This was at a panel discussion at the Mumbai Book Fair 2013 organised by Spandan, and held at Powai, which is not such a long trek away with the JVLR anymore and totally worth the trip for any book lover given the number of stalls on display and given that this is their first year of organising it, a fabulous effort by a group of committed individuals.

We spoke on content, masala and marketing and the discussion was great fun. I will try to get my mitts on a video of the discussion but till then here are a few photographs of the event.

“Kaun hai hum me se jisne peechha nahi kiya hai. Aur jab mahila se baat karni hoti hai tab pehal mahila nahi karti hai, pehal toh hamein hi karna hoti hai. Koshish toh hamein hi karni padti hai. Pyaar se batana padta hai, yeh poore desh ka kissa hai. Humne khud anubhav kiya hai, hum sab log uss daur se gujare hain, usko aise mat bhulo. Debate karao, long lasting changes pe nazar rakho. [We have all stalked (women). And you have to take the first step when you want to speak to a woman. A woman will never approach you; we (men) have to try on our own and have to talk to her softly. This is the story of the entire country. We have experienced it ourselves. We all have gone through that age, don't forget. We must debate (on anti-rape laws) and keep our eyes set on long lasting changes],” the JD(U) chief said.

Thankfully, despite the spirited defence put up by Sharad Yadav in its favour, Lok Sabha passed the anti rape bill, making stalking and voyeurism non-bailable offences if repeated for a second time. When an elected leader does not get the fine difference between wooing and stalking, it is time to get very, very worried. When we are told on the floor of Parliament that wooing and stalking are synonymous, we cease to wonder why India holds this abysmal track record of gender violence.

Every girl would know the horror of being stalked. Contrary to what our esteemed politicians believe, there is nothing romantic about it. Wooing as a concept is completely different from stalking and it is the inability to recognise this intrinsic difference that underlines the regressiveness of the mindset of those we have elected as our representatives. Geetika Sharma and Priyadarshini Mattoo were not wooed, they were stalked. Geetika was driven to suicide. Priyadarshini was raped and brutally murdered.

Where does the line blur between wooing and stalking? Is our popular culture to blame? In most Indian cinema, the male protagonist’s unhealthy interest in the female protagonist, shadowing her everywhere, irritating her, finally ends up in her collapsing dramatically in his arms and declaring her love for him. In teen fiction, the Twilight series, which went to break all records and achieve cult status, worryingly, has the male protagonist, Edward Cullen stalker like in his obsession with Bella Swan, the female protagonist. While this seems cute and adorable, and oh-so-romantic on celluloid and in the books we read, in the real world, stalking is anything but. In fact, it is downright scary. I remember stopping going to university because of a persistent stalker. Friends tell me of stalkers giving infinite missed calls on their home landlines (these are all friends who have been adolescents in the pre cell phone era) and not one of them found it cute or romantic. It just completely freaked them out that an unknown person they had absolutely no interest in was shadowing their every move. Not one of them said that they welcomed the attention, in fact most of them were terrified. I must add here, that stalking is not gender specific, there have been famous cases where women have stalked men too.

Classic stalking behavior is this. “The stalking behaviour is in the nature of harassment. Typically, stalking behaviour includes the following the victim and entering the victim’s home. They persecute their victims by unwanted advances, frequent telephone calls, letters, email, mobile messages, graffiti, notes, and gifts. Severely aggressive behavior can lead to assault, kidnapping, and even murder sometimes of the love object but at other times of an acquaintance seen as a rival.”

When Salman Khan in Tere Naam follows the girl he has set his heart on, played by Bhoomika Chawla, and even goes to the extreme of kidnapping her, he set a dangerous precedent that legitimised the extreme side of stalking, that of wanting to take complete control of the object of interest. Earlier hit films like Sholay (where Dharmendra pesters an irate Hema Malini in Koi Haseena Jab Ruth Jaati Hai), find their echoes in more recent films like Rockstar where a nerdy, earnest Ranbir Kapoor makes a public nuisance of himself in following Nargis Fakhri around the place. In all three examples, the girl falls in love with the boy eventually.

Stalkers are normally fixated on the object of their affection. In Hindi cinema, Shahrukh Khan played perhaps, the most realistic portrayal of the dark side of stalking in the movie, Darr, unlike the fluffy romantic portrayal most movies choose to show. To quote Farhan Akhtar, actor-director, “There are films in which romantic wooing has been replaced by a kind of harassment of the heroine. The heroes of these films could be considered stalkers in some civil societies. Now imagine that this actor is a role model to millions… wouldn’t his fans think this behaviour is okay? Now imagine that this actress is a role model to millions… what message does it send to women across the country?”

