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