'No Boring Babu'; Outlook's Irresponsible Journalism

Exactly a day after the world witnessed the humongous response to #SelfieWithDaughter, seemingly joining hands to support daughters in particular and promote gender equality in general, I read this piece in Outlook India’s Deep Throat Column, by a female journalist. Read:

“No Boring Babu

The portfolio of a junior bureaucrat, who is posted in the Telan­gana CM’s office, is a mystery. She used to be posted in a district earlier. But things changed all of a sudden after the elections. The lady is present at every meeting and seen in almost every official photograph sent out by the CMO. But what she does exa­ctly is a puzzle. She makes a fas­h­ion sta­tement with her lovely saris and serves as “eye candy” at meetings, admit leading party politicians. In fact, it’s this burea­ucrat who calls up other officials in the CMO and asks them to come for meetings. She knows exactly what time the CM will arrive and leave the office. The lovely lady, known for her ethnic style, recen­tly stunned all by appearing in a trendy trouser and frilly top at a fashion show. And for once, she wasn’t sitting in an official meeting. But this appearance too made for a great photo op.”

It also carried a cartoon, which was later removed.

Do you too think this is troubling, sexist and full of insinuations? Made more shocking by the fact that it is Outlook India printing this? (Alas! Like fools we cling to the hope that some reputed media houses are free from the scum of sensationalism.) 

The young IAS officer under question, Smita Sabharwal, had qualified in the UPSC exams with an AIR 4 back in 2001. (Yes, that means she’s been in service for 14 long years, something that the journalist would not have called ‘junior’ if it was her own profession being talked about.) Presently she is Additional Secretary to the CM of Telangana, Hyderabad. Over 2.5 years the district she was collector of, before coming to the CMO’s office, saw visible changes for the better. Residents of Medak and Karimnagar swear by her honesty, her dedication and her work. They responded to this piece of irresponsible journalism by talking about programs and processes she initiated and executed. 

Thank god for that. Else, I may have lapped up Deep Throat’s journalistic innuendos verbatim over dinner tonight, creating my very own version of this soap-y "truth"!

Which, actually, is a habit we as people are coming to enjoy; that of swallowing-without-chewing news which at best is half-concocted and at its worst fully false and even defamatory. Three humour pieces, 30 status updates and 300 tweets on any issue of socio-political import are created and shared only by looking at the breaking headlines. Who has time to wait for the real news to come in, which, when it does after a few days of replayed tamasha on TV, is something no one is interested in? Of course we need the press. But it’s time we asked ourselves - Are we giving the media too much importance? Are we laying at their feet the thinking caps we were all born with? And, are we killing with it our ability to critically examine, argue and really draw out a thought-process instead of hammering on tables because apparently the ‘nation wants to know’ and it’s always comfortable to take a #tag’s side? 

The nation does want to know. It should. But from whom? Now that is a question. 

What is the nation if not the people who inhabit it? That’s another question. Look at the language contained in the few lines of this article. By a woman, for a woman, sans proof, sans responsibility but with an over-dose of sly insinuations. (If the journalist was playing Taboo and was not to use the word ‘slut’, she’d had won with flying colours!) It isn’t Smita making for a ‘great photo-op’. It’s the ignoble parade of most media houses which slut-shame even as they try to be pillars for exposing unfairness and injustice. It disturbs me that educated professionals from a sex we’re trying to uplift have no qualms deconstructing clothes and provoking lines of thought based on invented reasons. Would this have occupied news space if this Additional Secretary was a man? The journalist didn’t feel the need to do her ground work before talking about another woman. All she needed to do was ask politicians about this ‘not boring’ “eye candy” and create mystery around a woman who ‘knows exactly what time the CM will arrive and leave office’. And it gets published! 

What role is journalism playing here, really?

I do wonder why this surprises me and angers me still - this gall, this utter lack of respect towards public servants, for instance, and a fellow human being at large. If it isn’t already fashionable to misread, mock and malign them with each passing prime time, it will be. Just like it is already in vogue to find the easiest scapegoat, the government, to disown our responsibilities as citizens . Please tell me how we as a collective seeking services motivate the ones who are working up good in the yellow corridors? By playing with their dignity, with as much liberty as we use to make police uniforms dance to item numbers in movies? Does few-and-far-between mean naught when it comes to good officers? 

And if it’s their job to serve you, pray, what is yours?   