We have generations of Indian men who have grown up, conditioned on the belief that to woo a girl, one must stalk her, be persistent, force one’s attentions on her and even if she resists, expresses irritation, disgust and revulsion, they must continue because, inevitably, like the heroines in our popular cinema, they will succumb. When these men realise that unlike Hindi cinema, in the real world, girls they pursue with such rabid single mindedness might be totally disinterested in them, they can’t take the rejection. They have been brought up to believe that THIS is the way to woo a woman, and to add to this is the way our boys are brought up, never denied anything they want. This then leads on to rape, murder, acid attacks, all to assuage the thwarted sense of self esteem the rejected stalker feels.

This is what happened with Priyadarshini Mattoo, who was found raped and murdered in her own house on January 23, 1996. From Wikipedia, “Priyadarshini was in the third-year of her law program, when she was found strangled in her uncle’s residence. She had been raped, struck 14 times with a motorcycle helmet, and finally strangled with a wire. Santosh Kumar Singh, her senior in college, had been stalking and harassing her for several years, and was the immediate suspect. But Santosh came from an influential family – his father J.P. Singh was then Inspector General of Police in the Indian Union Territory of Puducherry – in the course of the trial he served as Joint Commissioner of Police in Delhi, where the crime had been committed. In view of these connections, the court handed over investigation of the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). In 1995, Priyadarshini had complained that Santosh Singh was harassing and stalking her. She had been provided with a personal security officer at the time. In retaliation, Santosh had lodged a complaint with the university alleging that she was pursuing two degrees simultaneously. However, it turned out that Priyadarshini had passed M.Com in 1991 and the complaint was merely malicious. On the morning of January 23, 1996, Santosh was seen knocking for entrance into Priyadarshini’s uncle’s house, where she was living, in the Vasant Kunj area of Delhi. A servant saw Santosh entering her house, apparently saying that he wanted a compromise in their legal complaints. Subsequently he raped her, strangled her with an electric wire and then battered her face beyond recognition with a motorcycle helmet.”

Priyadarshini Mattoo’s case got widespread media coverage, with the public pressure compelling the case to be reopened, after the trial court acquitted him. In the interim, Santosh Singh had gone on to get married and become a practicing lawyer. The High Court eventually awarded him the death penalty which was then reduced by the Supreme Court to life imprisonment. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, “Santosh Singh, post conviction, barely spent 4 months behind bars and was out on parole in March 2011. Upon return, he subsequently filed another application for grant of parole, subject matter of Criminal Writ Petition 224/2012 before Delhi High Court. The High Court granted him a parole of another one-month on March 6, 2012.”

In Geetika Sharma’s case, the former airhostess with MDLR airlines owned by former Haryana state Minister of Home Gopal Kanda, committed suicide alleging harassment.

In yet another case, Vinodini, a techie in South India, died after an acid attack by her stalker.

Thankfully now, for girls who face the nightmare of unwelcome attentions, “Stalking — physical or electronic via phone calls, text messages or emails — is now a criminal offence, punishable with one to three years in jail. Stalking no longer means just causing distress to someone by following the person or forcibly interacting with them. It now also includes unwanted telephone calls, sending derogatory SMS or emails that “disturb the peace of mind of any individual”. Those guilty of these offences will also have to pay hefty fines. “Whoever monitors the use by a person of the internet, email or any other form of electronic communication that results in a fear of violence, or interferes with the mental peace of such person, commits the offence of stalking,” says the Indian Penal Code.

Many Geetikas, Priyadarshinis and Vinodinis suffer across India. Some are burnt to death, some have acid flung on them, some are stabbed, some are abducted, raped and murdered. Girls drop out of college in order to avoid stalkers, they change timings, they avoid going out in public alone, they live on the edge of a sword. For no fault of theirs. Not all of them get justice. In a culture which does not take into consideration a woman’s consent, stalking is considered a legitimate form of courtship. Our leaders call it a form of ‘romance’, underlining the chauvinism that defines their beliefs. Perhaps we need to remind them of Priyadarshini, Geetika and Vinodini. And this unnamed girl committed suicide after being stalked for months. These girls were not wooed. There was no romance. They were driven to their deaths. Or killed. That is what stalking is.

Read the link: http://blog.tehelka.com/difference-between-wooing-and-stalking/

Illustration: Samia Singh

Last week, I curated the @WeAreMumbai twitter account. Given that it was International Women’s Day on 8 March, I asked the residents of Mumbai, or at least those who followed the @WeAreMumbai account, what they would like to see changed in the city to make commuting and public spaces more accessible and convenient for women. Among the many suggestions that cropped up, the most notable were the demand for more ladies special trains, buses and more compartments in local trains reserved for women. Interestingly, when I asked which areas of the city women found safe to walk, jog, run in, the answers were few and far between. I asked the women if they used the skywalks and subways, and the answers from those who used the sky walks far outnumbered the answers in the negative from those who didn’t. Women preferred to be on the road, rather than enter a subway late at night even if it meant walking a great distance to be able to cross a road, or access a railway station. They took the second class ladies compartment which is always reserved for ladies and not the one that changes to general at a fixed time, because the men jump in much before the time of changing to general and they’ve had unpleasant experiences of being groped and verbally harassed.

