Thiruvananthapuram abused victims still left in lurch

Thiruvananthapuram: They were opened in all district hospitals and five other government hospitals in early 2013 but One-Stop Crisis Cells (OSCC), where victims of sexual abuse are to be given all kinds of post-trauma assistance on an emergency basis, exist only in name. There is a cell in many of the district hospitals but none has a women police officer, a counsellor, a lawyer or even a dedicated gynaecologist.

Victims, therefore, continue to suffer the very humiliation and torture the OSCCs were supposed to prevent. “There is no point in sending the victims to the OSCC, there is no one there. So we are forced to put them through the same primitive administrative ritual. Six to ten hours in a police station to lodge a complaint, at least half a day in a hospital to see a gynaecologist for medical examination, then hours waiting outside the office of a lawyer, by which time the victim might feel this ordeal of inordinate delays and loaded questions to be more insufferable than even the original violation,” a senior welfare officer in the Social Justice Department said.

In such a situation, the services of a counsellor are virtually unthinkable. At least two women victims had attempted suicide, one of whom is still in a serious condition.  For the OSCC to work, smooth inter-departmental coordination is a sine qua non. The Social Justice Department, the police, Health Department and Kerala State Legal Services Authority (KELSA) should function in sync for its success.

“In fact, in the initial days, it had worked. But then it was decided to bring domestic violence too under its purview. The number of daily cases proliferated and the cells simply disintegrated under its weight,” said Joby John, a probation officer.

The Social Justice Department seems to have acknowledged the failure of the initiative. It has convened a workshop next month to think of ways to revive the OSCC mechanism.