I don't know Smita and know not how this story will unfold, but at a larger level I do know that no matter how many like her, #DespiteBeingAWoman, work their years away in public service, popular journalism will read and look like exactly this above. Because as a nation what we don’t want to know is where we as people are responsible, or even where we are being irresponsibly spoon-fed tasteless food 24X7. 

Our taste-buds have been that dumbed down, and our antennae for Trending News always on alert. Not a good combination, don't you think? 

Balls!

Have the balls?

Okay, here, have the balls!

There’s this rickshaw puller I know because he is usually standing outside our society’s B-Gate (the one near the Mother Dairy with the seller who never, ever parts with his change). I know him as much as you know yours. Which is to say, I recognize him, I am sure he never charges a penny extra and also he’s usually standing free. No, I don’t know his name but I know he’s missing a thumb. Guilt at wrinkled hands clutching the rubber handles of a rickety rickshaw keeps riders at bay. Guilt. Or maybe they are in a hurry and those battery autos are faster, cooler and cheaper than yellow-green ones. Today afternoon, he was taking me to the other, farther Mother Dairy because the guy at this one (you know who never gives change) also never kept packet-wala-dahi – cheaper and better for raita. The rickshaw had just squeaked alive and started moving when hot, hot winds slapped my face. Looked down to escape the burn to see two pairs of burnt, dark, toned, hairless legs pushing pedals with the might of sweat. And blood. I don’t know what made me but I asked him something which meant ‘Till when will you do this?’ as I asked him to wait. His wide smile told me two things – 1. It was a silly question, a naïve one, coming from someone who has a family back home. 2. He has only three teeth on the top and one below. He said – ‘Till I fall asleep in this rickshaw, madam. Akele akele savari kaengey phir.’

And we still think Fortitude comes from a brown, crinkled, ultra-sensitive sac of the male organ. 

A 60-year-old woman, mother to my maid, had a uterus she should be proud of. It took so much battering and pounding! Oh, you know, the B/W movie reel of three girls, then equal number of miscarriages, then one boy and by then a simple fever of the boy being attributed to the weakness of the womb and all that by a husband who drank, and drank, till he had sex with her, peed and slept. Wanted another kid, a stronger idea of a boy who suckled less. You must have heard that a zillion times over. Same story, different setting, different husbands, same weak-wombs. You know what she did? ‘Enough!’ she must have silently screamed one day when she stole his drink money to go get a Copper T inserted. ‘This is it, you swine!’ I imagined her screaming, when I heard this story over left-over aloo-kachori my maid was enjoying on a stool, under the fan. Then, what happened when he learnt? ‘Phir kya thaa. Bachha-daani bhi bach gayi, aur aurton mein izzat bhi badh gayi.’ She lived like a Queen. He slapped her, of course. But rumour has it that at the commons that night he cried like a baby. Like a baby boy.    

And we still think Courage is born in a brown, crinkled, ultra-sensitive sac of the male organ.

Nope. 

Neither got away from the drudgery, really. So clapping at this point and assuming a “happily ever after” would be silly. Like the hands of a clock they were stuck to a point, forever damned to go round-and-round, keeping time mostly for others, that too. Hm. 

You know the Myth of Sisyphus? The holy Gods decided to punish him, one day. (Let’s not go into details. Just know that mostly punishments are unfair!) So, this Sisyphus, he was doomed for eternity to push a rock up a mountain. On reaching the top, the rock would roll down again, leaving Sisyphus to start over. Sisyphus knew this would happen and yet he would begin all over again. Silly, sissy, stuck man. Oh, the absurdity of life! But what was he really doing by beginning all over again? One, acknowledging that a better life, truth, comfort, respect would come in one day because it does exist. Two, accepting what is, but with the strength and hope to push the rock back up again, despite knowing his own and the rock's fate. What must it have taken, imagine. Imagine!

Nah. Even this philosophical, fate-surpassing, looking-Gods-in-the-eye, I’m-fine-really idea did not emerge from the sac under question. 

It all really comes from some place else. And we’re still at ‘Have the balls!’ to show your might. 

Thankfully, I have none! 

Phew!

Run! It’s a keloid!

Leaving a woman’s body alone is the single most difficult task that the world is faced with. If it isn’t about dictating how much skin they show or commenting on how dark the colour of that skin, it is about the marks on it. You know, scars, spots, scabs, specks, stains, and all those tiny-to-big announcements, that a woman’s body is imperfect in some way. Um, defective is another word that comes to mind, especially if I recall their expressions on looking at my keloid.

