India woman speak out on “sex marriages” with wealthy Arabs

Geeta is 19-years-old. She is attending a local university in Varanasi, but she is unmarried and her family is not well off. As a result, she became the victim of what has been described in the country as “sex marriages” with wealthy Arab men, who come to the country on business trips and purchase Indian women to be their wives for a certain period of time.

She recently sat down with Bikyanews.com to discuss her ordeal with who she described as a “Saudi Arabian man” who had paid her family some $2,000 for one month of “services.”

“I couldn’t go through with it after the first week. It was horrible,” she said, asking that her surname remain anonymous.

For her, it began in February, when a man appeared at her house, offered money to her family and then had a “Qazi” – or Muslim cleric in charge of marriages – come to the house to marry the couple. In the contract, she said, there would be an automatic divorce after the man left the country.

“I was taken away to a hotel where he forced me to have sex with him repeatedly for days. It was rape and I didn’t know what to do,” she revealed.

After only a week with the man, forced to remain in the hotel as he went to business meetings, she packed her few belongings and fled, finding refuge at a friend’s house. There, she has remained, refusing to speak to her family and seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis to help overcome the anguish and struggle she was forced to endure.

“I will never speak to my family after what they did. I was a sex worker and forced to do things against my will. I am shocked and so sad that this happened. I know other girls who are forced into similar things and it is wrong that our police and government do nothing,” she argued.

Women’s rights activists in the country have pointed out that these short term “contract marriages” are illegal in India and supposed to be illegal in Islamic law, but they are increasing across the country. In a recent Telegraph report, Hyderabad is becoming the central location for the marriages, as wealthy Arab businessmen come to the city in search of girls and young women to “service” them for their stay in India.

In a similar case, Inspector Vijay Kumar reported that one man “had paid 100,000 Rupees (around £1,200) to the girl’s aunt Mumtaz Begum, who in turn paid 70,000 Rupees to her parents, 5,000 Rupees to the Qazi, 5,000 Rupees to an Urdu translator and kept 20,000 Rupees herself. The wedding certificate came with a ‘Talaknama’ which fixed the terms of the divorce at the end of the groom’s holiday.

“The next day he came to the house of the victim girl and asked her to participate in sex but she refused. She is a young girl and the groom is older than her father,” Inspector Kumar told The Telegraph.

It is part of an ongoing debate over women’s issues in the country and one that is seeing young girls and women being used by families suffering from poverty. For social workers in the country, from Varanasi to Hyderabad to Mumbai and Delhi, they are seeing a rise in these marriages.

“We are having to deal with women and girls coming to our offices on a regular basis seeking help and we have to keep it silent for fear their families will force them again to go into these situations,” one social worker told Bikyanews.com in Delhi. “We just want the government and police to arrest these men and family members who are forcing their daughters into sex work.” Source

India's Muslims grapple with wedding racket

 Until recently, Hyderabad was hotspot for a disturbing form of sexual tourism, practiced mainly by visitors from Islamic countries, especially in the Arab world.

Seeking a short-term liaison, but wanting not to violate religious prohibitions against adultery, such visitors enter into brief, arranged marriages for a fee – often with girls young enough to be their granddaughters.

"In 90% of cases the women are as young as 15 and 80% of the time they are divorced within a week of the wedding ceremony," Bina Hassan, a women rights activist who has campaigned against this practice for years, told Khabar South Asia. "In rare cases the same girl is married numerous times, [though] usually the Arabs look for only virgins."

Many people have benefitted from such arrangements. The men can claim that they had not sinned according to Islam, which permits polygamy. Meanwhile, financial proceeds go to the girls' families, the agents who negotiate the deals, and the qazis (priests) who officiate.

For the brides, however, the results can be grim. After being deserted by their temporary husbands, they often find themselves without a home to return to. Their parents feel a sense of social stigma and want nothing to do with them. A real marriage is out of reach.

