How to Disable Asian Children: Book Reviews
By N.D. Wyteman
Pinki Virani (2000) Bitter Chocolate. Child Sexual Abuse in India. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. pp. xli + 245. isbn 0140298975 (softback).
Wang Ping (2000) Aching for Beauty. Footbinding in China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. xiv + 265. isbn 0816636052 (hardback)
These two books round off a millennium of abuse reports, with studies by two Asian women who are also coming to terms with their own childhoods. The two complement and contrast with one another in curious ways. An Indian journalist sexually abused in childhood (but apparently oblivious to the lengthy historical records of Asian child sexual abuse) reaches for Euro-American evidence to underpin her collection of Indian interview data suggesting that such abuse is a huge, hidden, festering sore on India's collective psyche and family life. A Chinese woman now teaching in the US trawls through a thousand years of literary evidence depicting a Chinese practice widely regarded (by westerners) as physical and psychological child torture leading to life-long disability. She reconstructs it as a marker of female culture, erotic power and intimate communication, not least in order to rationalise the secret self-inflicted footbinding in her own childhood in response to family taunts about her feet.
In the Indian case, child sexual abuse has apparently been bubbling away below the surface from antiquity to the present: always condemned, but seldom recognised in practice; when recognised usually covered up; the abusers very seldom brought before a court; the accusation, on the rare occasions when made public, being even more rarely provable; and the abuses ever continuing to cause widespread and often lifelong damage. In the Chinese situation, what is now perceived as severe home torture [1] became the socially approved norm for the dominant cultural group and its aspirants during at least 600 years but was targeted by anti-footbinding campaigners in the 19th century, outlawed early in the 20th century, and finally rooted out by Mao's revolutionaries in the 1950s. Footbinding was thus 'safe enough' by the 1960s for a young Chinese girl to hanker after it, as an alternative to deforming her feet with stiletto heels or (later) tattooing, starving or piercing selected parts of her body in the current peer-approved fashion.
Historical abuse in South Asia
The history of father-daughter incest can be traced from mythological eons in South Asia with the creation story of Prajapati's intercourse with his daughter, variously mentioned in the Rig Veda. Innocuous explanations can be given, e.g. that in any creation myth the deity made fertile what he had created, or that the first progenitors were incestuous because the choice of mates was rather limited. The earliest commentaries on Prajapati's activities seem nonetheless to take the story more literally and to disapprove of "doing what is not done". [2] In historical time, codes of conduct and law such as the Arthasastra and Manusmriti warned against such acts and prescribed severe punishment.
Some involvement of girls and boys in prostitution or as 'favourites' was also apparent in the ancient literature, as well as the marriage of girls at a very young age. Sexual intimacy of adult males with boys seems to have become more prominent in South Asia under Muslim rule, though Islam had heavy sanctions against such conduct. [3] Well-documented cases of child rape or sexual abuse can be found in published reports on medical jurisprudence based on court records from 1840. [4] After this there was a slow build-up of British official pressure against early marriage in the Indian population. Widespread disgust was expressed at the 'marital rape' of small girls by grown men, the physical and emotional trauma to the girls and the despairing shrieks from religious traditionalists facing deprivation of what they claimed was an essential part of their religion. [5] Such material is of course not popular reading in Male South Asia nowadays, and may be dismissed as Orientalist prejudice about Indian cultures. Yet Norman Chevers, recording medical jurisprudence from the 1850s to 1870, interspersed his detailed accounts of rape and brutalities in India with similar instances from Europe and America, to underline "an equally dark picture of the British character". [6]
