The reason I did not speak up about the abuse for 14 years is simply because I did not know that I was supposed to speak up. I did not know how and to whom I can speak to. In fact, I did not know that what happened to me was one of the worst social evils prevalent in our society and it is called child sexual abuse. I did not even know that I was not the only victim to this kind of abuse. I learned it only later that almost every other person has faced some sort of sexual abuse in their childhood.

For a very long time, I was feeling guilty of having sinned, masturbation being my ‘sin’. My parents and my teachers perhaps might have thought that teaching me about the changes taking place in my body, as I was growing up, was not important. If we think critically, it was the conservative nature of my parents and my teachers who consciously or unconsciously chose to ignore the subject of ‘personal safety education‘ that made it easy for my abuser to make me believe that masturbation was a sin, which eventually prevented me from calling him out. He became my teacher. He made me a party to his crime. Would I have dared to tell my parents that I got raped for having committed a ‘sin’? Of course not.

#PreventChildSexualAbuse