A demonstrator shouting from a bus after she was detained by police in New Delhi in December. Thousands turned out to demand justice for a young woman who was raped and killed on a moving bus. Mansi Thapliyal/Reuters

The man who was my abuser was a fine host, a good husband, a caring father, a respected elder whose generosity and kindness were as genuine as the fact of the abuse. These qualities were important, because they helped him conceal the abuse he carried out over a period of four years.

As a much-loved older relative, a close friend of my parents, he had unrestricted access to our house, and we visited him often. It was only at 12 that I began to feel uncomfortable. Not about the abuse — I didn’t know the term “child sexual abuse” at 9 or at 12, and had no words with which to describe my discomfort with the “games” he played — but about the silence that he demanded. When I was 13, I left Delhi for Calcutta, to study in that city, and left my abuser behind. But he didn’t forget, and when I came back to Delhi as a 17-year-old, he was there.

At 17, I knew that he had no right to do this to me. When he sent poems, said that despite the four decades that separated us, we were supposed to “be together,” I finally broke my own silence — but only partly. I told my mother and my sister, and they formed a fierce, protective barrier between me and my abuser.

But the man who had started his abuse when I was a 9-year-old was still invited to my wedding, because we were keeping secrets, trying to protect one family member or another.

Years later, when my abuser was dying of old age and diabetes, I visited him. There was no space for a long conversation, but I did tell him that I could not forget what he had done, even if forgiveness was possible. The silence around the abuse, as much as the abuse itself, festered and caused damage for years, until finally, in my thirties, the difficult but ultimately liberating process of healing began.

In December 2012, a violent gang rape in Delhi took the life of a young woman and set off a raging debate over women’s freedoms and rape laws. In all the complex arguments we’ve heard in the past few months in India on rape, violence against women and the even less often discussed experiences of men who have gone through either sexual violence or childhood sexual abuse, we have not discussed consent as much as we need to. In the area of rape, women’s bodies in particular are often discussed as though they were property: How much freedom should the Indian family allow its daughters, wives, sisters, mothers?

This way of thinking almost always reinforces curbs on women’s freedoms, by heightening the idea that a woman’s honor — rather than her well-being — must be safeguarded, because she is someone else’s possession. This used to be, until very recently, underlined by most Indian government and legal documents, in which we were asked for the name of the father (not the mother), the husband (not the wife), as though the terms “parent” and “partner” were alien to the notion of the Indian family.

If my story saddens you, please think about this: It is neither new nor rare, nor was the man who abused me a monster, or in any way out of the ordinary. According to a 2007 survey (the largest of its kind in India) conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare, over 53 percent of Indian children have experienced some form of sexual abuse — including a slightly higher percentage of boys than girls.

I am only one of many. And I was luckier than most; my abuser was not excessively violent. As I learned to acknowledge the abuse and to cope with the fallout, I made some unexpected connections, found good friends, found strong mentors, found help, found my voice again and built a happier, more free life. I’m breaking my silence today to make a point, not about abuse, but about the importance of consent in the present debate over women’s rights and gender equality in India.

Survivors of childhood sexual abuse are no different from anyone who has survived sexual violence, in terms of what we do to rebuild ourselves. But we are experts in two areas: We’ve taken a master class in the toxicity of silence and secret-keeping, and we have doctorates in our understanding of the importance of consent. It can take abuse survivors, like rape survivors of either gender, years to reclaim a sense of ownership over their bodies. The body is the site of so many violations, starting with the chief one: Our abusers did not ask us for permission to use our bodies as they pleased.
Over years, those of us who are fortunate enough to have access to well-trained counselors and healers learn to reclaim our bodies. We learn as adults what children are supposed to know by instinct: We learn that we can be safe in our bodies, we learn to play, to allow ourselves pleasure, to take care of ourselves, and most of all, we learn that we have the right to offer or withhold permission to other people, when they want access to our bodies, ourselves.

The Indian family has most recently been invoked as an institution that needs to be safeguarded, by both the government and the judiciary. The Justice Verma Committee, including several eminent, retired members of the judiciary and legal experts, was set up in the aftermath of the December rape, to make recommendations on the rape laws. Rejecting the Verma Committee’s strong appeal that marital rape be made an offense under the law, the Standing Committee on Home said that (a) the Indian family system would be disturbed; (b) there were practical difficulties; and (c) marriage presumes consent.

