Were you abused?

At the risk of being labeled a crusader of feminism, I will explain why it is important to express, if you experienced, faced, witnessed or were a silent observer of any form of abuse to womankind. Abuse is not just physical or claims more damage but even seemingly passive abuse (I will explain this later in the post) is equally harmful. I am willing to share real life examples if need be.

Several months back, I was asked to share a personal story about my experience of any kind of abuse that I faced, as a girl. The email was sent to a close group of women (volunteers) under a cover of complete trust. Email sat quietly for 2 days begging for a response. But then, there was one response, and then the second one and by third one it dawned to me that it was not something that happened to me only, which I had completely forgotten under the cloud of shame and guilt. And that was the beginning of my self-chosen suppression, as a tiny girl, as early as being a seven years old child, without even knowing what it was. Each woman in the group had a horrid & a heartbreaking story and perpetrators were sometimes strangers but a lot of times family members, uncle, cousin, brother, husband, boyfriend & fiance'. This fact is not so important but it highlights one point, that it is everywhere and can happen to anyone by anyone.

What did this exercise do to me?

It strongly reaffirmed my faith that it is important to speak up, share and form a trusted network of people and bring out these horrifying examples to awareness, beyond a complicated burden of social pressure. I realized that there are far more basic rights to acknowledge & protect, before we go on for fancier issues. We love to dwell in popular issues and causes. Big names & popularity attracts human psyche.

I personally know a girl who even after discovering that her fiance was cheating in a relationship and had several physical relationships outside their promise, ended up marrying the guy. My guess is that the monumental pressure of society to break the engagement and speak loudly about the cheating was too big a burden. Society does not provide a very stable system to deal with such adept disrespectful behavior. Instead, we facilitate such deplorable examples with silence, indifference or its "not my problem" attitude. How many people can really do this?

I will keep my promise to explain passive abuse. We all accept that rape, gang rape, sexual assault etc. can be very damaging to a woman. Affected women are devastated and damages are more or less irreversible. But so are other forms of abuses. Groping, feeling, touching, flashing, staring, and stalking etc. can also form a sense of inadequacy and shame.

The other day I was in a deep discussion with a set of my friends and it started with Mumbai attacks, went on to economy and then ended up on physical abuse. As I started giving examples, the girl in a group announced that if I ever have a daughter, I would never want to raise her in India and her voice went heavy and eyes welled up. She recounted her own childhood story and then another friend's. It clearly means that none of us can ever forget, no matter how many years pass by and where we go and we are emotionally battered for rest of our lives. The guys to my surprise, always get surprised when they hear such revelations. His angry tone suggested that he thought of it as extremely unfair and he suggested that why do women not talk about these things more openly and form a stronger support group. I said such efforts are everywhere, its a matter of proactively joining hands and to make it more successful.

Coming back to passive abuse, anything that causes pain or hurts beyond the tangible and visible wounds are also methods of abusing. Lying, cheating, hiding facts, avoiding response, comparing, mocking, blaming, being disrespectful or infidelity of any degree can be very harmful too, it leads to emotional abuse. Since, these aspects are soft and hard to pin-point openly, it makes it even more easy for the perpetrators.

Perpetrators harbor on this weakness that the victim will never openly speak-up and they use this fact to their advantage. This makes it all the more critical that more victims acknowledge and speak-up and grow this network strong and stronger. child-abuse is a good example of this.

We are so intricately and organically connected to each other and the issues that we simply cannot work with the mindset that "oh but it doesn't affect me so it's not my problem." Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere and explicitly or implicitly it will make itself clear. So our isolated "just" presence can be temporarily soothing and can make us short-sighted & prevent us from looking at things more holistically, beyond the "I" zone.

With all that said, I hope none of us will suppress the wrong under the garb of guilt and shame in future. Don't go silent and accept it as your destiny because you were born as a girl.

I will sign off with something Ms.Roy said:

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. ~Arundhati Roy