For most women, even the every day commute to work was replete with groping, molestation, street sexual harassment, and it was a matter of fact every day battle they needed to deal with if they needed to get out to schools, colleges and to work Most women accept that street sexual harassment was part and parcel of the perils of urban living. This sad reality affects a woman’s ability to move about in a city freely, to be an equal participant in the workspace; it limits their ability to navigate a city without fear of being at risk of harassment, molestation or worse. It makes half the population of a city rush through their time out in public spaces simply because of their gender.

The fact remains that commuting in our cities was, is and seems to remain fraught with danger for women. In Delhi, on December 16, 2012, a 23 year old medical intern boarded a private bus, along with a male friend, because one of those in the bus called for passengers saying it was going towards their destination. She was then gang raped so brutally that she eventually passed away from the injuries suffered despite the best medical efforts, that the medical details that emerged horrified the nation. The incident led to weeks of concerted protests by enraged citizens, both men and women, young and old, leading to a committee being set up to re-look at our gender violence laws.

As recently as last week, a minor was gang raped in an auto after she left from a mall at Ghaziabad. The girl took a shared auto at around 8 pm in the night, the auto unfortunately had been stolen and the three men in it were around for a joyride. “The girl was told the two men sitting in the back were passengers.  ‘Shared autos’ are a common practice here, partly because they make commuting cheaper, and because there’s a paucity of public transport. The auto drove through multiple police check points for a journey that lasted more than two hours on Saturday night.  The men in the back pinned the girl down and gagged her, preventing her from shouting for help, according to the police. When the men had raped the teenager in a secluded area near a major highway, they threw her onto the road. But not before robbing her of her cash and cellphone.” Passersby who found her lying bleeding on the highway, took her to the police station, interestingly, she was not spotted by the police patrols in the area.

Transport and commuting in our cities is a matter of concern. In most metropolises we have women only fleet taxi services like Forshe, Vira Cabs and Priyadarshini, but these are not affordable or practical for the regular, every day commute for most women. Most women take local trains, the metro, auto rickshaws, sharing autos and public buses in their daily commute, often taking two or more of these modes given distances in our cities of the residential areas from commercial districts. Some years ago, the Delhi based NGO Jagori conducted a study on women’s safety in public spaces in the city. The survey found that 80 percent of the 500 female respondents had faced sexual harassment in buses and other public transport. Jagori has also initiated a Safe Delhi campaign where they look at how the city can be made safer for its more vulnerable residents, specifically women and the elderly. Another study conducted by Jagori Delhi in collaboration with UN Women in 2009, in two cities of Kerala – Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode, surveyed over 1500 men and women across both cities. According to Rejitha G, Project Coordinator for Kerala for the Safe City Initiative, “The study brought to the forefront some of the critical issues of women’s safety in public spaces. 99 percent of the women felt that the city was not safe due to lack of street lights and high raised walls of residential houses on either side of the roads. Harassment in public transport was identified as the major problem. Others included ‘eve-teasing’, sexual remarks and jokes in bus stops and roads, exhibitionism, staring, and attempting to take photos through mobile cameras.  In Kozhikode, 53 percent of the women respondents reported that the incidents took place during day time and 24 percent reported incidents after dark. The study also revealed that women hardly speak about this kind of harassment. Only 5-7 percent of women reported the incident to the police, while 19 percent did nothing when they were sexually harassed. This refers to the incidents that occurred in the last one year before the study. A majority of women responded by not stepping out after dark – 69 percent women said that they avoided going to secluded places and 67 percent avoided going out alone after dark.”

On Twitter, Blank Noise, a volunteer driven collective that works to change attitudes towards street sexual harassment, recently did a twitterthon where they asked tweeters to take a Safe City Pledge, where they stated what they would do to make our cities safer. The most notable fact was the constant echo in the pledges about reclaiming the cities for women, getting back the freedom to move around after dark. Among the more poignant pledges was this one, “I will ask my daughter to go out and play. Play football. Jog. Unlearn warnings.” While reclaiming the city after dark for women might seem ambitious right now, but it is important that women realise that they have as much right to be out in the streets of the city they live in, without fear, as men do and take for granted.