Heard of keloid? Sounds deadly, doesn’t it? It isn’t, but if the common man’s gaze at my upper chest is to be believed the butterfly shaped keloid there is but the very disease that will bring mankind to its end and let them cockroaches rule. Some withdraw their hands as soon as they see it, disturbing the handshake midway and whispering something like ‘What is that?’ as if they see an alien perched there. Some others, because they like to be right even if rude, pronounce a kind ‘Ugh!’ before they ask me to ‘get it removed, ya!’ Very few have directly asked me (though everyone must have thought of this), with bated breath and the adrenal gland ready for flight, ‘Are they contagious?’ The list of those asking me to ‘keep it covered, why show it’ is the longest, but going by the dimwitted gaze my butterfly invites I guess they must mean well. Plus, how confusing I used to find it once to figure out what exactly they were staring at! 

Only one asked me to get a funky tattoo around it and flaunt its exclusivity. Him I married, even though the idea was ‘preposterous!’ according to a medical doctor (Of the tattoo, not the marriage!).

In short, if my keloid had eyes it would either be squirming with all the unwanted attention or have been a properly spoilt brat by now. Except, it isn’t anything more than collagen cells out camping under a shiny, red ‘tent’. In summers the cells hold a BBQ party and gosh it itches whereas most other times they hate to be disturbed and prick at the slightest rub of a necklace or seatbelt. Funny ones, these guys, who have successfully baffled doctors I consulted as to their mysterious appearance. No injury, no surgery, and I’m not even from the highly pigmented ethnic groups which are 15 times more likely to get them. Anyway, some suspense in life is good!

What isn’t good? This obsession with perfection we seek in others. 

Remember when the gorgeous Aishwarya Rai put on baby weight and we went ballistic creating humour around her more-rounded personality? We had so much time on our hands, yet not a second to spare to give a second look to our own loving mothers’ girths at home. With puckered noses we pronounce ‘Madhuri looks so old now’ and with equally crinkled noses we say ‘What has Sri Devi done to her face!’ Why go Stardust? Look around in your park! Someone’s baby has unfortunately got his mother’s wheatish complexion, someone’s daughter-in-law has hair like a broom, someone’s daughter needs to mind her weight and yet another’s needs to put some on around her thighs or else ‘they will say your parents don’t feed you’. One was pushed for Lasik to get her spectacles removed the other is struggling to hide her acne under a ton of concealer. And in the process, the little girl who got a burn mark on her arm because she was keeping her kid brother from getting hurt by the hot iron is gradually feeling ashamed of having got it! 

Some scars can have stories. No, actually all scars do!

I remember reading at a popular handloom store how every missed knot in the knit, an extra print or a change in the thread’s sequence is not imperfection but simply a part of pattern which need not fit convention. Like a break, a breather and a point to celebrate. Much like marks and scars on our bodies. African American writers have celebrated those in their works and on their characters as symbols of not just struggle but also survival. A fading whip lash on the back, slashes near the lip where the bit was used or wounds on shoulders carrying the white man’s harvest.

Remove layers of your own clothing and make-up. Bare your own shoulders and tanned backs and look closer at your stretch-marked legs. You will feel so free you will wonder if we really need to cover the countless signs our lives and roles have left on our very human bodies. Is there reason to feel ashamed? Even more, is there reason to make others feel ashamed, enough to scar their minds?

I had no idea when I first spotted a tiny red mound near my neck that it wasn’t a spider lick or a mosquito bite gone wrong. I had no idea it would grow and grow and eventually ‘grow wings’ and become what they call a butterfly keloid for the world to see. But most importantly, I had no idea how an inch of collagen on the neck could become my personal touchstone to know real concern from fake reactions, and real people from all the rest. Perhaps that is why it is called a Butterfly Keloid. If helped fly my mind away from the unabashed and limiting gaze that women’s bodies live surrounded with and find reason to accept and be proud of my own skin.

So saying it once and for all, yes, I love to bare my keloid to the world! Want to know more? I’m thinking of wearing a boob tube and low waist pants to walk around flaunting my C-sec mark, among others. Is there a 6-stitches long surgery keloid there too? Hey, does it matter? It’s a scar.

A SCAR!

Just run for your lives, will you?

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was  - Tattoo … you? - Do you have a tattoo? If so, what’s the story behind your ink? If you don’t have a tattoo, what might you consider getting emblazoned on your skin?]

Laurie, I share your ‘short-cut’ and your feminism

Laurie,

I love your hair. And what you just did to it. I don’t mean just the cut. No. 

