A little experiment, although won’t help much through the lockdown where you have all the time in the world, but sure is interesting. All of us have plastic bottles at home which we were supposed to dispose of after use. Nonetheless, crush one of those bottles and throw it hard at something. Now pick it back up and do whatever the hell you can to make it go back to exactly the way it was before. Apologize, cry, pull it and put pressure on it or whatever is in your capabilities. Does it go back to being exactly the way it was before? This is one of the very classic examples. It is the same thing happening with almost everyone. Even the slightest of things are leaving a whole lot of marks on the minds and consciences of people, especially those in the teenage and 20s. And then on the other side of the world are the victims of rape and sexual abuse. Now, imagine the plight of a person in the age group mentioned earlier who is also a victim.
One of the very lesser known things in India is knowledge and this is not just a sarcastic comment. Even though the literacy rate in India is a satisfying 74.04%, the learning and knowledge curve is just a bit more than a flat line. India might have produced excellence in almost every field in the form of inventions, great leaders, etc. but has failed miserably in distributing the knowledge about the same uniformly. It is not a mystery as to what most kids and teens do these days with their phones and the strong resource that internet is. Let’s talk from scratch. What can be the major reason of sexual abuse in India? Illiteracy? Inadequacy? Improper approach towards kids? Religious insecurities? Racism? Patriarchy? Pseudo feminism? Incomplete or wrong sex education? Being too much liberal towards such topics? Too much trust? What if I tell you it includes all of these and many more. The right question here would be what have we as a responsible citizen (as we claim to be) done after knowing at least about 5 reasons of those? Right, Social media posts and candle marches. Boom! The bottle is back as it was. Oh no, wait. It isn’t.
These things have been gaining more momentum and attention as the days pass and still remain to be forbidden to talk about in a normal household. Everyone knows the reasons, everyone knows the consequences and everyone know the pressure but no one is willing to act on it much less talk about it. To some extent, all of them who even try to do something lack support on a very large scale. For all you know, you might even have no idea that your girlfriend, your boyfriend or your best friend or some person you meet every day and talk to regularly have been a victim of sexual abuse. He/she doesn’t feel safe or trustful enough anymore to share it with you and that is such a huge failure on our parts. Our minds interpret things in a way so that we feel comfortable towards things which actually have a more destructive nature. In simple words, we lie to ourselves just because we aren’t capable enough to accept the truth and walk through it. Things here might already be known to most of the people. But they have a very faint clue of the existence of this thought let alone accepting that it has happened to them more than once. Human tendency contravenes with the ability of the human mind to rule out probabilities. Our conscience is so very convinced with the thought of something that has a huge potential of ruining your personality and eventually your life that whenever we go through a traumatic event, no matter how trivial, we let the situation get the better of us and start questioning our own integrity and capability to withstand pressure.
The basic skeleton of at least hoping to prevent any such thing from happening to anyone is conversing and guiding people about it. Just listening to reply and pose a counter opinion is not conversation. Technically, an ideal conversation has to include information, analysis, consequences, opinions (not just counter) and a plan of action along with emotions in every part of it. It is about time that the “un-speakable” must be spoken of, the children to begin with and then the adults who know but fear to say it out loud and all others. The need of the hour is that people get the right kind of sex education and not the type they learn from pornography and/or bookish information. Why has talking about it become a taboo? High time someone from the family took the initiative to make it easier to talk about things like this. If not now then it will probably never happen. People know that something has to be done but don’t know what. Start from the basics. If you can’t even take a simple step such as this then you have no right to express your anger or protest against it. After all prevention is better than cure, and let's face it, we won't be willing to go through things to get the cure. This is the right time to mould the very future of our country we talk about. None of this is new to anyone reading.
Briefs such as this have next to no effect on people as they don’t even reach the end of it. No matter how practical it may be, it always is insufficient for people. People believe these topics to be abstract until it happens to them. Move on! Think the way you are actually meant to. The society needs a regular routine check-up.
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