Photo: Goutam Roy. Model: Romyarup Mitra

The workshop on child sexual abuse was getting too grim. To make matters light, Sangeeta Saksena asked the Class I students of a public school in Bangalore an off-hand question on how often they got angry. “I expected some trivial responses,” says Saksena, director, Enfold, a Bangalore-based non governmental organisation which works in the area of child sexual abuse.

Saksena was stunned at the reactions to her question. “The six-year-olds got angry for reasons galore,” she says. They felt furious when their parents didn’t buy their favourite Play Stations, or when their teachers expected them to complete their homework or even when a friend wore a trendy pair of shoes to school. And when Saksena asked the children how they vent their anger, they said they used foul words.

Once considered an adult problem, anger is fast becoming a childhood condition as well. “Today, the two most common problems that urban children are counselled for are anger and a dip in school performance,” says Jitendra Nagpal, consultant psychiatrist at the Vidya Sagar Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (VIMHANS), Delhi.

A study conducted by VIMHANS among school children in Delhi in 2002 found that four out of every 10 urban teenagers show symptoms of depression and stress. “And prolonged stress often shows up in violent ways,” says Nagpal. A five-year-old Bangalore boy, for instance, would hit his mother at the slightest pretext. “He once asked his mother for a toy car. When she said he’d have to wait till his birthday, he kicked her,” says Ali Khwaja, head, Banjara Academy, which counselled the boy.

Sulatha Shenoy, consultant child psychiatrist at Bangalore’s Sagar Apollo Hospital, once counselled a six-year-old boy who turned violent every time his friends refused to share a toy with him. “The boy was a single child and was used to having his way. He wanted immediate gratification,” says Shenoy.

The mercury is rising among India’s Gen-X. The reasons for this, according to psychologists, is a lethal mix of loneliness at home, performance pressure in school, increasing exposure to violence, growing substance abuse and reduced physical activities among adolescents.

Says Ali Khwaja, “In double income, nuclear families, parental attention has reduced and expectations have shot up. Computer games have supplemented outdoor play. All this adds to the pressure quotient.” Fifty per cent of the children who come for counselling at his centre have problems of anger and violence, he adds.

And aggression, clearly, is setting in early. “Four and five-year-old children with violent streaks are brought for counselling,” says Khwaja. Last week, Banjara Academy conducted the first of a series of workshops on anger management among children. The workshop helped adolescents identify anger as an emotion and taught them techniques to manage aggression.

The VIMHANS study reported a four-fold increase in tobacco and alcohol use among Delhi’s teenagers in the last decade. In Karnataka, in 2004 65 per cent of crime was committed by people in the age group of 15 to 25 years. Also, 35 per cent of people who committed suicide in the same year were adolescents.

“A sharp increase in crime and suicide has brought the focus on emotion management among adolescents,” says C.R. Chandrashekhar, professor of psychiatry and deputy medical superintendent, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore.

Adolescent anger management training is now on the agenda of several mental health agencies in India. It’s not begun a day too early, says Dr Geesom Unni, a Kochi-based paediatrician and author of a book on adolescent life skills, Life Skill Interactive Sessions — Minus Two to Plus Two. “We’ve seen adolescent anger lead to school shootouts and killing sprees in the West. India could go the same way if growing teenage rage is not nipped in the bud,” says Unni.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) began funding a NIMHANS-led life skills training programme in Karnataka in 2003. “The WHO has drawn up a list of 10 essential life skills, which include anger management, problem solving and coping with stress. NIMHANS has trained 200 school teachers to teach these life skills to students,” says Chandrashekhar.

VIMHANS RUNS A LIFE SKILLS PEER Educator Programme in 82 schools in Delhi. Anger management training is treated as priority in the programme. “We believe that peers make the best teachers in imparting life skill training. Select senior students from every school are trained to counsel the juniors,” says Nagpal, the programme coordinator.

The Delhi Chapter of the Indian association of Private Psychiatry holds annual camps during the mental health week in October at government hospitals in the capital. Last year, it began focusing on anger management training for children. “There is a steady rise in psycho-pathological anxiety disorders among children. So we have made adolescent emotion management a focus area at the annual camps,” says Dr Sandeep Vohra, president of the association.

Adolescents in urban slums are also being trained to keep rage in check. In 2005, the ministry of health began funding 12-week anger management workshops at a slum in Panchkula near Chandigarh. Two workshops of 12 students each are held every year. “Anger and aggression are one of the main problems in urban slums. It’s important to address the issue, because adolescent anger leads to risk-taking behaviour,” says Ruby Ahuja, project manager, Yuva Josh, the NGO that conducts the workshops.

Paediatricians are also pitching in to check child rage. For instance, the Indian Association of Paediatrics (IAP) has started a teenage counselling programme. “Most parents are uncomfortable seeking psychiatric help for their children. The IAP programme fills the gap,” says programme coordinator Geesom Unni. Two paediatricians from 540 districts in India have been trained in life skill management, under IAP’s Family Life Education Programme. “The programme helps adolescents to understand and deal with anger. Relaxation techniques, including meditation, time out and counting till 10 before reacting to a situation are also taught,” says Unni.

But visit computer gaming firm XBOX 360’s store in a Bangalore mall and you know that violence has become a part of everyday adolescent life. The children — many in their pre-teens — are playing games with names such as Hitman: Blood Money, Bullet Witch and Assassin’s Creed. “Since children cannot disassociate reality from virtual reality, they assume violence is a normal way of the world,” says Enfold’s Saksena.