You made chopped crop a powerful symbol of women’s sexuality and an even more powerful one of female choice. I read your article about why patriarchy fears the scissors and I had to write this. I address you and I quote you, even though you may never read this, but only because you spoke my mind and I could not have done it any better. Only because in your mind I see the woman inside mine. And on your head the “boy cut” that I enjoy. 

I too see the ‘wickedness’ attached to short-haired girls, in the various media that you mention. That we are ‘crazy’ for ‘destroying femininity’ that we were tutored so hard to enjoy. 'Dudette' is the latest word to enter my lexicon. Feeding stereotypes further, I see board-room women in movies and serials with wedge blunts, not buns. Westerns to complete the picture. And ‘ambition’ portrayed as ‘ego’. A head fast woman in the man’s world calling the shots with hair the length of a tea saucer which she refuses to place before the beau, perhaps. Subtle stereotyping which finds a place in my grocer’s head somewhere, when he stares me down with incomprehension writ large on his face – my dress, my lack of matrimonial symbols and then my hair. No sweet talk lest I take out my hidden guns, he seems to be whispering to himself. And another whisper which goes – ‘Oh God! Why don’t women want to look their age? Why don’t women want to look married?’ 

You call it ‘logical’ Tuthmosis' ‘basis for declaring short-haired women “damaged”. I sure know that usage was intentional, and you too smile as I do. While he thinks no sane woman would ever want to do anything that decreases her capacity to please men, he lost the plot exactly when he said that. Prove himself insane, yet “attracted” enough to us short cropped ones to rant in rage. Or maybe just sitting frustrated that his idea of patriarchy was smashed to irrelevant smithereens soon as the scissors touched our hair? More than this, I refuse to dedicate my personal space to him, though I thank him for giving birth to this, in a way.

But now I tread a different path, as I read your personal experience of trying newer lengths of hair and the temptation of a razor looming large. Our experiences differ because we inhabit different milieus. While you garnered lesser number of ‘cat-calls and whispered slurs’ as you cut your hair, I experienced the opposite. Not just looks of incomprehension from grocery shop owners silently labelling me as ‘fast’ but the smooch sounds on roads and sexual passes increased. Because where I come from – while long hair makes you a sexually and socially attractive married woman, a pixie makes you exactly that – a pixie. Naughty, available and one challenging the carefully treasured and taught idea of female sexuality, gift wrapped in patriarchy. My short crop symbolized a rebellion here, perhaps because of the difference in magnitude of what we call feudal, or patriarchal in our two contexts. And here where I stay, you crush female rebellion. Cat-call it till it hides in the bathroom to cry. Cowers for cover, and pledges to conform – like an animal tamed to jump the rings in the circus or an urban educated woman who is “total strangers coming up to tell me how much prettier I’d be if I only grew it out.”  

But then I get my kick. Oh yes, I visit my salon every month. Spend that money I earn - on hair or face, feet or hands. Not for what you call ‘performance of femininity’ that some women are ‘prepared to work at’ but for what you mention before that. Yes, I ‘negotiate femininity’ because it is mine to mould, entirely. From mid-back length of hair I enjoyed before I got married to now, when I don’t even need to run the comb – the journey had been a short and sweet one. I negotiate, but I know fully well that so many like me cannot, even as so many can. I will wear my bindi when I so desire, if it suits my mood or dress. No bangles on my hands to announce to the world I have a married man at home. And no vermillion to mark in red that I love my husband. I exercise my choice. If I had made a bun on my head, that too would have been my choice.

And no cat-call can drown out the voice of my free will. 

My feminism begins and nurtures itself in my free will. The act of choosing, and living my choice. From cooking to children to cleaning to hair cuts to careering. Just like yours does – be it in reading a book undisturbed in the train or wanting “to take the razor to it right then and there.” 

As for men “who treat women and girls as human beings rather than a walking assemblage of “signs of fertility” – believe me, they are out there” oh I believe you. I have been with one for 7 years now. And never before I have been made to examine my own ‘politics of compromise’ as by the man I married. While here I was sitting vowing to follow as he lead since compromise is ‘sweet surrender’ when all is painted in the colour of love, he went ahead and convinced my long hair behind my back – go chop yourself. Be who you are, even as you happily be my wife. For symbols which feed social ideas of femininity or a matrimonial signage saying ‘Hands off! She’s mine!’ he knew I could handle them with my mind - without those wifely fineries. 

