There is no door. Or if there is one, it is not the child’s to shut, and shutting it would be read as a small act of rebellion. The bed is shared, often with an adult, for years. The child is bathed where the family walks past, changed in the front room, lifted and turned around so the relatives can see how big they have grown. Nothing in the house belongs only to them. A locked diary would offend everyone. Wanting an hour alone gets read as a sulk, or a worry, or a sign the child is keeping something from you.
All of it is done with love. It is how an Indian family says: you are ours, there is nothing to fear here, there are no walls between the people who love you. I have no argument with the love. I want to follow it to the one place it goes wrong, which is that we have raised a child who has never, not once, been allowed a boundary of their own.
How a child learns where the line is
A child works out what a boundary is by being handed one. Some small thing they are allowed to keep, or refuse, or shut, while the adults around them stand back and let it happen. From enough of those small moments, the idea settles in: I have an edge, the edge is real, and a person who pushes past it is doing something wrong. None of that arrives in words. It is learned from being respected, again and again, until a child can feel the shape of their own line in the dark.
Indian children mostly do not get those moments. Their bodies are there for anyone who reaches out. Their space is everybody’s. The no they offer is the lightest thing in the room, overruled as a matter of course, usually kindly. What grows in place of a boundary is a kind of fluency in being intruded upon. The child gets very good at being handled.
Where the danger already is
Think about who is near that child. Almost all sexual abuse of children in India happens at home, or in a relative’s home, and the person who does it is nearly always someone the child knows. The government’s 2007 study, the largest the country has run, found this. The National Crime Records Bureau finds it again every year in the cases that reach a police station. A stranger is the exception nobody should plan around. The threat is usually a familiar adult with easy, daily, unquestioned access to a child’s body.
And abuse is, at bottom, a boundary being crossed. The trouble is that you cannot feel a line go that you were never allowed to draw. To a child who has spent their whole life being touched and entered and displayed without anyone asking first, the abuse does not stand out as a different kind of thing. It reads as one more adult doing the usual. There is no contrast, so there is no alarm. The worst of it arrives wearing the same clothes as all the small intrusions we taught the child to sit still through.
The kisses and the cheek-pinching are not crimes, and nobody is calling them that. The problem is only that a child is never once allowed to wave any of it off, so they never learn that waving it off is a thing they are even allowed to do.
The people who study this keep finding the same thing from the other side. A child who grows up sure of their own body, who knows a no will be heard, is harder to abuse and quicker to tell. The child with no line of their own is easier to reach and slower to speak.
There is a second loss underneath the first. A child with no private space has nowhere to go. No door, no corner, no half hour, nothing they have ever been permitted to close against a grown-up. So even the child who senses something is wrong has no room to retreat into, and no practice in the idea that retreating is even allowed. We did not just leave the line untaught. We left the child with nowhere to stand.
Let them keep something
So keep the closeness. None of this calls for a colder home, or locked doors, or a child held at arm’s length from the people who love them. The missing piece is small. Let the child own something. One boundary the family agrees to honour.
It is worth being careful here, because the idea can curdle into its opposite. A child’s boundary is a wall against being intruded on. It is not a sealed room where an adult gets to be alone with them, out of sight, and it is not licence to stop watching over a child’s safety. Those are different things, and a parent keeps doing both at once. You respect that a child’s body and space and few belongings are their own, and you still keep track of who they are with, and where, and for how long. Privacy from the family’s prying, never privacy from the family’s care. The boundary belongs to the child. The work of keeping it, and of watching over them, both sit with the grown-ups. A child who does not want to be touched is not made to be. A shut door stays shut. The small pile of things a child calls theirs goes through nobody else’s hands.
And it asks nothing of a child that a child cannot give. A small child cannot defend themselves against an adult, and we are not asking them to. The whole of the job is ours. We honour the line so the child grows up knowing the line is there, knowing that crossing it is wrong, and knowing they are allowed to say so where someone can hear.
Privacy is not a foreign import, and it does not mean a child is turning cold on their own family. It is the first lesson a person gets in being a self. A child who has held one boundary and watched it hold has learned something the boundary-less child never does: that lines are real, and that they get a say when one is crossed.
It costs nothing, and it survives a one-room house, because it was never really about space. You turn your back while a child changes. You ask before going through their bag. You tell the aunt, gently, that the child does not have to be kissed today if they would rather not. You give them one shelf, or one box, or one end of the sleeping mat, and you do not open it without asking.
So this week, pick one. Let a child shut a door, or keep a thing to themselves, or turn down a touch, and let it stand. Do not call it rudeness. Do not overrule it to keep a relative happy. You are not turning the child out of the family by doing this. You are telling them, in the only way a young child really takes anything in, that they have a self worth keeping, and that anyone who walks into it uninvited is the one who is wrong.
It will cost you something small and real, and it helps to know that before you do it. An aunt will look slighted when the child is not made to hug her. Someone will mutter that you are spoiling the child, that this is not how children were raised in their day. Let them mutter. A relative’s hour of feeling put out is a cheap price, and the child reads every second of it: they saw that when I did not want to, the grown-up I trust stood next to me and not with the room.
Holding our children close was never the mistake. The mistake was deciding that closeness meant a child should own nothing at all, not even themselves. Give a child something that is theirs. Start this week, with one thing.
If a child is in danger or has been harmed, call Childline on 1098. It is free and open 24x7, in many Indian languages. If this is close to you and you are carrying something from your own childhood, iCALL offers free, confidential counselling at 9152987821. You do not have to carry it alone.
Sources