Follow-up of this earlier investigative work has been extremely slow, hardly gathering momentum until the 1980s, allied with the rise of studies on Asian women's and girls' lives in general and on commercial sexual exploitation and AIDS prevention. Indian child abuse studies have been documented by Uma Segal, covering paediatric and sociological reviews and a child sexual abuse study from 1985. [7] Similar material began to be published in Pakistan from the late 1980s onward, with some focus on disabled children. [8] In Bangladesh, as part of an extended study of "stolen childhoods" among various groups, the anthropologist Thérèse Blanchet gives a detailed history of a 10-year old servant girl who was abused and finally killed in November 1993, and the desperate efforts of the middle class family to bribe its way out of the tragedy -- told from the sceptical view of an experienced researcher, yet not without passion. [9] By the later 1990s it was not hard to list many further and more specific studies concerning child sexual abuse in South Asia, from websites. [10]
Disbelief, Inertia, Shock Tactics
Contemplating the existence of at least 150 years of recorded medico-legal evidence of severe physical and sexual child abuse across South Asia, it is all the more remarkable that the Indian legal system seems to have remained practically incapable of defining laws more closely and arranging for cases to be investigated more carefully, so that children will have a better chance of legal protection and remedy against their fathers, brothers, uncles, and occasionally their female relatives. Pinki Virani (details above) reports dozens of cases from her notebooks, in a breathless, ungrammatical and often sensationalist manner, with little or no attempt to understand the family dynamics; yet the facts behind Virani's hype are quite credible in the light of the substantial literature accumulating from the mid-1980s onward. The psychiatrists, counsellors and lawyers whom Virani interviewed during several months of fieldwork were understandably reluctant to have their work reconstructed as melodrama by an intensely committed journalist:
"'Most adult males who sexually abuse children are...' Dr Parikh searches for the word, 'They are...'
'Bastards?' Dr Rajesh Parikh nods in agreement, 'I do not approve of the usage of strong language but yes, grown-up men who sexually molest children are...'
'Bastards?'
'Definitely'." (p. xxvi)
The consensus seems to have been that Pinki Virani's flair and appetite for publicity could serve to punch home much-needed messages and stir some senior lawyers and civil servants out of chronic complacency, disbelief and inertia.
In fact, the Law Commission of India had already begun formulating a very detailed overview and response to issues raised by 'Shakshi' and other women's campaigning bodies concerning the rape and sexual abuse laws and their application to children, much before "Bitter Chocolate" was published. [11] What Pinki Virani's book may more usefully achieve is to drive home to the wealthy and educated classes that child sexual abuse is not merely a nasty perversion to which servants and coolies might turn in their impoverished lives. It concerns serious damage to or by their own sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, husbands and wives, and their own highly respectable fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, and religious teachers. Whether ultimately there will be sufficient public outrage, and sufficient well-chosen channels for action, remains to be seen. Nothing lasting can or will be achieved without the political will of the four per cent of the population that could read this English-language work. By far the strongest instinct will be for denial and concealment.
Whispers from China
The hypothesis that campaigning against South Asian child sexual abuse could result in it being considerably restricted, if not totally eliminated, is given some strength by China's virtual elimination of deliberate footcrushing. Yet the lively but ambivalent treatment of the latter by Wang Ping (details above) suggests that there will be no imminent or easy victory. While Pinki has no historical depth at all, Ping is largely historical in this published doctoral dissertation, giving not only a "brief history of footbinding" (pp. 29-53), but nibbling at many interesting social phenomena (food, sex, art, politics, pain, language, masquerade -- what remains unnibbled?) through the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911). A numerically vast and long-lasting society, in which able-footed women were ridiculed while attractiveness and empowerment arose from having crippled feet, should certainly attract the attention of modern proponents of a social model of disability. Will we yet hear from the "wheelchair-bound" [sic] on the resonance of sexually alluring wheelchairs with the titillating 'golden lotus' bound feet?