And for this reason, I include men in my feminism. As partners for change and not those across the enemy lines. I have an example at home, as much as an exception he may be. Or belonging to that category we dearly call 'few good men'!

There is no better way to thaw that ice berg of patriarchy than to use the sparks that chose not to be codified by it. 

I sit in India, knowing fully well that no Goddess will ever appear on an Indian calendar with a pixie cut across her head. No halo will shine bright behind a bald feminine pate. Not any time soon, most certainly. While I sit and wonder looking at them painted in bright red and golden if they had a choice at all in being reduced to Goddesses sitting muted on a pedestal, I send a silent prayer to whatever force that listens, that nothing makes me feel more blessed than the power of choice I exercise.

Thank you for writing what you wrote. In each other's thoughts, women find company for their's. In each other's idea of feminism, support for their own.

To Tarun Tejpal: The Alchemist of Desires?

Mr. Tejpal,

The cat is out of the bag. While they still try to ascertain if it’s black in colour or white, the crow has certainly flown away, never to return and sit as honestly, fearlessly and with as much dignity on letters which stood for all three – TEHELKA.  

Since news is all about numbers circled in red and flashed till the lights go off, let’s begin with what your site shows me. On searching for stories on ‘sexual exploitation’ covered by Tehelka, this is what I find. What a big number! More than 500 times, you have told us the truth and nothing but the truth, be it on trafficking of little girls or the ‘saint’ Assaram losing his halo. Losing his halo. Why, makes you think, does it not?

First – What you did, allegedly 

A woman journalist has accused you of sexually assaulting her on two occasions during a media event organized by the publication in Goa, earlier this month. Let’s put it differently. A woman whose father was your colleague once, and who is good friends with your daughter – someone who ‘had so deeply respected and admired you for years.’ If you fail, it will not just be at a professional level but at a very personal level too. You also know how shamefully that failure, if at all, will come about, for it would be proven beyond doubt that you assaulted someone who considered you a ‘paternal figure … responsible for offering me my first job, and always just a phone call away whenever I needed his advice on a story or life.’ 

After the first episode of what you call in your conversations ‘a drunken banter’ ... 

[To read further, kindly click here.]

Sounding the Red Siren against Sexual Abuse

In the year 2000 I moved from my secure, joint-family, small-town setting to become a student of a reputed college in New Delhi – raring to go, promising to make the best of hostel life and continuing wide-eyed in this big city with flyovers, McDonald’s and something called pubs.

As a part of Delhi University rules, every student enrolled in the Bachelor’s programme had to give a certain number of hours to social work to get their degrees at the end of 3 years. This idea was run under the National Service Scheme (NSS) and while some colleges simply handed over the certificates, mine made us do our bit, every minute of it. Most of us cribbed. It involved our meagre pocket money being spent on commuting to far flung places and spending free time earning good karma - something which we considered ourselves too young for. Out of the array of activities, I picked teaching in a Jhuggi Jhopri Shishu Mandir about 8 kilometers from my college hostel in South Delhi. And 40 hours in a month is what I had to complete, which meant going everyday for an hour. 

Once I got over the idea of being stared down as I entered the slum cluster and learnt to ignore the catcalls welcoming ‘madam ji’, I started enjoying the teaching greatly. A class of about 60 students, all 4-6 year old in their dark blue and white uniforms would welcome me with a sing-a-song ‘Good morning’ and repeat their letters and numbers after me in the same sing-a-song voice. It was tough, to make them sit still on the mats and listen. All they wanted to do was dance to songs they sang themselves. A few days into it, and I started a story telling session, where the last 15 minutes of every class were to be spent in sharing personal tales. I had noticed a few children never participate and while I did not want to force them to, I thought this activity might interest them. 

I was not prepared to hear what I heard. 

“I don’t talk to him because his father came to kill my father with a knife one night, because my father stole a fish from his stall” – said a boy with an Om tattooed on his wrist, telling me why he refuses to sit next to the other boy.

“Her mother is a prostitute. Everyone knows that. Other women are saying she is a witch too.” – said an older looking girl pointing at a little one sitting in the back row with an angry scowl permanently etched on her brow. 

