Some of the increases can be explained by growing awareness of child rights leading to increased reporting of incidents, but Sri Lanka remains a country where “the family unit is extremely tight-knit and the honor of the individual reflects on the entire family,” says Alia Whitney-Johnson, the founder of an NGO working with survivors of sexual abuse in Sri Lanka, who was interviewed by TIME via e-mail. “It is extremely difficult to report abuse, particularly incest.”
That means it’s unlikely that greater reporting is behind any but a small proportion of the growing figures. Instead, “the incidence of statutory rape and child abuse in Sri Lanka is a growing problem,” UNICEF says.
The traumas suffered during Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009, may have a role to play. “When the dust settles, that’s when it hits them. That’s when you see severe violent reactions to small things that under normal circumstances would not have happened,” explains Reza Hossaini, UNICEF’s Sri Lanka representative. “It’s a combination of a culture of silence and culture of impunity,” he says, that breeds the “continuation of violence and abuse.”
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But a more important factor may be the growing number of Sri Lankan women who seek to alleviate poverty at home by taking jobs overseas as domestic helpers. The children they leave behind are often defenseless against abusive fathers and predatory male relatives. (Even so, a comparison with the Philippines — another country where large numbers of women have been obliged to find work overseas — is disconcerting. Based on available official statistics, there are roughly 17 cases of child abuse for every 100,000 people in Sri Lanka; in the Philippines, there are just six cases per 100,000 head of population.)
Typical of the case files that cross the desk of Esther Gnanakan, a child psychologist at a Colombo NGO, is that of a 10-year-old girl sexually abused by her father over a year ago. Sudden movements and sounds still frighten the girl, she suffers from nightmares and cannot control her bladder. With a mother working as a domestic helper in the Middle East and relatives unwilling to take her in, she now lives in a juvenile shelter in the Sri Lankan capital. “The child has no other place to go,” Gnanakan says. “We’re just hoping the mother will come back.”
When Whitney-Johnson first arrived and met young girls who had survived sexual abuse, she says it opened her eyes “to the reality that many children face in Sri Lanka.” The girls she worked with were “survivors of incest, and many of them had mothers who were working abroad, leaving them in the care of alcoholic fathers or stepfathers.” As they matured, some had the courage to take legal action, but “as a result, they faced years of court cases,” Whitney-Johnson says.
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