Community moves to end practice

Over the past two years, the Muslim community in Hyderabad has worked together with the government in order to halt such marriages and better protect local women. The results have been impressive. In 2012, only two such weddings were reported – compared to 58 during 2011.

Elders on the state Waqf Board played an instrumental role, government sources say.

"These weddings have been going on for decades, but no steps had been taken. The government decided to work through the Waqf Board because merely banning these weddings would not have produced any result. We needed the co-operation of the Muslim population," Andhra Pradesh Minister for Minorities Welfare Mohammed Ahmadullah told Khabar.

Waqf Board chairman Mohammad Saleem said one incident in particular galvanized opinion. "The straw that broke the camel's back was an incident in May 2012 in which a 73-year-old United Arab Emirates national became the centre of public ire when he tried to desert his bride of two days," he told Khabar.

According to journalist Omer Farooq, "the issue is quite dead now. The racket no longer flourishes."

Poverty cited as underlying cause

The grim economic picture for Muslims residing in Hyderabad's old-city quarter provides a context for the proliferation of dubious marriages. Packed into a medieval walled city, residents have the lowest literacy rate for women and a per capita income far lower than the Andhra Pradesh average of Rs. 71,540 ($1319).

The computer software industry – which gave the city its new nickname of "Cyberabad" – has had little impact on the urban Muslim community. "It's a ghetto, where people live in grimy conditions without access to even running water," Waqf Board general secretary Rumaan Idris Ali told Khabar.

For some families caught up in such dire conditions, black market weddings appeared to provide a way out.

In one case, according to assistant commissioner of police S.K. Rao, a 14-year-old girl (name withheld) was married in 2008 to three different men, all of them as old as her grandfather.

"The girl was pretty and looked older than her real age. Today she works as a construction labourer in some other city," Rao told Khabar. "We were helpless because her family was supporting these marriages."

Mussrath, 16, was married to a man in his 50s but dumped after three days in a local hotel. Her father then fixed her marriage to 70-year-old man, Rashid Ali, from Dubai. "She was taken to the same hotel, used and divorced," Rao said.

Mussrath's father found a third groom – 63-year-old Ahdul Rehman Abdullah from Oman – before her mother alerted the police.

Stories like this are becoming far less common, Waqf Board general secretary Ali said. Thanks to community vigilance, he said, young girls are no longer preyed on by racketeers.

But the discarded wives require rehabilitation. "They lack the means to put up legal fights. So the government must take up their cases," he said.

Racket moves to Mumbai

While sham marriages are becoming a thing of the past in Hyderabad, the problem is far from being resolved in India as a whole, authorities say. Rather, racketeers have simply moved their operations to other locations.

Mumbai, in particular, appears to be the new destination of choice for "grooms" seeking a no-strings-attached wedding.

The city's police on December 28th cracked an operation involving agents that brought young girls from Hyderabad to take advantage of the unreformed situation in Mumbai. In the suburb of Dongri, police rescued 12 girls – some as young as 13 – who were being paraded before Arabs by agents who had brought them in by overnight train.

"The girls were promised Rs. 200,000 ($3,700), out of which the agents would keep half," Assistant Police Commissioner (Women's Cell) Savithri Waslankar told Khabar. "Their aim was to have as many weddings as possible in the span of a few weeks so that they could make enough money to return home."

Source

Poverty-stricken Indian women forced into prostitution in Middle East

The two women sit in a grimy flat in west Delhi. The sound of traffic filters through the curtained windows. It is dark and they are talking about their rescue a few hours before and how – if – they might get back to their homes almost 1,000 miles away.

Malti, 22, and Sita, 35, were promised well-paid jobs in the Middle East. Neither reached the Gulf. Instead they were stripped of their valuables, travel documents and phones and held with 18 others in one room in a rundown apartment in the Indian capital for four months. Denied any outside contact, they were freed only when police, acting on a tip-off, raided the "human warehouse" where the women were being kept.

