The Hyderabad rape case recently rocked the country, and then there was a news report I edited as part of my profession about a seven-year-old being raped/ molested in her school bathroom. The slash between rape and molestation is because the little one didn’t know what word to use, or how to describe at all what had happened to her.
Which brings me to something I have been observing a lot through all these years of existing, of being a woman. Yes, a woman. Because all of us women have at least once in our lifetimes been victims of molestation - in public places or even in the security of our home - by unknown men lurking all over those crowded railway stations, or in worse cases, by those relatives who take the advantage of being a ‘relative’.
The question that evades me though is of friends/ relatives/ acquaintances refusing to believe the victim. The reason? There are many - from not wanting to leave their own comfort zone of distrusting the molester, to not wanting to believe their friend was wronged, to avoiding uncomfortable discussions around it.
While we simply push all these reasons under the large umbrella of ‘social stigma’, it is the nitty-gritties of the problem that are more worrying. One example being: we are, for some very weird reason, wired to believe and hence react to rape/ molestation in an extremely episodic and distant manner. These ‘dirty’ things are done by unknown devils lurking somewhere in the dark corners of the city. Not my brother, not my friend, not my husband - they can’t be the ones committing these crimes.
Because rape = inserting a male private part into that of a woman by an unknown man, without her consent. We are too accustomed to viewing sexual offence in this one simple definition.
Anything even slightly different from this has - oh, I am sure she was involved, she must be drunk, she must have seduced him, oh it was just a harmless touch, why did she not say it then, she was wearing the wrong clothes, wrong time, wrong company, and the list of victim-blaming is never-ending. Wrong birth altogether, maybe?
One such incident recently shook my basics. Not like it was the first time my body was violated. Of course not! Come on, I have travelled in Mumbai locals at peak timings for the most part of my life, and been to male doctors, and basically lived. So of course, I knew what it was to be touched inappropriately by men.
But this particular incident disturbed me in ways I hadn’t known.
A trip with a group of new friends turned ugly when one of the two men with us violated me. Yes, I decided to let it go with a very light warning for a day because we women have a hundred reasons to brush things under the carpet. But, when things began to sink in, I felt increasingly offended and angry at myself for not reacting more aggressively.
That’s when I took it up. From ‘why didn’t you say so earlier’ to ‘others in the group are going to be pissed off with this sudden decision of yours to leave the trip’ - the reactions I got were mind-boggling.
I even had the accused come to me with an apology a few days later and an explanation - of how his hand was only so many centimetres into my pants. Yes, exactly that. My fingers are rattling against the keyboard even as I type this.
Most of the girls were even legit offended with the use of the word ‘molester’ for their friend. A person who molested me is a molester though, isn’t he? I was honestly quite confused.
After a lot of back and forth and ‘discussions’ over the matter that involved ‘oh but they (there were two men involved indirectly) are our friends and they would never do something like this’, it all ended with a couple of those people (including a fellow woman) blocking me from her life - yes, on social media and otherwise.
This is something that disturbed me the most and got me thinking as to what is the one thing that makes believing men easier than believing women? Patriarchy, yes, is the easiest blanket answer again.
But we need to look deeper, I say. We need to be more articulate, and intricate with our definitions, perceptions and analysis of the gender world. Rape and molestation is, more often than not, committed by people known to the victim and very much in the friend and family circles.
Go take that step forward, trust the victim, stand by her/ him, instead of adopting the easier solution of social isolation. Do not give the men in your life the benefit of doubt so easily. I, for one, don’t. Honestly, it is the social reaction to crimes that sometimes matter even more than legal action.
One of the closest men in my life had once laughed over how a man of the stature of Nana Patekar was being accused of molestation. “It’s not funny,” was my only response with an evidently angry expression.