The mainly male-inflicted sexual abuse of children lamented by Pinki contrasts with the female-inflicted torture of girls described by Ping. Another inversion is that Pinki's upper classes find it hard to believe that all those sordid gropings and penetrations may touch their own elevated ranks. Ping's literary accounts of life and times with crushed feet very largely concern the Chinese leisured classes, though she reiterates that footbinding was 'widespread'. Here, Ping's enthusiasm might be further adrift than Pinki's outrage. Ping works hard to show that in aid of upward mobility, Chinese women reconstructed not only their daughter's feet but women's whole language and literary heritage:
"Although footbinding was not the object of their own erotic gaze or fetishistic obsession, it appeared everywhere in their texts as a natural part of the whole organic body. Footbinding and writing played an extremely important role in Chinese women's self-identity." (p. 230)
Writing? Extremely important? Were not the vast majority of Chinese women fully occupied in the skills and crafts of the poor rural home, kitchen, child rearing and some field cultivation? Did writing have a role in the lives of any but a tiny minority of upper class Chinese women during the Ming and Qing? Even taking account of the 'Nushu' script used by some 'ordinary' women in one unusual province, scholarly opinion favours a maximum of 10% 'functional literacy' among women at large in the Qing era. Wang Ping herself admits that education was "usually available only to girls from the gentry families or the upper classes" (p. 154). Are those who could write the only ones who count?
The 'literary' evidence that Wang Ping provides for her historical assertions is highly readable, mildly pornographic, and probably quite misleading when it comes to the lives of most Chinese women. With a largely western readership she will seldom be challenged on Chinese literature. It was riskier for Ping to depict Oedipus as one who is "himself a mixture of human and beast, and the physical evidence is his clubfeet, the deformed or half-evolved feet that betray his link to the animal world and its power." (p.13) This sort of self-granted literary licence to play with Mediterranean mythology raises doubts as to whether the more central Chinese historical evidence might have been selected and massaged to fit a predetermined thesis. [12]
Ping or Pinki?
The two books raise far more sickening questions than they can answer. Infant and child bodies and minds are highly malleable, and the early years have everywhere been within women's domain and power. As women were shaped and clamped by social and physical pressures, so they have exercised the same or greater shapings on their 'living dolls'. In fact, head-shaping and other deformation of infants has occurred across the world far longer and more widely than footcrushing, with just as little apparent reason. [13] Powerful religious and political movements, run almost entirely by men, have also believed that by moulding children's early minds they should be captive for life.
The international porno-industry, the democratisation and promotion of recreational sex as a fundamental need and human right, and the socio-cultural delinking of sex from any personal responsibility for child rearing, presumably contribute to a steady increase in the global appetite and demand for compliant, faceless, tender flesh. (A classic example, again from China, was the habitual use of blind girls and women for prostitution, providing an 'interface' still more defenceless than that of a sighted child). Meanwhile, fundamentalisms of every kind compete for blank young minds to engrave.
Ping's is a polished, civilised product, to tickle the jaded western literary palate. [14] Pinki's book is raw and muddled, but ultimately more challenging: her Asian child-millions are having their bodies and minds seriously damaged today. It is nobody's cultural obligation that this wrecking should forever be ignored or smoothed over.
Notes
[1] See for example the detailed victim account reproduced at:
http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/humanities/history/reader/footbinding.htm,
reporting how a seven-year old girl underwent the standard daily process. During a three year period her mother and then mother-in-law crushed her feet causing the toes to rot and skin to peel away, and then forced her with daily beatings to jump about on the putrifying mess, suffering agonizing and unremitting pain. NOTE: Site users may suffer some nausea while reading.
[2] The material is translated, discussed and extensively referenced in WD O'Flaherty (1975) Hindu Myths, pp. 25-35, 313-315. There is some resonance with East and South-East Asian creation stories, with brother-sister incest and deformed children resulting. See Fuminobu Murakami (1988) Incest and rebirth in Kojiki. In: Monumenta Nipponica 43 (4) 455-463.
[3] See e.g. documentation in CM Agrawal (1989) Sodomy in medieval India, Aligarh J. Oriental Studies 4 (1/2) 123-131. Compare, however. the 'street scene' in the Tamil Manimekhalai Canto 3, with boy transvestites and sexualized description of children on play apparatus; and possibly contrary evidence in Shilappadikaram Canto 26 & 27. A Daniélou (1993) Manimekhalai, 10-12, Delhi: Penguin; Ibid. (1993) The Shilappadikaram, 166, 176-177, Delhi: Penguin.