The pair are victims of a new wave of abuse as more and more women fromIndia are recruited by unscrupulous agents for jobs in the Middle East.

There were 3,517 incidents relating to human trafficking in India in 2011, says the country's National Crime Records Bureau, compared to 3,422 the previous year. Most involve women, often from very poor backgrounds, being seized forcibly or misled into lives of harsh domestic labour or sex work within India. But increasingly police and campaigners are uncovering illegal operations which channel women to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or theUnited Arab Emirates.

Many work without problems, sending much-needed cash back to their families. But others fall prey to unscrupulous and often violent intermediaries. An increasing number are forced into prostitution.

Anis Begum, 27, an almost destitute mother-of-four from Hyderabad, southern India, said she had paid 10,000 rupees (£120) to an agent to go to Saudi Arabia after being promised well-paid work as a maid. Instead, she was locked in a storeroom and then sold as a sex worker at an auction for the equivalent of £300, beaten, imprisoned and abused. "I was scared I might get pregnant. If I did, I thought they might kill me," she said. She was freed by her captor's wife after months of confinement in one room at their home in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

Such stories are increasingly familiar to police. The problem of human trafficking is huge, said Neeraj Kumar, Delhi's police chief. One case last year, was an eye-opener, he said. Nearly 40 women were intercepted by police atDelhi airport in an operation launched in co-operation with authorities in Mumbai and the United Arab Emirates. They were destined for brothels, investigators believe.

In another police operation last April, a trafficking ring in Bangalore which had sent more than 200 women to the Gulf was broken up. The gang received around £2,500 for every woman they delivered to brothels in Muscat and Dubai.

Most of the women recruited by the agents come from severely deprived backgrounds and are often illiterate. Unable to verify inflated or misleading claims, they travel willingly. In the Bangalore case, the women were told they were to be maids and then forced into sex work. Those freed in the Delhi operation were told they would be dancers. Anis Begum was told she could earn £125 a month, four times her wage as a hospital cleaner.

The two women released from the Delhi flat-cum-prison were typical of many victims. No one had forced them to leave their homes and Malti, from northern West Bengal, had already spent two years in Saudi Arabia, where she was neither abused nor denied pay, as a domestic servant. She was trying to return to the Gulf for more work when she got involved with the agent who imprisoned her.

Sita, an illiterate mother of five whose husband earns around 130 rupees a day (£1.60) as a labourer when he can find work, had little idea where she was going or what awaited her when she left her village, also in India's poverty-stricken north-east, late last summer.

"I was told I was going to earn a good salary by a woman who came to my home. I need to feed my children so I went with her. I had high hopes. She brought me to Delhi in a train but then I was locked up," Sita said.

One reason for the women's imprisonment in Delhi could have been a problem with paperwork, perhaps an official who had not been paid off. Mandha Bheem Reddy, a campaigner with the Indian Migrants' Rights Council, said corruption was endemic among border control officers.

"They often give clearance for poorly educated or even illiterate women who are particularly vulnerable. Many of these women can be stopped at the airport when questioning shows they have probably not met the requirements for emigration to the Gulf countries but they are allowed to leave," he said.

Anis Begum said her travel documents had been falsified to get round Indian laws designed to restrict abuse. "[The agent] told me to tell the emigration desk at Hyderabad airport that I was going to Dubai to visit my aunt. When they asked me too many questions, I called him and handed over the phone. Once he spoke to the official, they let me through," she said.

Last month an Air India employee was arrested at Delhi airport for falsifying boarding passes to allow workers to travel overseas illegally. A police officer was also involved in the scam.

Even substantial bribes to officials do not dent profits. "There is a lot of money at stake," said one Bahrain-based activist who works with Indian domestic workers in the Gulf state. "Employers over here are willing to pay up to 800 Bahraini dinar (£1,350) to an agent to bring a [maid] from India. Agents are taking money from both the employers and workers and in the process cheating both parties."

