Breaking the silence
The Delhi gang rape had everybody sit up in horror and outrage, but it led Charanya Kannan, an Indian resident living in South Korea, who works as a General Manager for a commercial vehicle manufacturer in Seoul, to write a post on Facebook that mobilised widespread solidarity. ‘I break my silence’, as she called it, was about her experience of being molested on a bus as a kid. The first of many occasions, she recalls the other times she was groped.
“I yelled and insulted the man and got him out of the bus. Publicly humiliating him helped me bring it to a closure, knowing he wouldn’t dare to repeat it. I opted to write about this specific incident because it still boils my blood that the bus conductor, the driver and the people around, looked at me as though I had committed the crime. (The general public never comes to help, at least in Chennai.) The total apathy with which the bus conductor had asked me to get down from the bus, thereby giving support to the perpetrator, completely broke me down. Being groped is one thing, and being blamed and looked down upon for it, while the guy who commits it gets to laugh — the helplessness of it all — never ceases to enrage me. That night, the helplessness of the Delhi girl brought it all back for me,” she recalls, and felt impelled to write the post.
Her note went viral and led to the formation of the group, ‘I break my silence’. People wrote in, applauding her courage, and recounting their own stories of harassment. “Breaking our silence is the first step,” she says of what has become a nationwide phenomenon with a number of people sharing their stories on the website. “If this gathers momentum, it will influence mindsets, give women the confidence to know that they are not alone in facing the perpetrator of a crime and to help them understand that it is all right to speak up. It will probably persuade people not to fall in the ‘bystander trap’ and sensitise readers,” she says. She realises at the same time that for it to be far-reaching it has to go from online to partnering with NGOs and colleges to take it to a more grassroots level.”
Charanya envisions a utopian world where “we shouldn’t feel privileged to be a man or a woman.” Reality though, is different, she realises — parents who deny girl children education, companies unwilling to acknowledge that a woman’s career and motherhood are not mutually exclusive; and people unable to accept sharing of household chores. Gender equality is far off, “But I do hope our battle to end sexual harassment is not that long,” Charanya says. “We deserve at least that much dignity — so that we can pass on a better world to our daughters.” That can happen if more people write in, break their silence, she points out.
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