A series of real stories shocked me awake from my small-town-to-elite-college-comfort. Were they pulling my leg to unnerve me? I was still wondering if I should let this exchange go on when out came this –

“You see that girl in the corner? We don’t sit with her. Her father does dirty things to her. She is very dirty and if we sit with her, our father will also do those things to us. So our mothers told us to keep away from her. Maybe she also does dirty things to her father.” – giggled a couple of boys and girls together, completing each other’s sentence with a misfit excitement punctuating their sentences. I looked at her, as she fixed her gaze on the floor with a steely tenacity. That explained why she always sat alone, opened not her mouth and did not participate at all. She sat right there and her moving shoulders told me she was sobbing, something I had noticed so many times before without realising that this little 4-something girl has been crying all this while, even as the rest of the class sang ‘A sey Anaar Aa sey Aam’.

My class was suddenly transformed into a very disturbing reality that I had no idea about, that no one had told me about before this day. I dismissed the class and waited for the principal of the school to come. The girl, Sapna, kept sitting where she sat. I asked her to go home and she nodded a no, saying "mummy has told me to stay here till the building gate closes at 4pm." I approached the principal and told her what I heard, showing her the girl insisting on sitting here. I could not believe my already numb ears when she said this to me:

"I know, beta. It has been going on for a very long time. We can’t do anything about it. These slum dwellers are like that. Let’s just do our jobs and not get personal. It’s none of our business. Plus, we have so much to worry about anyway. She sits here till I close the premises to leave around 4 pm. Then she goes home too. She is usually the first one to arrive." I wonder what shocked me more. The reality of the girl’s sexual abuse at the hands of her own father or this principal’s complacency and acceptance of it as something we cannot and should not do anything about.

Back in college, I related the story to a professor who took it as seriously as it was supposed to be taken. She visited the Shishu Mandir with me, called the girl’s mother and asked her what this was all about. The mother, shuttling between sobs of helplessness and determination to not let us interfere in her household matter told us this – "Yes, he does dirty things to her. Every day. So, what can I do? He’s the father. We have nowhere to go. If I leave him, this girl will die of starvation. At least this way she is fed and even studying to become successful one day. I just look away, even if she calls me for help. What can I do? The neighbours saw him fondling her once and the word spread. Thank God we were not excommunicated from the jhopris. Where will we go? Maybe it’s just a bad habit of my husband’s and it will pass. I hope it does. I do want it to stop. I have told her to stay in school as long as possible. I hate it too. I try to stop him. But then, he is feeding her, educating her and getting her new dresses too. What more should I ask for?"

And the girl still sat in her favourite corner, with her shoulders moving, knowing what her mother was talking about, re-living it in her mind as she did on her body, day after day. My professor contacted an NGO which worked for the rehabilitation and care for the girl child. After many meetings and even a little force, the father admitted to his crime and agreed to undergo counselling, between bouts of crying. 

My 40 hours of teaching were over, but this horrific story became a permanent chapter in my book of learning. I remember asking after Sapna from a junior who was assigned the same Shishu Mandir for NSS but she had no such student in her class. A year had passed already. 

This is the first time I share this story. Thanks to Rekha’s and Roshni’s blog posts spreading awareness about Sexual Abuse and the Girl Child, as part of Time to Sound the Red Siren Campaign by UNICEF India and Protsahan. As I look back with the eyes of a 30 year old mother and not a 17 year old teenager lost in a big city, I understand so much more than I did then.  

I see and read how sexual abuse is usually at the hands of a person known to the victim, say the father of the girl in this story. How, knowingly or unknowingly, we become abettors in the crime, like the girl’s mother, the principal, the whole jhuggi community and even those little children. Most importantly, I see how there is always recourse and hope, considering that Sapna’s father shamefacedly admitted to the crime and willingly sought counselling to stop his ‘habit’, something that seemed to be a burden for him to carry too. 

Be it making noise on public forums or whispering it in responsible ears, anything can help in stopping sexual violence against the girl child, or any child. It takes very little, and what it takes is well worth it!  

    [This post is in collaboration with Protsahan and UNICEF India‘s Time to sound the Red Siren campaign. Sexual abuse cuts across class, ethnicity, religion and origin. Millions of girls in India face obstacles in their lives, experiencing various forms of discrimination, exploitation and abuse on account of their age and their sex. Each year, an increasing number of children in India face sexual violence. Recently, there have been cases of rape that have galvanized global attention and sparked mass demonstrations and widespread debate on the issue of sexual violence directed at children. However, there are many cases that go under reported. Fear of social stigma and victimization often stop children and their families from reporting these crimes. Since much abuse is hidden from public view – and because it is too often tolerated – the numbers do not reflect the true magnitude of the problem. When violence occurs, the physical wounds or bruises may disappear but the mental scars may not.]