Having experienced one long war and two insurgencies, Sri Lanka is no stranger to violence. But until a few years ago, violent crimes targeting children were relatively rare in this wounded land. Historical maladies such as female infanticide, which tormented many of the country's Southasian compatriots, were unknown. There was poverty, malnourishment and child labour, and certainly some amount of child abuse – including sexual abuse – shrouded in the privacy of homes, schools and religious institutions. But violent crimes against children, of the sort that cannot be hidden from either the police or the public, were uncommon.
Not anymore. Today, violent crimes against children are everyday news. The end of 2012 and the start of 2013 brought news of two horrendous cases, one from the Tamil-majority north and the other from the Sinhala-majority south. In late December, on the small island of Mandativu off the Jaffna coast, the body of a four-year-old girl, reportedly raped and strangled, was found in an abandoned well. In early January, in Colombo district, a baby girl died after her father assaulted her and burnt the lower half of her body. The father, who was out on bail after allegedly raping his 17-year-old cousin, has since killed himself.
Statistics about child rape and sexual abuse paint a horrendous picture, especially by Lankan standards. According to a police spokesman, over 700 cases of child rape and sexual abuse were reported in the first six months of 2012 – a rate of four a day. The real figure may be significantly higher: according to the National Child Protection Authority, over 20,000 instances of child abuse may have occurred in the first half of 2012. In 2011, 1169 cases were reported – an average of over three a day. That same year, the Family Health Bureau warned that 10 to 14 percent of underage girls are sexually abused every year, and about seven percent became pregnant at a very young age. Reports for 2010 recorded that three children were raped or abused every day. The problem is particularly acute in the country's north, according to the Government Agent (GA) of Jaffna. The GA also reported that there are about "600 child abuse cases annually", and that "this immoral culture was not there before the conflict or during the conflict period, but has emerged after the conflict". Currently, according to unconfirmed reports, about five children are raped or abused in Sri Lanka every day.
Why has post-war Sri Lanka become so extremely unsafe for its children? "The returning warrior risks carrying the seed of violence into the very heart of his city," wrote French anthropologist René Girard in his 1972 book Violence and the Sacred. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a relatively new name for an age-old phenomenon. The question is whether PTSD affects societies as well, especially ones which have been consistently and extensively exposed to exceptional levels of violence. Is Sri Lanka's plague of anti-child violence rooted in the country's bloody past? Did the triumphant and lionised warriors of the Fourth Eelam War bring back with them the bacillus of violent mores? What happens when a society is exposed to a military culture and is injected with concomitant military values, as Sri Lanka has been?