Once in the Gulf, workers have little protection. A recent Human Rights Watch report described migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia working 15 to 20 hours a day with no holidays and few breaks, minimal access to healthcare and poor accommodation. Many reported sexual abuse by employers.

According to the US state department, the kingdom is a "destination country" for men and women being trafficked for labour and, "to a lesser extent, forced prostitution".

Some are forced to work in brothels or simply abused. There are frequent reports of such incidents in the Indian press. In May last year a 21-year-old told recounted how she was forced to dance in a bar in Bahrain with 20 other women from the northwestern province of the Punjab by a violent trafficker before she drank chemicals to force him to bring her back home.

In August last year, authorities in Dubai arrested four people accused of running a prostitution ring after members allegedly beat up a Bangladeshi woman and held her in a cell where she was raped and pimped to paying customers. In Sharjah, another of the United Arab Emirates, a decades-old business which took impoverished Indian women who had been promised jobs in supermarkets or as housemaids and forced them into prostitution was uncovered by police in November.

Campaigners admit that as abuses occur overseas they are difficult for Indian authorities to deal with. But the agents are "here, not there", said Subhash Bhatnagar, the Delhi-based activist who received the tip-off which led to the raid on the "human warehouse" and freed Malti and Sati.

"There were maybe 40 or 50 girls who spent time in the flat while we were there," said Malti. "All were supposed to be going to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or somewhere else in the Gulf. Every week one or two of them would disappear, probably flown off to the Middle East. But most of us stayed put. No one had any money or contacts. We were helpless."

Conditions were harsh. Food, brought in from outside, was bad and there was no privacy.

"It was cramped, everyone was ill, there was no work and no one gave us any money. We were not allowed phone calls or any contact with relatives or friends. Our mobiles were confiscated and we were physically stopped from leaving. We kept asking when we would be going to Saudi Arabia. They just said soon," Malti said.

As their imprisonment entered a fifth month, Malti managed to contact a distant acquaintance through a sympathetic intermediary. Eventually word reached Bhatnagar, the activist, who informed the police. An hour or so later, the "warehouse" had been raided, emptied and three men detained.

"I am very happy," said Sita. "I'll be more careful in future.I'd still try again though. I need the work to feed my family."

But for Anis Begum in Hyderabad, indebted, traumatised and ostracised as a result of her ordeal as a forced sex worker in Riyadh, the struggle to rebuild her life has only just begun. She has attempted to bring charges against the agent who sent her to Saudi Arabia but has been told by police that he cannot be found.

Source

I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t

 THIRTY-TWO years ago, when I was 17 and living in Bombay, I was gang raped and nearly killed. Three years later, outraged at the silence and misconceptions around rape, I wrote a fiery essay under my own name describing my experience for an Indian women’s magazine. It created a stir in the women’s movement — and in my family — and then it quietly disappeared. Then, last week, I looked at my e-mail and there it was. As part of the outpouring of public rageafter a young woman’s rape and death in Delhi, somebody posted the article online and it went viral. Since then, I have received a deluge of messages from people expressing their support.

It’s not exactly pleasant to be a symbol of rape. I’m not an expert, nor do I represent all victims of rape. All I can offer is that — unlike the young woman who died in December two weeks after being brutally gang raped, and so many others — my story didn’t end, and I can continue to tell it.

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.

Source

Where rape is seen as violence

Rape cultures are nourished by norms, attitudes, and practices that trivialise, tolerate, or even condone violence against women.The legitimisation of prostitution and trafficking will only support the myth of male supremacy, increasing such crimes

A cruel and bizarre idea has surfaced since the rape of the 23-year-old student in Delhi — that prostitution should be legalised because ‘men will be men’ and, if prostitutes exist girls from ‘good’ families will not be raped.

