Nobody's Women

Nobody's women - How They Survived The Rapes

It is difficult not to look at the ground when you are in a room full of women who have been subjected to unspeakable sexual abuse. It is awkward when you meet those who up until that moment have been faceless, lost somewhere between FIRs and newspaper reports, just “a 24-year-old who was dragged away at night...” Reduced to a statistic: “This was the fourth such case here in just the past one month…”

It is even harder to meet their eye when they talk of hope in a world that appears to have no use or place for them.

The real stories of rape victims almost never come out, tightly sealed as they are in shame, taboo and a sense of futility. What is the point in talking about it, they will tell you, encouraged by their families not to heap further indignities upon themselves, having already “lost their honour” in the community. But when they do come out, the stories, they stagger you with the unbearable weight of each personal tragedy.

At Samadhan in Dehradun, a care intervention and rehabilitation centre for victims of sexual crimes, there is a young woman who the other inmates call ‘DGP’. Renu D Singh, 50, a rights activist who runs the 30-year-old privately-funded institution, said this is one of the “worst of the worst” cases that have come to her.

The girl is not in a position yet to talk about her history, but information pieced together by Samadhan activists hint at her surviving the violence of child marriage in rural Uttar Pradesh and running away from home. No one knows how she came to Haridwar three years ago where she had been raped so many times that she started smearing her body with her own excreta to ward off predators. She was being molested when some passersby heard her cries and alerted a local Samadhan representative. “She was on the brink of losing her sanity when we brought her here on September 13, 2011,” Singh said.

The victim’s case summary says that when she landed in Haridwar, hungry, unhinged and as vulnerable as a little baby, some “opportunistic criminals in the garb of sadhus” turned her into a sex slave for months. They let go of her when an untreated wound on her right leg developed a severe infection. “There were maggots crawling all over her and gangrene had also set in,” said Singh.

Then Singh says something that knocks the wind out of you. “Even in that condition, when we took her to a government hospital a doctor was caught trying to molest her. We created a hue and cry and went to the cops, but they asked us to first put in a complaint with the CMO and the DM. They later told us that they found the doctor innocent and that there was no basis for the FIR. The report about the doctor’s misdeeds was published in the local papers but nothing came of it. We were just glad we somehow managed to save her from yet another rape.”

When I met DGP sometime in June this year at Samadhan, she looked closer to 30 although she is barely 22, dragging her bad leg as she walked. “Do you know why she is called DGP?” Singh said, allowing herself a little smile. “It is because she occasionally pretends to be a cop. That gives her a sense of power. Once in a while she will carry a small stick, too, like officers do. The other girls humour her.”

On the top floor of Samadhan’s three-storied building in the heart of Dehradun, there is a small kitchen that the inmates run, making rice, dal and sabzi; occasionally they prepare dosa and noodles too. Standing behind the food counter is a frail girl. Let's call her Amrita. “Namaskar,” she says, cheerily. “I am a victim-survivor, too, but am now studying law. I want to fight for women like me, help them in whatever way I can. The courts can be a jungle. It’s easy to get misguided and be exploited.”

Displaced by the Tehri dam and unable to cope up with delayed rehabilitation by the government, Amrita’s family had quickly disintegrated. Later, her father had only been too happy to give her off to someone who promised marriage. The man turned out to be a trafficker.

It was when she was fighting against her own trafficking and rape by some powerful men in her village that the brutal reprisal came in the form of her sister’s gang-rape. Amrita’s younger sibling was only 15 then. After a long battle an FIR was lodged in the Matli thana (Uttarkashi) in October 2010, but the police slapped a reverse case against the girl under section 182 of the IPC for “filing a false report of crime.” Today both the sisters are with Samadhan. Their father died of TB two years ago and their mother lives alone in their Uttarkashi village, barely able to fend for herself.

It’s an issue Amrita says she will take up once she is armed with a lawyer’s degree. “Across police stations in India, it is simply impossible to report a rape. The police do everything in their power to thwart you. In nine out of 10 cases the victim gives up,” she said. “A much longer and tougher battle awaits us in court. Few can go through such humiliation and pressure, that too over months and years.” Rehabilitation is another problem. “Even if you win the case, compensation from the government either takes ages to come or doesn’t come at all. The system doesn’t support you. Jobs are tough to get, often your family deserts you and men think we are easy meat,” she said.

Listening to Amrita talk is a quiet woman in well-tailored salwar-kameez and sandals. Speaking in English, with a hint of make-up, she does well to hide her scars – emotional and physical. But at Samadhan, she must be the only one who is still scared of harm from her tormentor – the man she married. A helper at the centre said, “Her husband, a police inspector who recently took voluntary retirement, still wields a lot of power. For the longest time the cops wouldn’t even listen to her. Some of them would tip off her husband about the case.”

Nalini (her name changed) says that after several months of visiting the police station in Dehradun was she able to file an FIR in September 2011. She alleges her husband, a man with psychopathic tendencies, would at the slightest provocation gag and sodomise her. Once when she complained, he flung her to the ground, sat on her and poured a bottle of floor cleaner down her throat. One day he tattooed his name on her arm with a needle in front of her five-year-old son. “I was so smashed up, inside and outside, that when I came to Samadhan I could barely talk,” said Nalini. “I was terrified that my husband, who had once beaten me up in front of some colleagues and chopped off my hair, would find and kill me.”

Thirty-five years old now and divorced, Nalini has done her Masters in Child Education and Development and now wants to do a PhD. “Maybe I will work as an educationist some day. I like to be with children,” she said. Her son is still with her husband because she has been to doctors and psychiatrists so often that it is difficult to prove in court that she is normal enough to fulfill her role of a mother.

Amrita, meanwhile, is studying hard to crack her law exams, while her sister, who completed class X recently with 74% from a school in Roorkee, has written 108 poems in both Garhwali and Hindi and is waiting for someone to publish them. Even DGP reads and writes a bit, and has started to paint, drawing babies and flowers.

Survivors like Nalini, Amrita and DGP, across India, at home and in rehabilitation centres, are attempting to put the past behind and build their lives anew. But Singh knows it will be tough. “The fact is that there is little sympathy for victims of sexual and domestic violence in our country,” she said. “We need to talk about rape in our society more than we do – in our midst, in the media, policy circles. In India, nobody really does.”

Least of all, it seems, the government. Despite a steep spurt in the sexual crimes graph – while the US Justice Department says the rate of such violence against women and girls aged 12 or older fell 64% in a decade there (1995-2005), India has witnessed a 74% increase over the past 15 years, according to a study based on stats released by the National Crime Records Bureau – and the MHA’s urgent advisory to state governments on it in 2009, few, if any, have set up rape crisis centres and specialised treatment units.

As Nalini said, “We are nobody’s constituency and we are nobody’s people.”