UN Women has launched the Safe Cities Global initiative which partners with municipal governments, local communities and organisations to make global cities safer for women, the initiative now covers over 20 cities world wide and is growing. One of the cities covered under this initiative is Delhi. To quote Michelle Bachelet, the executive director of UN Women and former president of Chile, “A diagnostic study in New Delhi, for instance, revealed that a common strategy against harassment was to simply keep girls and women at home. One girl explained: “If we tell our parents about boys harassing us, they would blame us only and say that it is our fault … Our parents might even stop us going out of the house.” Findings like this spur action, since keeping women and girls home is not a solution. Residents organised community collectives to build awareness, report crimes, and work with authorities to improve public safety and justice.” UN Women is also partnering with Microsoft to find ways to use mobile technology to stop sexual harassment and violence in public spaces.

Efforts to effect changes are definitely underway. The Supreme Court has directed that a victim of sexual harassment in a public service vehicle has the right to take the vehicle to the nearest police station and give the information about the incident to the police. If the crew does not do this, the permit to ply the vehicle can be cancelled. Post the Delhi Gang Rape, the government is looking at making transport more convenient for women. According to news reports, the Urban Development Ministry has asked 63 cities, with a population of more than one lakh, to run women-only buses on busy routes. If not buses, then the state governments are urged to run smaller transport vehicles on these routes with the emphasis on frequency.

An interesting initiative from the Delhi Transport Department looks at bringing in an autorickshaw fleet, driven only by women. Special women only buses have been launched in UP on International Women’s Day, painted appropriately pink, but operational unfortunately only till 5.30pm, which quite defeats the purpose of being an option for women who work and need safe modes of transport post 8 pm.

In Mumbai, which has had ladies special trains for over a decade now, ladies special buses starting from the railway stations are thoughtfully timed keeping in mind the timings of the ladies special trains at certain main railway stations. There are many who would say segregating men and women in mass transport is not the answer to stop street sexual harassment, but the fact remains that is the most effective way right now to ensure that women don’t get sexually harassed at least for that part of their commute while they’re in these women’s only modes of transport. Safety of women on their daily commute is not just limited to the actual mode of transportation, every point on the route must be safe, from the road to reach the railway station being well lit, the railway platform with adequate police patrolling, parking lots well lit and with security, adequate CCTVs placed at strategic positions in public spaces to help identify perpetrators in the event of a crime.

Our cities haven’t been planned keeping safety and convenience in mind. Access to and comfort with mass transit is one of the key rights of a woman, and it is not just the responsibility of the government to provide it, but also that of the residents to be more proactive and push for changes in order to get the security they deserve. Most importantly, gender sensitisation efforts in communities are a must, community outreach efforts across all media—mass media, print media, social media and even via popular culture like cinema are essential. We are seeing efforts in this direction, with mainstream publications like The Times Of India and men’s brands like Gillette coming out with well meaning campaigns to change attitudes towards women, to encourage onlookers to step in if they witness street sexual harassment. We could put all the safety measures in place to keep women safe from harassment and sexual assault on their daily commute, but unless mindsets that view women as mere sexual objects don’t change, little else will.

http://blog.tehelka.com/give-us-this-day-a-harassment-free-commute/

So it came to pass that yesterday, the child, the spouse and the mater, and of course I, dressed up in our Sunday best and headed out towards Powai where the event was to be held. We landed at the venue, after a few hiccups on the way occasioned by us taking the long and winding Aarey Milk Colony route and a few wrong turns. The child dressed up for the occasion insisting he would wear his black corduroy blazer, which I did my best to desist given it is touching 40 degrees Celsius in the city, but I guess I passed on my sartorial stubbornness to him.

Now to the event, my fellow awardees this year made an impressive list. Here are the names, “Dolly Thakore for Theater, Bina Aziz for art, Jyoti Mhapsekar for strategising ragpickers in Maharashtra, Sunita  Bhuyan for classical instrumental music, Abha Narain Lambah for Architecture conservation, Aditi Lahiri for animal welfare, Rinki Banerji for animal welfare in socieites, Preeti Sagotra for disabled successful working woman, Raageshwari Loomba for Music and healing, Dr.Anita Soni for gynecology, Leena Mogre-fittness, Salma Sheik for unorganised vendor segment, Aarti Vijay Gupta for fashion entrepreneur, Sofia Hayat for fighting for animal rights for PETA, Nisha Harale Bedi for social Activism, Manasi Parekh Gohil for best TV actress, Roshini Mazumdar for fighting off goons to protect animals in New Panvel, Abha Singh for Director Postal services, Rita Abraham for law, Bhawana Somaaya for best Bollywood journalist, Shilpa Singh for representing India as Ms Universe and social work, Dr. Rekha Sapru chief of Cancer Association and Dr. Mithu Alur for lifetime work dedicated to disabilities.”

