I believed I would know exactly what to do if a man I was dating ever hit me. By now I was a self-aware young woman with strong opinions. The toughest discovery for me was to find that feminism offered no shield against the vulnerability, confusion, guilt and rage you felt when you were abused.Īs a young adult who experienced violence in a personal relationship for the very first time as a postgraduate student at Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia University, my response was less confused but no easier to act on. So it wasn't surprising that over 70 per cent of children had never spoken to anyone of what was done to them. The report found that 31 per cent of the sexual assaults were by an uncle or neighbour. These were men deeply embedded in the family structure, it made it that much more difficult to call them out. Yet, the silence of young victims and the misplaced shame they felt shielded the perpetrators. Twenty per cent of those interviewed said they had been subjected to severe abuse, which the report defined as 'sexual assault, making the child fondle private parts, making the child exhibit private body parts and being photographed in the nude'. In 2007, the first ever government survey of child sexual abuse uncovered that more than half the children spoken to (53 per cent) said they had experienced some form of sexual abuse. I didn't know it then but my experience, horrible as it was, was hardly uncommon.
I discovered that I was often wary, even scared, of sexual relations - a familiar consequence for those who had experienced abuse as children. It was the loneliest and most frightened I had felt as a child and the fear lurked in the shadows, following me into adulthood. In my growing years, I blocked out the man's face, his name, in fact the very incident was banished to the recesses of my consciousness but from that moment onwards, sexual abuse had an odour. As I grew older, what stayed with me, strangely enough, was the rancid smell of hair-oil even years later, anything that smelt faintly similar made me nauseous. My assaulter was immediately thrown out of the house and I buried the awfulness of the memory in a deep, dark place that I hoped I would never have to revisit. Ridden with guilt, unable to shake off the feeling of being dirty and trapped in a sink of fear, I finally told my mother that something terrible had happened. But after the first few times I had innocently followed him to 'play' with him in his room, I was overcome by panic and disgust. The concept of teaching your child to distinguish between 'good touch' and 'bad touch' had not yet become the enlightened norm. Worse still, as a child unable to process the magnitude of what had happened - I was the one who felt grotesque and dirty.
Little did I imagine that this much-older, family figure - someone who would take the kids for piggy-back rides and twirl us around in the air - could be such a monster. But, to a child's eye, he was avuncular and affectionate and, in any case, I just assumed I was safe in my own home. Today, decades later, I cannot even recall the precise connection of this man to my family. Like many Punjabi households, ours was an open house, always welcoming to cousins and their friends, and their friends in turn. The perpetrator was a distant older relative who had come to stay with us for a short period of time. I was not even ten when I was first sexually abused.
Excerpts reproduced courtesy of Aleph Book Company. It is available at all leading bookstores and online at Amazon and Flipkart. Here is an exclusive extract from Barkha Dutt's new book This Unquiet Land - Stories from India's Fault Lines.