[4] N Chevers (1854) Report on medical jurisprudence in the Bengal Presidency, Indian Annals of Medical Science, 3 (Oct.): 243-426; e.g. the case of child sexual torture from 1843 (pp. 308-309). Chevers published earlier than Ambroise Tardieu whose series of French medico-legal child abuse cases is usually considered the first in Europe. (Tardieu's earliest case was from 1838).
[5] Editorial (1890) Child-wives, Indian Medical Gazette 25: 272-273. This gives medico-legal studies in which victims were as young as two or three years old. (Intercourse in marriage was legal if the girl was aged 10). Many other reports in the Indian Medical Gazette sketch a grim picture, e.g. rape by adult women on young boys (IMG, 1871, p. 232); torture of a youthful homosexual (IMG, 1874, p. 67); medical examination in cases of rape, including young children (IMG, 1902, pp. 230-234).
[6] N Chevers (1870) A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India, pp. 5 & 671-709, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. In 66 court trials for rape, 27 victims were aged between 4 and 10 years. One blind man was convicted of raping a 3-year old (pp. 677-678).
[7] U Segal (1992) Child abuse in India: an empirical report on perceptions, Child Abuse & Neglect 16: 887-908. Among the citations is: CT Castelino (1985) Child sexual abuse: a retrospective study. Bombay: Tata Institute of Social Sciences, unpublished.
[8] Report of the Seminar "Child Abuse in Pakistan" Sept. 29, 1989, Peshawar: Pakistan Paediatric Association NWFP. Anis ur Rehman (1992) Thoughts of an abused child, in: A Caring Society, Peshawar: Frontier Post Publications. AS Muslim (1993) Mental Retardation in Pakistan, 2nd edn, pp. 122-123, 128-130. M Miles (1996) Walking delicately around mental handicap, sex education and abuse in Pakistan, Child Abuse Review 5: 263-274. See also the stirring of interest about deaf Indian children and sexual abuse, in S Patil & CY Gopinath (2000) Exploring the sexual vulnerability of urban deaf Indians, Mumbai.
[9] T Blanchet (1996) Lost Innocence, Stolen Childhoods, pp. 199-217, Dhaka: University Press Ltd, isbn 9840513508. Blanchet cites further reports of specific studies carried out with Bangladeshi colleagues, on children in brothels, male child prostitution, etc.
[10] See e.g. A Meena et al (1998) A Situation Analysis of Sex Work and Trafficking in Nepal with reference to Children, Kathmandu, UNICEF, 186 pp.; AKM Masud Ali et al (1997) Short Study on the Street Child Prostitutes in Dhaka City, Dhaka, Red Barnet, 140 pp.; many further items on India are listed at http://www.inet.co.th/org/gaatw/DocCen/India.htm ; and on neighbouring countries at http://atsec.tripod.com/atsecbangladeshchapter/id5.html. Cf newsletters of Sahil reporting studies on "Child Sexual Abuse in Pakistan" at: http://www.sahil.org/html/newsletter/.
[11] The Law Commission's full text appears at: http://www.nic.in/lawcom/rapelaws.htm
[12] Sophocles (5th century BC) has the legendary Oedipus (= Swollen Foot) so named from having his infant feet riveted together when he was put out to die, and this has been the conventional story. Sophocles transl. EF Watling (1947) The Theban Plays, p.45, Penguin Classics. Marie Delcourt suggested that swollen feet were a sign of extreme hunger, so Oedipus was all the more a signal of divine judgement, sterility, plague and famine. M Delcourt (1938) Stérilités mystérieuses & naissances maléfiques dans l'antiquité classique, p.46, Paris: Droz. Others have since picked up the idea that Oedipus was born with club feet (without explaining how he later became a capable fighter). Portraying Oedipus as part animal gives him a new twist, with even less basis.
[13] EJ Dingwall (1931) Artificial Cranial Deformation, a contribution to the study of ethnic mutilations, London: Bale, Sons & Danielsson.
[14] Cf the academic course web-page on "Body Histories: the case of footbinding" by Dorothy Ko, the major authority in this field: "... to explore new ways of theorizing footbinding. If we succeed, we would become famous; even if we fail, the voyeuristic journey promises pleasures in itself."
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