Naturally, this meant that there were many speeches. The child was wilting like a flower at sunset by my side, ergo I promised him I would not make one, given that lunch time was nigh and his stomach was doing the Bronx Rumble, audibly.
Suffice to say, the highlights were an emotional speech from Salma Sheikh who spoke of her journey from a vegetable vendor to a crusader for vendor rights, which has taken her around the world, a fabulous performance by Sunita Bhuyan of an Assamese folk song on her violin, a rousing speech by the darling Nisha Harale Bedi on why we need to validate our rules for nightlife. Of the one speech that began with the metaphoric level of ‘In the beginning I was zygote in utero’ and detailed every year of her long journey, I will not speak, suffice to say the child let out two very audible, arms and legs stretched out yawns when it was in progress.
All in all, it was an excellently organised, inspiring and humbling event. All kudos to the Young Environmentalists Group for pulling it off so wonderfully. I now have a crystal award only I am allowed to dust at home, one that I am very proud of. And yes, one that means a lot to me because it is the first award I have received since I was in college, when I took all those awards for granted.

Here are a couple of pictures from the event.

Gearing up for CSAAM 2013.

Ah yes, Swim class. The swim class which has now taken over our lives so completely that we have no time nor energy to be social, go out and meet friends, to spend time doing anything but burrowing head beneath covers and grabbing multiples of 40 winks through the day over the weekend in order to make up the sleep deficit.

I slept in on Sunday morning. This of course means we woke at 7 am instead of the regular 5 am. We lounged around lazily, and had our breakfast at the obscenely late hour of 9.30 am. We then read the newspapers at leisure instead of skimming through the headlines before deciding that the only way to spend the day was to do things we didn’t have the leisure to do through the week, like catch up on catnapping, reading books for hours at a stretch or watching enough television to

render the eyes glazed and watery. Not that I watch too much television or any television, to be accurate. The only television watching I did do in times past was that of the news channels, but when every panel discussion on them news channels began resembling the kind of catfights one sees in the fish market, needing heavy dosages of Disprin in order to contain ensuing migraines I discontinued television viewing. Except for the occasional movie. The child played with his friends, long neglected through the week of school and tuitions and swim class morning evening, until they had gone miles beyond the Raju Veeru levels of reconciliation and were back again in adversarial WWE combat mode, and I was summoned via intercom to resolve playground dispute which seriously was of much taller order intellectually than some of the bickering and name calling our so called political leaders have been guilty of over the past few days.
The Sunday was spent reading, sleeping, eating and which is how it should be. A weekend needs to have one completely relax oneself so one can spend the rest of the forthcoming week stressing oneself out to drawn string bow levels of tenseness.
This in itself is a luxury, I would think. To do absolutely nothing. To meet no one. To go nowhere. To stay cocooned at home, to allow the day to be unfilled with things to do, places to go, people to meet. This, probably is the only true leisure. And yes, today, its back to the grind.

If you are a woman with an opinion on the online space, there is every chance that you will have been subject to some sort of misogynistic abuse. On twitter, you see it every single day. Women with an opinion are routinely asked to shut up, go back to the kitchen, called ugly, obscene language is used against them, or worse, actual threats of rape made online. Women who write opinion pieces find their comment spaces filled with abuse of the vilest sort. When abusers are blocked, they turn hydra-headed and pop up under multiple identities. What is worse is that the rest of the internet looks on this with no reaction, metaphorical popcorn tubs in hand, watching the show. Very few will actually step in and castigate the abuser.

I’m not going to name the women I’ve seen get harassed every single day that they’re online. They represent a diverse group, from television anchors, to poets and feminists, to movie actresses, to journalists to regular professionals. The crime of these women is that they have an opinion, and they will air it. Their opinion might go counter to the perceived notion by a great many of those who populate social media spaces, but because they are women, they are denied the civility of the space to voice their opinion. Very often, the reaction to some tweets becomes nothing better than a lynch mob, baying for blood, rather than space for civil discussion on a topic where differing opinions might be entertained and listened to.

Journalist Laurie Penny wrote this in her piece on misogynistic abuse on the internet, A Woman’s Opinion Is The Miniskirt of the Internet. “Many commentators, wondering aloud where all the strong female voices are, close their eyes to how normal this sort of threat has become. Most mornings, when I go to check my email, Twitter and Facebook accounts, I have to sift through threats of violence, public speculations about my sexual preference and the odour and capacity of my genitals, and attempts to write off challenging ideas with the declaration that, since I and my friends are so very unattractive, anything we have to say must be irrelevant.”

“Interesting, because there’s a tendency, when women complain about online abuse, to dismiss the men who spew it as fringe characters and teenagers. The belief is that mainstream, adult men with families and jobs aren’t doing this, which allows the denialist to claim, therefore, that misogyny is not tolerated or encouraged by society, making women who complain about it whiners and babies,” says Amanda Marcotte, in her feature, Online Misogynists Are Not Fringe Characters.

