The spike in child marriage, a side-effect of the pandemic, threatens to reverse gains by years of activism. But a government proposal to raise minimum age to 21 for girls is not going to solve the problem, I write in Hindustan Times Gita got married when she was 12 but, like most married girls in […]
India can solve its rape problem. The question is: Do we want to? A week after an “encounter” with Telangana police left four rape and murder-accused men dead, it might not be out of place to ask if India has solved its endemic problem of violence against women. Have men stopped raping women, or killing
A new book by my friend and college room-mate Sohaila Abdulali explores the idea that victims of sexual violence are not broken beings. Awful as it is, rape is survivable, and those who have been raped are deserving and capable of happiness again. I don’t remember the precise moment when my then college roommate, Sohaila
What we talk about when we talk about rape Read More »
In IndiaSpend, I look at the state of India’s shelter homes for children to discover endemic abuse and, worse, absolute apathy. She has no memory of her early childhood, no recollection of her biological parents and no idea of how or why she got separated from them when she was about three years old. What she
Abuse of Children in India’s Institutions Reveals Nationwide Crisis of Reform Read More »
Now that we are making our child sexual offences law gender neutral, isn’t it time we started talking about adult male rape survivors? Sohaila Abdulali is telling me about the time many years ago when a man called up a Rape Crisis Centre in the US. He had been raped by a teacher some years
It’s time we recognised that men can get raped too Read More »
In Hindustan Times: Atul Kochhar is the symbol of a far more widespread problem – the normalization of prejudice against Muslims. I run into my college friend after a gap of some years. Post the usual small-talk, she wants to know my views on the tolerance/intolerance debate. I tell her I am worried about the
The bigot in my drawing room Read More »
In IndiaSpend: Anti-trafficking activist Sunitha Krishnan, one of three finalists for the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity spoke to me on sex slavery, rehabilitating victims of sex trafficking and death for raping children. New Delhi: She’s dodged an acid attack, had a fatwa issued against her and survived 17 separate physical assaults. But Sunitha Krishnan, 46, doesn’t seem
Children don’t seem to be a priority in this country Read More »
In response to public outrage against a spate of reported rapes of children, the government has now brought in an ordinance that imposes death to anyone convicted of raping a girl below 11. Why I think this ordinance won’t work, and what I think will. The remarkable fact about recent Indian law-making, particularly when it
Laws by public emotion Read More »
The murder of a woman in Alwar points to India’s most shockingly under-reported story on why nearly 200 lakh women have quit jobs. All Usha Devi wanted was to give her kids a good education. The wife of a construction worker knew that her husband’s income was not enough to educate her children, Tanuja, 15,
Why women are falling off the employment map Read More »
At the heart of this controversy lies not so much the right of a woman to choose her religion and spouse, but society’s attitude to women. We should be grateful for small mercies. On International Women’s Day, a day when hashtags were declaring ‘Time’s Up’ and ‘My Body is Mine’, our highest court reaffirmed a
The lamentable humiliations of Hadiya Read More »
All over the world, the responsibility of bringing up children lies disproportionately with women. A 2015 report by McKinsey Global Institute found that 75% of unpaid care-work – cooking, cleaning, washing, caring for children and the elderly – is done by women. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tweeted this past week that she and
Childcare should not only be a woman’s job Read More »
A new generation of anti-status-quoists is unapologetic about its beliefs, unafraid about whom it is taking on and unfettered by the hackneyed script. No careers were brought down. No global hashtags were created. No roars reverberated throughout the world. And yet, women in India continued chipping away at that edifice called patriarchy. In a year
A year of assertion when notice has been served on patriarchy Read More »