Need of acknowledging understanding Rape Culture

hello everyone today i want to start

with

one important story that happened to me

a few

days ago so almost a week back i was a

part of an all woman panel discussion

in one of the most one of the biggest

literature festivals in our country

and among the course of our discussion

we were asked to share about one of the

most

emotional moments of our lives uh being

a public discussion it was obviously not

meant to be a personal experience

we were expected to bring light to a

much broader perspective

from one of our own personal experiences

and

i could not think of anything else more

relative than the safety of women in our

country

i went on to see that women in nepal

weren’t

safe anywhere neither in public buses

nor at schools

not in their own neighborhood not even

at their own homes

i went on to say that sexual harassment

was so common that

it would happen by strangers by your

friends by your neighbors

by your relatives by your own family

members

a few days later i saw a quite

misleading headline

in one of the bigger news portals of our

country

um it was misleading in a sense that it

made it

it presented it as my coming out story

with a picture that was used of me

inside a chow body shelter

me looking quite frail

and miserable of course that’s a very

different topic of

on ethical journalism which i’d love to

talk about in some other panels someday

but

today i want to focus on this one very

important topic

that is rape culture if you allow me i

would

love to read out a few comments that

were made

in that particular facebook post

and some other news news porters that

copied

the same news and posted it in their own

pages

so the comments read the by the way the

headlines said um

shrink hala you and himself himself

i want to find out if he actually

penetrated you or did he just touch you

miss nepal’s virginity is already lost

this is among the few

this is among the few of the hundreds of

comments that i went through

and this really pushed me out of this

one bubble that i had been living in

this bubble that i thought where people

had been progressive

where i thought that women were finally

rising up

and this bubble where i thought that

women were finally started

to get respect and love that they

deserve it was like

pushing me out of that bubble into this

fast deep reality

and i was disgusted to say the least

i did not stop there i went on to

research the profile of every individual

that passed a comment at me i saw a

young man who had just gotten married

and who could not be happier to flaunt a

picture of him with his wife

i saw a picture of a mother with two

kids

i saw a picture of an elderly man who

was almost the age of my father and he

was the one who said gee boy tikka boy

whatever happened

it’s normal it happened for good

i found a profile of a man who just had

who could not be more proud to flaunt

his

one-year-old daughter’s achievements

i was shook to see that these people

were as

human as me they were not just some

comments in social media it was

the actual society the society that you

and i we all were living in

this one particular comment caught my

attention it was from a woman

who had two kids two daughters to be

precise

she wrote if you sell yourself for a

hundred bucks

for fashion and modeling what else do

you expect out of it

think about nirmala i went through the

profile of this woman

and she is the one who had been teaching

defense classes to girls

to protect them against sexual predators

to the viewers and listeners who do not

know nirmala was a 13 year old girl who

was brutally raped and murdered

in july 2018 which brought a very

big public outreach against the

situation of women’s safety in our

country

which took the world took the nepali

media the

national newspapers by storm the

perpetrator is still at large and the

case is still wide open

and this case was very important to

showcase the reality of women in our

country

but one thing that i understood

that that really hit me from all the

comments that i went through was

we as a society were expecting to get

rid of rape

by normalizing sexual harassment and

expecting change

i could i could not be more disgusted i

could not be more shameful

at the level of mentality

that we were all going through

i wanted to research more so i went

through and

i studied a lot about what made

people think that way what made people

think that sexual harassment was normal

and i stumbled upon to rape culture i

did quite a research and i found out

that

rape culture was so deeply embedded in

our society that

we all had been practicing it knowingly

or unknowingly we had all been

practicing it

we had all been victim of it we just did

not know that we had been normalizing it

so much that it had become

our day-to-day activity

think about it how many times have you

listened to a song where a singer says

that he wants to make a woman his

possession

how many times have we looked down upon

a woman

saying she is too opinionated or too

egoist

how many times have we took permission

from our own husbands or boyfriends to

go out with our goals

from sexualized advertising to

molestation

from on sexual on consensual touch to

reap

from drugging to marital rape all

of these come under this same category

which

makes us which gives us an idea that

women are submissive

and this idea that you all can objectify

women

if you allow me i would like to show you

a chart um

please if you mind yes um this is the

chart of

reap culture which is divided into four

uh

three categories which is normalization

degradation and assault

in level one that’s normalization

there are things like boys will be boys

sexist attitudes unwanted touch that is

nonsense sexual cat calling

eve teasing whistling

unequal p online rape and death threats

victim seeming which goes on and which

is followed by level 2

of rape culture which is flashing

or exposing safeword violations

revenge porn grouping

threatening moving on to the actual

bigger issue that

is rape murder gang rape

molestation dosing

murder

after going through this particular

pyramid

how many of you can relate yourself to

the chart

please use your hands up

quite a few hands have reached the

reason

how many of you can

relate to normalization

how many of you can relate to

degradation

how many of you can relate to assault

the story that i shared at literature

festival was was

of me when i was four years old when i

was molested by a much older man

i was too young to realize what was

happening to me but

much later the image came back to me and

i was haunted with that image for the

rest of my life

since then i’ve been a victim of

catch calling of unwanted touch

of sexist attitudes of victim shaming

of threatening of croping and i know

that i am not alone

i know that i’m not the only woman

standing here right now and saying that

i have related to this pyramid because i

know a lot of hands were raised

and i have talked to a lot of women i’ve

talked to a lot of young girls and i

wish i could go back in time and tell

them

you could have said no whenever you felt

uncomfortable

and i want to tell you all i want to

tell the girls who think that

who blame themselves that it was never

your fault

it was never your fault

standing here today i want you all to

look at the pyramid once more and if you

can see yourself in there

stop stand right there and reevaluate

re-evaluate the way that you’ve been

viewing women

and rape culture as a whole and if you

can still find yourself

in that culture please do something

to change it do something from your own

to

make sure that it does not happen again

raised conversations about it

these conversations that rape is not an

isolated subject

it has a lot of other topics a lot of

other environment and cultural aspects

that has

groomed people to think that sexual

harassment is normal but rape is not but

this

is not an isolated subject

i know that rape is a very sensitive

issue and i know that

i or anyone could never really

understand what a victim of rape

has gone through but we can emphasize

as human beings we can empathize with

our own experiences

you can empathize with your experience

of being grouped at a public bus

you can emphasize with your experience

of your teacher touching at places you

did not want to be touched at

you can empathize with how you felt when

your boyfriend forced you for sex

you can empathize when you were

victim-shamed

when you saw someone being victim-shamed

that’s the least we can do we can

empathize with our own

experiences and take actions against it

rape is a bigger picture

is a much bigger picture of the same

ideology

that makes us things that women are not

as equal as men

the same ideology that makes us think

that marital rape is not real

the same ideology that thinks that

victim shaming

is normal but it is not

it has never been like it has never been

that way and from this conversation

i want all of us to sit back reevaluate

how we’ve been culturally viewing women

and rape culture as a whole

and i want us all to take a stand

against it thank you so much