And here’s how Mary Beard OBE, Professor of Classics at Cambridge, author, writer and presenter of BBC2’s BAFTA-nominated Pompeii and Meet The Romans, dealt with the online abuse she faced. Says an article about her experience, “But rather than sit back, ignore it and wish it all away, Beard decided to drag her bullies and their depraved comments out into the open in the hope that she might protect other, more vulnerable, women (and men) from a similar experience.” Beard says, ‘Women are too often told just to shut up and don’t make a fuss and it’ll go away. But not this time. What about all those other women who might think twice about appearing on Question Time after this?”

An interesting development happened as a result of the National Consultation on Online Gender Abuse held in Delhi on the 18th of February, organised by Internet Democracy. Sabbah Haji (@imsabbah on twitter) was amongst the participants who included gender rights groups, bloggers, activists and journalists, amongst others. She says, “Amidst all the brilliance that was happening there in terms of discussion and way forward and legal recourse and stuff, all of us decided that when we leave the room, we DO something about abuse online.”

The thought behind this was the same as it is in the real world. Most misogynistic abuse is akin to real life bullying, confronting an offender as a group makes it more likely that the abuser will back off and retreat. Even if they don’t, the important thing is not to let misogynistic abuse pass uncommented on, because that lack of reaction legitimises it, makes it acceptable, makes it part of the deal for being online in social media. As Sabbah says, “Basically, don’t just let it go, because it makes offensive behaviour seem acceptable, in the same way that we have seen street harassment to be ‘not a big deal’. The ‘Don’t-feed-the-troll’ attitude is well and good but when it comes to the internet space and women in it, it is not just gender-neutral, mindless trolling/abuse; there is a woman-specific tinge to abuse and it reflects an attitude that has to go. Grouping up online and proactively and publicly having a go at offensive behaviour, not letting it stand, is important.”

The @iNetDemocracy team asked for tweeters to come up with a hashtag that succinctly described what they were trying to achieve, mainly draw the attention of folks to online misogyny on twitter. Anyone could RT a misogynistic tweet by using the hashtag and then, having noted the tweet, others could step in and support the person being harassed. After a slew of suggestions were received, the team shortlisted #MisogynyAlert as the hashtag to be used and publicised the hashtag on twitter. The conveners of the Internet Democracy Project would check the hashtag from time to time and respond to reported misogynistic abuse.

Here’s how the tag can be used by those who might be interested:

1. Check in on the hashtag #MisogynyAlert from time to time. Save it in your Search.

2. When reporting abuse, the hashtag has to be added to the offensive tweet or RT, or the Tweet link should be posted.

2. When engaging with the offender, again, the hashtag must be used.

3. Any response, RT, retort, reply all, needs the hashtag.

This creates a chain online, a train of tweets for everyone to follow and to see the back and forth, and more importantly, to see that there is an active online group at any given point of time that is watching what you say and is willing to come after you for it.

Strength in numbers, cementing a fluid online group to intervene and do a takedown at any time.

The team has dealt with a few cases tagged with the #MisogynyAlert hashtag so far, in one case the abuser disappeared, in another, the abuser deleted the offensive tweet, and the third, one I had the good fortune to engage with too, in the course of responding to the misogynistic tweet, was so dense that after a point it made no sense engaging with him.

Another interesting hashtag started by feminist blogger Sady Doyle, #MenCallMeThings sought to bring to the foreground sexist and misogynistic abuse women face in the online space. In a Time article on this hashtag, writer Megan Gibson says, aptly, “At this moment in time, you can work, socialise, date, learn, communicate and debate online. There is no longer a divide. What is happening online is happening in real life. This type of abuse reflects real-life attitudes, real-life misogyny and it’s prolific.”

Online abuse is as invasive, disturbing and an infringement of one’s rights as is street sexual harassment and deserves to be treated as such. Women need to stand up against it, and not get shouted off online spaces. Other women and men need to step in when a woman is being harassed online. A hashtag like this might be just the start of an effort at acknowledging that online harassment is not acceptable, nor for the woman at the receiving end of the abuse, nor for the others around her. That no woman should fear being online because of the abuse she faces, simply because she is a woman. It might not be enough, there definitely is the need for more to be done, legal recourse is an option that some women are exercising now, but yes, this is a start.

I’d like to end with these words from the Laurie Penny article I quoted above, “I believe the time for silence is over. If we want to build a truly fair and vibrant community of political debate and social exchange, online and offline, it’s not enough to ignore harassment of women, LGBT people or people of colour who dare to have opinions. Free speech means being free to use technology and participate in public life without fear of abuse…”
- See more at: http://blog.tehelka.com/why-we-need-a-misogyny-alert-hashtag-on-the-net/#sthash.TXzFAHtk.dpuf

Anyway, to get back to being a pool mom, I’ve been on evening pool duty for the better part of the last month. I must admit that it is not a duty I enjoy given that I have donated enough blood to the welfare of the resident mosquitoes association to revel in the task. To add to it is the pressure, the pressure.

