http://jilsblognujs.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/through-my-looking-glass/
Through my Looking Glass
by Stella James
Sometimes the most difficult things to
write about are also the most essential. I feel this is especially true
when many people, much more scholarly than oneself, have already said
and written a lot around the issue, and yet your own experience does not
seem to fit into the wide net that they’ve cast. Gandhi once said “I
have something far more powerful than arguments, namely, experience”.
And it is from these words that I derive what I consider the ‘value’ of
this piece – not my experience per se, but from what I feel that my
experience can tell us about much discussed issues in the country today.
Last
December was momentous for the feminist movement in the country –
almost an entire population seemed to rise up spontaneously against the
violence on women, and the injustices of a seemingly apathetic
government. In the strange irony of situations that our world is replete
with, the protests were the backdrop of my own experience. In Delhi at
that time, interning during the winter vacations of my final year in
University, I dodged police barricades and fatigue to go to the
assistance of a highly reputed, recently retired Supreme Court judge
whom I was working under during my penultimate semester. For my supposed
diligence, I was rewarded with sexual assault (not physically
injurious, but nevertheless violating) from a man old enough to be my
grandfather. I won’t go into the gory details, but suffice it to say
that long after I’d left the room, the memory remained, in fact, still
remains, with me.
So what bothered me about this incident?
As a conditioned member of the society, I had quickly “gotten over” the
incident. But was that what worried me: that I had accepted what was
essentially an ‘unacceptable’ situation. The more I thought about it,
the more I realized that the crux of my unease lay in my inability to
find a frame in which to talk, or even think, about my
experience. While the incident affected me deeply, I felt little anger
and almost no rancour towards the man; instead I was shocked and hurt
that someone I respected so much would do something like this. My
strongest reaction really, was overwhelming sadness. But this sort of
response was new to me. That I could understand his actions and forgive
him for them, or that I could continue to think of him as an essentially
‘good’ person, seemed a naïve position that were completely at odds
with what I had come to accept was the “right” reaction to such
incidents.
This emotional response was also
completely at odds with the powerful feelings of righteous anger that
the protestors in Delhi displayed. I am not trying to say that anger at
the violence that women face is not a just or true response, but the
polarization of women’s rights debates in India along with their intense
emotionality, left me feeling that my only options were to either
strongly condemn the judge or to betray my feminist principles. Perhaps
this confusion came out of an inadequate understanding of feminist
literature, but if so, isn’t then my skewed perception a failing of
feminism itself? If the shared experiences of women cannot be easily
understood through a feminist lens, then clearly there is a cognitive
vacuum that feminism fails to fill. Feminists talk of the guilt a woman
faces when sexually harassed, like it is her fault. I felt a
similar guilt, except, my guilt wasn’t at being assaulted, but at not
reacting more strongly than I did. The very perspective that was meant
to help me make sense of my experiences as a woman was the one that
obscured the resolution of the problem in my own mind, presumably an
effect that feminism does not desire. And if not a result of feminist
theory itself, the form that it has taken in India, especially after
recent incidents of sexual assault, strengthened the feeling of “If
you’re not with us, you’re against us” in a fight that I feel I can no
longer take sides in.
All the talk during that time was of
stricter punishment, of baying for the blood of “creepy” men. Five years
of law school had taught me to look to the law for all solutions – even
where I knew that the law was hopelessly inadequate – and my reluctance
to wage a legal battle against the judge left me feeling cowardly. On
reflection though, I cannot help but wonder why I should have felt that
way. As mentioned earlier, I bore, and still bear, no real ill-will
towards the man, and had no desire to put his life’s work and reputation
in question. On the other hand, I felt I had a responsibility to ensure
that other young girls were not put in a similar situation. But I have
been unable to find a solution that allows that. Despite the heated
public debates, despite a vast army of feminist vigilantes, despite new
criminal laws and sexual harassment laws, I have not found closure. The
lack of such an alternative led to my facing a crippling sense of
intellectual and moral helplessness.
The incident is now a while behind me,
and they say time heals all wounds. But during the most difficult
emotional times, what helped me most was the ‘insensitivity’ of a close
friend whose light-hearted mocking allowed me to laugh at an
incident (and a man) that had caused me so much pain. Allowing myself to
feel more than just anger at a man who violated me, something that I
had never done before, is liberating! So, I want to ask you to think of
one thing alone – when dealing with sexual violence, can we allow
ourselves to embrace feelings beyond or besides anger, and to accept the
complexity of emotions that we face when dealing with any traumatic experience?
(Stella James is a Fellow at Natural Justice: Lawyers for Communities and the Environment)
Image courtesy: here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
This entry was posted in Human Rights, Law and Sexuality, Uncategorized, women's rights and tagged Criminal Law Amendment, delhi gang rape, Feminist movement, Law and Sexuality, rape laws, sexual assault, sexual harassment. Bookmark the permalink.
9 Responses to Through my Looking Glass
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i respect your courage for sharing this incident with us and making us aware of what the situation is around us.
Ask for a public apology and admission of guilt like the way Sweta Menon did recently.