After being raped, I was wounded; My honour was not: Sohaila Abdulali


"When I fought to live that night, I hardly knew what I was fighting for. A male friend

 and I had gone for a walk up a mountain near my home. Four armed men caught us

 and made us climb to a secluded spot, where they raped me for several hours, and

 beat both of us. They argued among themselves about whether or not to kill us, and

 finally let us go.

At 17, I was just a child. Life rewarded me richly for surviving. I stumbled home

, wounded and traumatized, to a fabulous family. With them on my side, so much came

 my way. I found true love. I wrote books. I saw a kangaroo in the wild. I caught buses

 and missed trains. I had a shining child. The century changed. My first gray hair 

appeared.

Too many others will never experience that. They will not see that it gets better, that

 the day comes when one incident is no longer the central focus of your life. One day

 you find you are no longer looking behind you, expecting every group of men to

 attack. One day you wind a scarf around your throat without having a flashback to

 being choked. One day you are not frightened anymore.


Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the

 heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared

, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is

 not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and

 your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina,

 just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.

If we take honor out of the equation, rape will still be horrible, but it will be a personal,

 and not a societal, horror. We will be able to give women who have been assaulted

 what they truly need: not a load of rubbish about how they should feel guilty or

 ashamed, but empathy for going through a terrible trauma.

The week after I was attacked, I heard the story of a woman who was raped in a

 nearby suburb. She came home, went into the kitchen, set herself on fire and died.

 The person who told me the story was full of admiration for her selflessness in

 preserving her husband’s honor. Thanks to my parents, I never did understand this.

The law has to provide real penalties for rapists and protection for victims, but only

 families and communities can provide this empathy and support. How will a teenager

 participate in the prosecution of her rapist if her family isn’t behind her? How will a

 wife charge her assailant if her husband thinks the attack was more of an affront to

 him than a violation of her?

At 17, I thought the scariest thing that could happen in my life was being hurt and

 humiliated in such a painful way. At 49, I know I was wrong: the scariest thing is

 imagining my 11-year-old child being hurt and humiliated. Not because of my family’s

 honor, but because she trusts the world and it is infinitely painful to think of her

 losing that trust. When I look back, it is not the 17-year-old me I want to comfort, but

 my parents. They had the job of picking up the pieces.

This is where our work lies, with those of us who are raising the next generation. It lies

 in teaching our sons and daughters to become liberated, respectful adults who know

 that men who hurt women are making a choice, and will be punished.

When I was 17, I could not have imagined thousands of people marching against rape

 in India, as we have seen these past few weeks. And yet there is still work to be done.

 We have spent generations constructing elaborate systems of patriarchy, caste and

 social and sexual inequality that allow abuse to flourish. But rape is not inevitable, like

 the weather. We need to shelve all the gibberish about honor and virtue and did-she-

lead-him-on and could-he-help-himself. We need to put responsibility where it lies: on

 men who violate women, and on all of us who let them get away with it while we point

 accusing fingers at their victims."

(IQ)

- Sohaila Abdulali.