There are other pool moms around. These are very earnest ladies, fully committed to the cause of their kids bring home the metallic stuff on ribbons and in plaques and in trophy form are completely clued in as to timings of record holders in various strokes from Mumbai district level, to state level, to national level, to international level. Give me a moment while I catch my breath again. They sit in groups discussing, nutrition, stroke technique, free hand exercises and such while I run yelping in fear into distant corners, where I stand, trembling with embarrassment at having absolutely no clue about all what they’re discussing.

Not content with intimidating me in this manner, there are a couple of moms who add to mine feeling of having crawled out from under a rock by being epitomes of fitness, all lean taut muscle, zero body fat, and such like. I hide my mounds of quivering blubber behind pillars and chairs in their presence. Then there are the impeccable ones. One of this category, the other night, at 8 pm, turned up in a lovely floral chiffony blouse, skin fit denims and gasp, hold your breath, coordinated floral wedgeheels and hair band with, you guessed it, coordinated floral arrangement of the artificial variety. Her make up too was firmly in place, with coordinated pink lipstick, echoing tones of roses on aforementioned floral top. I picked my jaw up from the tile on the floor it had cracked and quickly skipped behind a table, thereby effectively pretending the loose flowing kaftan like top I had garbed myself in to protect arms from mosquito assault was invisible to the casual onlooker, and the fraying at the seams Osho chappals too stayed out of line of vision. Of course, there was naught to be done about the face which was unpowdered and probably doing its best imitation of a beacon right now, and the world would have to lump that horror and not whine too much about it having put them off their dinner and such.

I have lessons learnt though. The first being that I need to get more involved in the nitty gritties of the sport the brat is in serious training for. It would not do any longer to stare blankly when a pool mom asks about fly timings and I visually the trajectory of a housefly being plotted. I will also get a trifle more serious about presenting a fitter self to the world. It does seem rather ridiculous to have the spawn of the womb in intensive training, while one tucks one’s spare tyres inch by inch into the trousers, and does the hold breath button up exhale routine. And third, the ganji flipflop look will not do anymore. I shall be coordinated, presentable and hair combed neatly in my pool appearances hence forth. This also means ensuring the scrunchie holding the hair off my face is in the same colour family as at least one item of clothing, and that the footwear be either serious running shoes or at least also in the same colour family as one item of clothing on my body.

Gah, whom am I kidding? I’m not cut out for this pool mom business. I will continue to spend my hours at poolside nose buried into twitter, blinking nervously at people around me when I come up for air. I will still throw on a shirt that is closest at hand to make self respectable in public situation over whatever it is I happen to be wearing at home before setting out for poolside duty. I will still not care about free, fly, breast and back records and confuse them all unapologetically.

My only task here is escort duty, the drop, the hanging around in case of being needed and the pick up. My other reason for being here is that I firmly believe that we need to instil some sporting discipline in our children. And my final reason, the child loves it. As long as he does, I’ll be a pool mom.

Last week, Human Rights Watch released an 82 page report titled “Breaking the Silence: Child Sexual Abuse in India.” The report states what we all know, but refuse to take seriously, that child sexual abuse is on the increase, disturbingly common in homes, schools and residential care facilities in India and what is even scarier, is that our system to protect our children from such abuse is sadly inadequate.

The report mentions, and prominently so in its title itself, our uneasy collective silence around the uncomfortable topic of CSA. When we (a group of bloggers and tweeters) did the first CSA Awareness Month in April 2011, what we faced was a rigid denial that CSA happens in India. We were viciously trolled by those who maintained we were talking about things which were ‘anti Indian culture’. But slowly, over the course of the month, the stories emerged, most anonymous, almost every story heartbreaking, and with no differentiation between male and female. Almost everyone had a story to tell.

Child Sexual Abuse is rampant in India. The statistics bear this out. A government study in 2007 reported that two out of every three children in India were physically abused and that 53 percent of the nearly 12,300 surveyed children reported one or more forms of sexual abuse. According to other reports, over 7,200 children, including infants, are raped every year in India. These are only the reported cases. We can only imagine the numbers, given so many cases go unreported. While releasing the report, the then Minister for Women and Child Development, Renuka Chowdhury said, “In India there’s a tradition of denying child abuse. It doesn’t happen is what we normally say. But by remaining silent, we have aided and abetted the abuse of children.” The most disturbing part of the report was that over 70 percent of the children had NOT reported the abuse to anyone. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6539027.stm)

Six years later, nothing seems to have changed. We are still not talking enough about CSA. “The 82-page report, “Breaking the Silence: Child Sexual Abuse in India,” examines how current government responses are falling short, both in protecting children from sexual abuse and treating victims. Many children are effectively mistreated a second time by traumatic medical examinations and by police and other authorities who do not want to hear or believe their accounts. Government efforts to tackle the problem, including new legislation to protect children from sexual abuse, will also fail unless protection mechanisms are properly implemented and the justice system reformed to ensure that abuse is reported and fully prosecuted, Human Rights Watch said.” http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/02/07/india-child-sex-abuse-shielded-silence-and-neglect

To quote Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, “Children who bravely complain of sexual abuse are often dismissed or ignored by the police, medical staff, and other authorities.”