These assumptions expose the violence and the toxicity at the heart of a certain view of the Indian family. For marriage to “presume consent,” you must assume that a woman gives up all rights to her body, to her very self, once she goes through the ceremony of marriage. You must also assume that a man is granted the automatic, legally sanctified right to access over his wife’s body, regardless of whether she finds sex unwelcome, frightening, painful or violent or simply doesn’t feel like it that particular night.

This diminishes both genders, with its assumption that men are little more than lustful beasts, unable to restrain their libido, and the parallel assumption that women are passive receptacles without desires of their own, forced to submit to demands for sex regardless of what they want.

This is a medieval view of marriage, and it is dismaying that Parliament appears to subscribe to it.

What is missing in the Standing Committee’s deliberations is the key question of consent — the consent of the woman and, indeed, of any person in a sexual partnership or contract. To understand why this consent is important, we must first accept that all people — children, women, men — have a right to their own bodies, and that they cannot be forced to share their bodies with partners (or strangers) under any circumstances.

They have the right to say no, as well as the right to say yes; to withhold or retreat, as well as to share their bodies freely and gladly. In any equal partnership, between any two people, whether in a marriage or not, the only possible basis for sex is the mutual understanding that consent is an active process — to be offered freely, to be given freely, to be withdrawn just as freely. Underlying the principle of consent is the equally strong principle of respect — respect for oneself as much as for one’s partner.

Without consent, there can be no gender equality; its absence makes every argument we have on rape, or on women’s rights or children’s rights, meaningless.

On an active, day-to-day basis, consent embraces the idea that any woman or man is free to say yes or no to a sexual encounter, inside or outside marriage, regardless of whether he or she is, in the coarse phrase of the courts and police stations, “habituated to sex.”

Survivors of child sexual abuse and rape survivors understand this instinctively: We understand that true respect for human beings includes giving them the right to say no, the right to choose when they will be touched, and by whom.

If it is hard for Indian society to understand why everyone should have this right, then perhaps we should start with a very basic principle. Everyone has the right to live without his or her body being violated. Everyone has the right to demand that you ask for permission before you touch his or her body.
Perhaps in time, Parliament and the government might understand this. The Justice Verma Committee and thousands of women trapped in marriages where they do not have the right to refuse sex certainly do understand. (For those who believe that marriage in India is a perfect, unsullied institution, read the statistics: Over 40 percent of women in marriages have reported domestic violence. That’s reported, not experienced.)

My own journey, from victim to survivor and then to a kind of normalcy, took years. Even so, I had less to deal with than some of those whose stories are reported in a recent study by Human Rights Watch of child sexual abuse in India — no institutionalized abuse, no caste abuse, no extreme violence. In time, I became a writer, a listener and a collector of stories.

From the shared stories of other survivors, I learned to let go of shame — child abuse was too common and too widespread for that — and I also learned that your memories, however dark, will not kill you, or prevent you from creating a better life.

Reclamation happened slowly, sometimes painfully. I was lucky to have the support of my partner, close friends and great counselors. But it started with this simple thing: believing that I did have the right to say no, learning to claim my body and soul back again.

The debate in India over rape laws, particularly marital rape, is about the simplest thing of all: acknowledging that women (and men, and children) have a right over their own bodies.

This should not be treated, as it is now, as a dangerous or radical idea; in a country that thinks of itself as modern, it’s time we embraced the idea of consent, in marriage and in all relationships.

Even though it’s so common — more than half of all adults in my generation of Indians have experienced some form of child sexual abuse — few survivors discuss their experiences, because of the Indian family’s insistence on silence. That silence transferred the shame of the abuser’s act onto the child and onto the family; it is powerful and crippling, and it actively enables abuse. The silence around marital rape is strengthened when the Indian social and legal system refuses even to acknowledge that it exists; for an abuser, and for a rapist, these silences are enabling.

Just as children have the right to ask that their bodies remain unviolated by the people they should be able to trust, a woman has the right to say no, she does not give her consent. Even, and perhaps especially, in a relationship as intimate as marriage.

This essay by Nilanjana S. Roy, a former Female Factor columnist for the International Herald Tribune, is also appearing in The Hindu newspaper. Ms. Roy is the author of a novel, “The Wildings.”

By NILANJANA S. ROY
2013/3/7
Source: New York Times