Besides the very elitist notion that poor women should be sexually available to protect middle-class women, the idea is an insult to most men who do not have an unbridled sexual desire. Most men will not rape women if they are not obtainable otherwise. Most men, like most women, know that there is an appropriate place and time for sex and build relationships around it. They don’t see rape as sex, but rape as violence.

However, the masculinity of the minority of men, who rape women, is not questioned by their fellow men. Men are silent, even if they don’t condone acts of sexual violence and domination by other men. They do not break the unwritten code of honour among men, by speaking up or reporting sexual violence and harassment.

This gives free reign to the cult of masculinity that creates supremacy crimes. Damini (name changed) was not just raped but monstrously violated with several objects ultimately leading to her death, showing that the rapists’ actions were based on a desire to dominate and violate. The legitimisation of prostitution and trafficking will only support the myth of male supremacy, increasing such crimes.

Prostituted women do exist. The CBI admits to three million prostituted women in our country. Yet National Crime Records Bureau data shows that between 1953 and 2011, the incidents of rape went up by 873 per cent. Obviously the root cause of rape is not lack of access to sex but a hatred for women and a desire for violence to women’s reproductive parts. Perhaps this data proves that the existence of prostitution normalises a rape culture.

Rape cultures are nourished by norms, attitudes, and practices that trivialise, tolerate, or even condone violence against women. They are further normalised if there is impunity for perpetrators either due to a lack of effective legal mechanisms or apathy to prosecuting crimes against women.

ROLE OF PORNOGRAPHY

These misogynistic norms are actually being promoted by the sex industry turning huge profits. India has become the third largest user of pornography in the world. Blue movies and CDs are available at any street corner, besides of course as phone and Internet applications. For many 12-year-olds, the first sexual encounter is a pop-up character on a TV screen, being penetrated in every part of her body, crying with tears streaming down her face, yet asking for more. This confusing message socialises some boys into believing that sex is connected to violence and domination and when a woman says no she means yes.

I would be curious to know if police investigators have thought to ask Damini’s rapists if they ever watched porn and how much. The answer may require a response, in addition to punishing the individual men.

It may require looking at a multibillion dollar sex industry that is creating notions of masculinity, which are increasing, not acting as a buffer, to the violence and rape in our culture.

Source

How not to think about violence against women: Noopur Tiwari

I woke up in Paris last weekend to the news of the Delhi protests. I felt relieved. People are not just watching or suffering quietly anymore, I thought to myself. I wanted to be there too, out in the streets of Delhi. For all those times I had to suffer sexual harassment in Delhi, I want to be part of this churning for change now.

My Parisian friends asked me what was going on. And I told them about the new “national outrage” and the stories that had been stoking the anger. That’s when I realised I needed to make a list. What was informing my idea of what’s going on? These stories making it to the headlines, do they have something in common?

Yes, they do have one very obvious thing in common. They are all “sensational” news items. They are either:

-gang rapes;
-cases with voyeuristic descriptions of how women are stripped or paraded naked;
-rapes that involving a celebrity;

-rapes ending in suicide, murder or mutilation.

We need to be careful here. These stories “sell” better than other reports of violence against women. They fire up people easily and the most recent has even triggered a ‘movement’. Awareness is a good thing half-baked awareness is not. While we are in the mood to fight for change let’s also be aware of the risks we’re running.

By highlighting only these sensational stories, we are making only these rapes seem “real” and making other, more common forms of rape, such as acquaintance rape or marital rape, seem “unreal” or not serious enough to require strict action. Let’s not forget the crimes against women that are being committed every day but not making it to headlines. The suffering of those women also deserves outrage.The Indian media has made a huge effort to break a common rape myth: that women “invite” sexual assault or harassment and that their life is “ruined” if they are raped. This has made a difference to the way in which we talk about victims and survivors. We slam the Khap leaders for saying rapes happen because women fail to do enough to shield themselves from uncontrollable male desire. We make Sheila Dikshit eat her words for saying a woman who is out very late at night is being too adventurous. We give room to “survivors” on television rather than feel sorry for “wrecked victims”. That’s perfect. But we still haven’t realised that the way we talk about the perpetrators of sexual crimes remains seriously flawed.