With detailed case studies across 100 interviews with CSA victims, their relatives, government appointed child protection officials, experts, police persons, doctors, social workers and lawyers who have dealt with such cases, this report brings to the fore the fact that the state and the community make it even more difficult for the victim to come forward, report the matter and get justice.

To start with, there is a basic lack of guidelines and training amongst the medical workers and doctors as to how they need to treat a victim of CSA sensitively. Four of the cases documented by the HRW reported that the doctors used the finger test method to determine whether a girl child had been raped, even though it is well acknowledged that this method has no value forensically, and there have been calls for it to be abolished across India. A bench of the Supreme Court has issued notices to the Centre, Delhi Government and the National Commission for Women on a petition that seeks to frame guidelines for medico legal assistance provided to rape victims. The two finger test, where the doctors conduct investigations by inserting two fingers into the vagina of the victim, is used to determine the laxity or the hymen of the victim and leads to judgemental statements in the report like ‘habituated to sexual intercourse’ or ‘no sign of injury’ which by extension implies that the assault was not forced but consensual. To use such a test on a child seems unthinkable and the zenith of insensitivity. (http://news.oneindia.in/2013/01/12/why-two-finger-test-is-against-womans-dignity-1129902.html)

Residential care facilities are rife with reports of sexual abuse of the children in their care. Orphanages, juvenile detention centres and such have cases reported in the newspapers on a daily basis about the abuse the children suffer at the hands of those in charge of the facilities. And a minuscule number of these stories make it to the press, a majority of the horrific tales stay within the walls of these facilities with these forgotten children having no way to get their anguish out to the world.

“A 16-year-old mentally challenged girl has told the sessions court the story of how she was raped, sodomised, beaten, tortured and intimidated for years at a state-supported orphanage by the institution’s authorities. The girl, who narrated her story in long sessions spread over four days, was the first of 19 victims to depose at an in-camera hearing expedited and monitored by Bombay High Court. A deaf-mute child is expected to depose next, sometime next week. According to the prosecution, the victims — mentally and physically challenged girls between the ages of 14 and 18, at least four of whom are also deaf-mute — were physically abused for several years at the Kalyani Mahila Bal Seva Sanstha orphanage in Panvel before being rescued in March 2011.”

“Medical experts and other witnesses have already been examined. A few victims are in such bad shape that they will not be able to face sustained questioning. So we decided to bring in only a few witnesses. Police have recorded statements of victims before a magistrate, which is admissible in the trial court,” Special Public Prosecutor Rohini Salian said.

The Indian Express, 5 Sept 2012, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/teen-victim-of-orphanage-sexual-abuse-tells-horror-story-in-court/998061

Sexual abuse of children in such institutions is rampant because many of them are privately run and therefore not registered. There is a lack of adequate facilities for inspection and poor monitoring of even institutions which are registered and run by trusts and organizations. The Justice Verma committee made several recommendations to address the plight of the children subjected to abuse in such residential facilities. What is needed is an effective system to consistently monitor every residential institution, whether government or private or unregistered.

A huge leap has been taken with the passing of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act in 2012, which now puts all forms of CSA as specific criminal offences. The law now allows for prosecution of an abuser for molestation and non-penetrative sex, in addition to rape. Earlier, abusers escaped punishment because there was no law that recognised non penetrative sex as abuse. The law also has guidelines in place for both the police and the judiciary to treat victims sensitively. There is also a provision for the setting up of specialist child courts to deal with CSA victims exclusively. Chhattisgarh has just announced the setting up of special children’s courts or Bal Nyayalays to deal with cases of crime against children. (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/raipur/Special-courts-for-crime-against-children/articleshow/18438231.cms )

Interestingly, India is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which make it mandatory for the government to protect children from sexual abuse and violence. (http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/02/07/india-child-sex-abuse-shielded-silence-and-neglect )

We have 19 percent of the world’s children; more than one third of our population comprises children below 18. This is our population advantage. We are a young country. But of these children, a conservative estimate of 40 percent have faced or will face CSA. What we need is to break the silence about CSA within homes and families, to realize that no ‘family honour’ means more than the need of a child to get justice and closure.

 Read the original here: http://blog.tehelka.com/lets-break-the-silence/