It was always about Raj being weird. His family, school staff, college friends and now colleagues…all of them perceive Raj as someone who is not NORMAL. Why??? Well, that’s something nobody could answer. Being shy, not outspoken, being restless, anxious and self-occupied were some of his traits that people used to perceive and label him as Not- Normal. But there was one group of people that always loved him and that was….kids…children of around 6-10 years…from his neighborhood, his relatives, and any random child he meets with, would get comfortable with him..He used to love children and undoubtedly, felt comfortable himself when with kids.
There came a time when Raj started going into a shell. His socialization reduced substantially. Is family too couldn’t help him as he never expressed anything, and always locked himself in his own room. His younger brother wrote him a mail in which he suggested Raj to go to a psychologist if he is not able to express himself with anyone else. Slightly liking this suggestion, Raj approached a psychologist.
After a couple of meetings with a psychologist, he could trust her and started revealing about himself. His drawings reflected loneliness, low self-esteem, lack of confidence and love for kids. The psychologist when probed him about his stress on drawing ‘children’ in all his drawings, hit the dart.
To the psychologist’s surprise, Raj’s so-called problem was not very simple. It had a lot of dimensions to it. His narratives reflected a potential harm to children…harm could be a sophisticated work for ‘sexual abuse’ in this case.
Raj, was brought up in a family where he was a neglected child because of his introvert nature, and lack of excellence in most of the things. Being alone was developed as a habit due to ignorance from all the sides and then he started loving this loneliness. However, when with small children of age 6-10, he started feeling comfortable; comfortable to the point that gradually, he started fanaticizing about them. During one such fantasy, he accidently imagined fondling and later having sex with a child…and he was overwhelmed with the kind of pleasure he experienced. Raj got habituated to fanaticizing about children and there came a point when he realized that children are his sexual preference. Fanaticizing about children gave him the utmost sexual arousal and satisfaction.
But in our NORMAL society, Raj’s preferences of these kinds would never be accepted and he completely knew this. But the reason for a recent asocialization was that he started feeling like he was losing control. Till now things were in his mind, but he was scared that he may act out on is feelings and fantasies.
Well, a little weird story, but what’s weird differs from person to person. And for Raj, this was completely fine…that’s who he was.. and he will be… Sadly, in India, child sexual abusers, are just dumped into the prisons and are seldom given psychotherapeutic treatment. But the truth is, that’s what they need the most. Psychotherapy…Sexual preferences and sexual behaviors….are the two dimensions of sexual being. A lot of people do not have sexual preferences for the same age opposite sex…but they may have sexual preferences for children, same sex people, old age people or any other preference from which they get maximum pleasure and arousal. But with the societal norms, not all of them turn their preferences in actual behaviors. Sexual preferences are destined and we can’t change them. What we can do is to regulate those preferences and encourage that person to stop their preferences getting converted into actions. People can still enjoy NORMAL sex life with a person from the opposite sex while he/she fanaticizes about his/her sexual preference. Psychotherapy can help people get upto a point where the person is free from anxiety and impulses of acting out the desired sexual preferences, which in a way would be sexual abuse for which they could be put behind the bars. Now is the time when we can campaign about sexual preferences so that people with “Not-normal” sexual preferences get themselves expressed and treated to avoid probable sexual abuse, particularly child sexual abuse. Destiny is always decided, but changing it is in our hands.