Rapists are being called “crazed animals” who cannot control their vile sexual impulses and anger. We’ve already heard reports in the media about how Ram Singh was a “volatile man” and his friends call him “mental”. One report says, “Singh is a cold and remorseless”. In fact, we are constantly trying to classify the perpetrator an outsider, someone on the fringes, a monster. Even the Prime Minister in his address spoke of “monstrous crimes”. But rather than say “they are beasts” we should really be saying “they are men”. That brings the responsibility of the crime squarely back on us, for tolerating societal norms that have led to a fierce culture of violence against women.

“When we are forced to confront the reality of a real live rapist, the discourses of both bestiality (“these people are animals!”) and madness are both summoned up, establishing a trend of constantly pushing the rapist to the bounds of society, in order not to have to recognise the one in our workplace, our home, our bed.”

 (“Rape Crisis. Women Against Violence Against Women”. Capetown Trust.)

Delhi Police Commissioner, Neeraj Sharma, said on TV that the recent Delhi gang rape case will be treated as “rarest of rare”. The media let him get away too easily! By calling this case “rare” the police is trying to say “no one is responsible”. Speaking of this crime as an aberration, leads to the idea, that no one could have done anything about it.

“By presenting stories of violence against women as separated isolated events, the news media reinforces the idea that the violence was an isolated pathology of deviance. Maintaining this mirage of individual pathology, the news media denies the social roots of violence against women and absolves the larger society of any obligation to end it.”

(“Monsters, playboys, virgins and whores: Rape myths in the news media’s coverage of violence” Shanon O’Hara, 2011.)

There is another dangerous trend in these reports. The stories being played up are often about victims from the middle class and rapists from poorer sections. In the recent Delhi gang rape case, the victim was a medical student and the prime accused a bus driver. In the Bombay Purkayastha case, the woman was a lawyer and the criminal a security guard. In both cases, these men wanted to “teach a lesson” to these women, both women were “better off” than them. In the Rueben and Keenan case, the press talked of “national rage” and here’s how the accused were described in a paper: “One of them is a labourer, another is a barber while the rest are unemployed, police said.”

A fear psychosis is building up about these “other” men from weaker social classes who are turning against educated, free women. The idea taking root is that these social classes are full of sexual deviants and more and more depraved men are attacking innocent, free thinking, middle class women. In reality, let’s not forget, that these are not the only rapes that are being committed, they are simply the only ones being reported in greater numbers.

With each rape case that gets wide coverage, the anger and the hysteria multiplies. “Hang the rapists in public” is the common refrain one hears on the social media. One particularly violent set of images, where a mob lynches a rapist in Lebanon, was doing the rounds on Facebook. Someone wondered why we weren’t doing the same to rapists in India. And sure enough, “national rage” led to the lynching of as many as five men for sexual harassment in Jharkhand. One journalist was shot dead by the police in a protest in Imphal. The media really needs to tread very carefully now. There’s a thin line between media activism and whipping up hysteria. The protesters have to be cautious too. Saying no to violence cannot be done with more violence.

There is still a great deal that is not said and not reported in the media about violence against women. We need to start making room for the stories that have been ignored or forgotten as we go along. Our fervour to get justice for women is well-meaning and our media is trying to make sense of it all. But our anger and emotions can also be manipulated. Let’s not forget that there will be sane voices but also misled ones. There will be TRP wars, lumpen elements and populist appropriation that will keep adding distortions to the larger picture. As individuals, whether we work for the media or consume it, we will have to constantly scrutinise what we are saying, why we are saying it and what it is leading to.

(Noopur Tiwari is a journalist in Paris.) source