Child Sexual Abuse in India during COVID-19

Pages: 173-178
Sakshi Vaish and Irfan Fayaz (Jindal Institute of Behavioural Sciences (JIBS) O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana)

Child sexual abuse (CSA) remains one of the most pressing and far-reaching issues in India today. The trauma resulted from the sexual abuse can contribute to numerous adverse effects on children throughout their whole lifespan. In most cases, the child sexual abuse is not reported and the child is not provided with adequate therapeutic and protective assistance. And as a result, the child has to suffer alone in silence. The main aim of this paper is to discuss and evaluate the nature and all the significant aspects of child sexual abuse in the perspective of Rational Choice Theory. It aims to explore how familial and socio-cultural risk factors are associated with child sexual abuse. The paper will also discuss the ascending growth in the number of child sexual abuse in India during the Covid-19 and provide an overview of the studies done on child sexual abuse during the pandemic. Data for this paper were collected from the incidents of child sexual abuse reported in the newspapers, therefore all the data are secondary. The approach of the research is pragmatic and descriptive method to evaluate the information is chosen. The findings or the results display that there has been a huge spike in the number of child sexual abuse during Covid-19 in India; unemployment remains one of the main reasons for the abuse; in most cases, the offender is well-known to the victim, and there is a huge lack of information about the laws of the country regarding child sexual abuse. Thus, it is quite understandable from this study that Covid-19 and the lockdown have deeply influenced and fueled the already existed issue of Child Sexual Abuse in India.