India child labor Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Winning the War on Child Sexual Abuse

Despite a shared interest in protecting children, sexual predation upends millions of young lives every year. Now, rights advocates and campaigners in India are calling for a global war to end the silence that has sustained this scourge.

NEW DELHI – With every new crisis that the world faces, humanity’s differences appear increasingly intractable. Religion, ethnicity, history, politics, and economics have all become tools to denigrate and demean. People seem to be drifting apart, and no country is immune from divisive discourse.

But there is one fundamental issue where contrasts dissolve into consensus: the desire to keep children safe. Protecting the physical, emotional, and psychological wellbeing of children is a universal instinct that no faith, dogma, or ideology can defeat. And yet, despite this shared instinct, children everywhere continue to be preyed upon. Too often, societies ignore child sexual abuse, owing to family pride or fear of stigma. The world can stay silent no longer.

The numbers are truly alarming. According to a 2016 World Health Organization report, one of every four adults was sexually abused as a child. A 2007 Indian government study found that 53% of children in India faced some form of sexual abuse growing up. And human trafficking, especially trafficking of children, is a booming business, with annual average profits totaling $150 billion. In other words, child sexual abuse is a moral epidemic afflicting the entire world –one that we can defeat only when we openly declare open against it.

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