thru which u cud explain the desired to the little one !!!!!!

ANAKTV SEAL (Philippines)
by Mag Cruz Hatol

column for 14 September 2008

HEALING VICTIMS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE

At the Chinh India Forum last month, one session began with the screening of “That Year, That Day”, a riveting video on child sexual abuse. It was a no-nonsense production that brought to its producer-director couple, Meenakshi and Vinay Rai, recognition in India as well as in international competitions. In a capsule, the piece prodded viewers to “wake up to the issue of child abuse”.

It was also appropriate that Jasjit Purewal, an articulate Indian socio-psychologist, discussed not only the film’s merits but the issue of abuse in general, she having been deeply involved with work on women, violence and gender issues for several years. Purewal is a busy woman whose hands are full in another aspect of human care: healing.

In the years of her work in New Delhi, Purewal noticed that what were repeatedly knocking on her clinic door were victims of sexual violence. The percentage vis a vis usual victims of simple gender issues was increasing in time. As a matter of fact, she observed, the figures were the same in whatever class or age. She was becoming convinced that the myth of Asia in general, and India in particular, being “family-oriented” was debunked. She was quick to cite media which have become namby pamby about sexual reportage as an accessory to the general indifference. Resultantly, when it comes to sexuality, discomfort has become a tradition. “If we know our children will be sexual beings, as they have been destined to be, we must prepare them intellectually while they are young. Why are we always silent?” she muses. As proof, there is no existing grammar of sexuality, not in India, not in the Philippines.

It is this indifference that has caused the worldwide child pornography industry to balloon to USD 65 billion. Beijing staged its Olympics at USD 40 billion.

One of the most startling discoveries Purewal made in the course of her study was the inordinate amount of abuse being heaped on boys, at least until they reached puberty. It is assumed that as a boy becomes physically stronger, he finds the gall and balls to fight back. With boys, sexual abuse appeared age-related; with girls it was continuous.

Purewal was aghast that the cases of sexual abuse were not mere phenomena but a reality that was ascending to epidemic proportions. However, that sordid reality was persistently being discussed in backdoor whispers while media was having a heyday trivializing or sensationalizing cases!

“Why was there so much pedophilia?” she wondered. The statistics were so regular in a large land mass, population density and cultural diversity such as India. “It was feeding on a cycle”, she concluded, that if a victim is mentally or emotionally healed from it, “the scars would nevertheless be deep. Healing was possible but the victim remained scarred for life.” Such stark reality surfaced in the Rai film. A number of men, now in their prime years, spoke gallantly about a painful fragment of their childhood but in the recollection, a few of them broke down. The Rais are now inspiredly doing another film, aptly titled, “Memory Becomes a Scar.”

Purewal today works with eunuchs, sex workers, homosexuals as well as men and women who have suffered some form of sexual abuse. Her sessions on child sexual abuse put men and women together and the room becomes genderless. Trust is built and nurtured until the once-victims begin talking about their experiences. From all this openness, Purewal is able to peddle hope. She starts when the victims begin unmasking themselves, holding sacred the very moment in the workshop where innocence should have been preserved. It is where her “healing” process gets down to work.

“Stranger things have been happening these days,” Purewal recounts. “Alarmingly, there are more women who have become sexually addicted and they come to me now to learn control, a part of healing.” She employs a combination of modern psychology with indigenous belief processes. According to the Vedas, man has three meridians, one governed by the body, the other ruled by the mind and the last by the spirit. The second chakra of the body is the sexual chakra, the abode of the self. “It is the self that is cosmic and indestructible”, she clarifies. “Within the cosmic Indian vision, the erotic being or the sexual union is like experiencing the same nirvana energy.”

From a one-stop crisis center, Purewal’s clinic has evolved into a place where police reports are culled, studied and addressed, hence becoming an action center. Later, it has morphed into a healing center. Much of Delhi now sends her women who needed comforting and reassurance after being defiled or beaten up.