[The ‘Palathayi’ case refers to a shocking instance of child abuse — of a 10-year-old female child in Palathayi, Kerala, by her school teacher, K Padmarajan, a noted BJP leader. Not just the act, but also the way in which the police and the ruling CPM handled it contributed to the public outrage around it. Worse, the child counselors’ role in intimidating the child, bombarding it with invasive, sexualised and irrelevant leading questions, and the police’s long interrogations, revealed, once again, the terrible rot in Kerala’s child protection machinery. The police investigation proved extremely biased in favour of the accused, and the team had to be replaced after protests by activists including feminists, and the family’s pleas. Despite complaints by the child’s mother against the counselors, the higher authorities, including the much-romanticized Minister for Women and Children of that time, K K Shailaja, did little to deliver justice. The verdict of the court in this case which sentenced the accused to life imprisonment, condemned the counselors’ questioning and asked for immediate action against them. The counselor was suspended after the verdict, but suspension hardly suffices as a punishment form blatant verbal rape of a ten year old.

Althea has been raising concerns about the state of child welfare, especially of female children from historically-marginalized social groups and family circumstances in Kerala even before. It is apparent that we need to keep speaking about it, and we will. This statement appeared first in the Malayalam online journal Truecopy Think. This is a translation of the original Malayalam statement by Gayatri Devi, who is part of Althea.]