Indians rely on their social capital. We take pride in remembering our family history, father, forefather etc and thus we have this multiple branches of first cousins, second cousins and nth cousins. Well to me it sounds like some river dividing into distributaries. If one comes from a small town in India, it’s the family first you trust and then friends. Family in this context would encapsulate all those distant cousins and relatives, who you get as your social capital in legacy. If you don’t maintain these relations, you fall. These are the people who are there with you in your thick and thin. All that is good until, it strikes you where it hurts the most. What I intend to discuss here is incest, the forced incest.
For a girl it’s not during the onset of menstrual cycle that she comes to know for the first time that she is a woman which would probably mean following certain rules related to her sexuality. In some cases the ‘stronger’ sex makes them realize the fact at the tender age of five or six. Avuncular love costs them their childhood. Especially in the case of joint families where kids don’t get enough attention due to paucity of time and children grow up in a small community of uncle, aunts, grandparents and cousins. A pedophile might be one of them, living as a parasite in your household without you having inkling of what all damages he is capable of inflicting on your little baby.
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Pic source:http://www.newjustice.net/blog/2012/03/09/international-online-pedophile-network-busted-by-authorities/
I still remember going for a wedding where a ten year old happy girl would suddenly become lifeless when she would see her forty year old maternal uncle. To my surprise, she would come to me and ask me to take my dupatta properly so that my cleavage remains unshown. I was taken aback. I just giggled and asked her where did she learn all that from? I could not sense the fear in the child’s behavior then. Years later the girl as an adult revealed that the maternal uncle tried to feel her 'non-existent' breast. I was furious. I wanted to behead that man right away. Thankfully, he was dead by then. When I saw Monsoon Wedding for the first time, it echoed the same emotion. I feel thankful to Mira Nair for bringing out this issue so upfront
Around close to fourteen years of adult female life, I have met lot of women who talk about being molested by their extended family members. Most of the times they were targeted at the age between 7-14. They never talked about it openly though. For many of them, when it happened they did not know how to express it to elders. They realise what happened only after some years. As an adult when they tried to be vocal about it, their mothers asked them to keep quiet or forget. The criminal roamed in the household openly.
What perplexes me in this blind chain of trust in the social capital which one gets in legacy? Can’t we protect our daughters first and then try maintaining our social capital or better enough, why can’t we just apply our brains and create a social capital worth banking on. We don’t need to sacrifice women of our family to protect the legacy. Let the heinous creatures go from your definition of ‘capital’. Moreover, pay heed to what the child is saying. Stop getting into moral dillema and asking your daughter to forget it. The only choice you have in such situation is to stand by a child. Respect the child and the childhood.
For a girl it’s not during the onset of menstrual cycle that she comes to know for the first time that she is a woman which would probably mean following certain rules related to her sexuality. In some cases the ‘stronger’ sex makes them realize the fact at the tender age of five or six. Avuncular love costs them their childhood. Especially in the case of joint families where kids don’t get enough attention due to paucity of time and children grow up in a small community of uncle, aunts, grandparents and cousins. A pedophile might be one of them, living as a parasite in your household without you having inkling of what all damages he is capable of inflicting on your little baby.
.
I still remember going for a wedding where a ten year old happy girl would suddenly become lifeless when she would see her forty year old maternal uncle. To my surprise, she would come to me and ask me to take my dupatta properly so that my cleavage remains unshown. I was taken aback. I just giggled and asked her where did she learn all that from? I could not sense the fear in the child’s behavior then. Years later the girl as an adult revealed that the maternal uncle tried to feel her 'non-existent' breast. I was furious. I wanted to behead that man right away. Thankfully, he was dead by then. When I saw Monsoon Wedding for the first time, it echoed the same emotion. I feel thankful to Mira Nair for bringing out this issue so upfront
Around close to fourteen years of adult female life, I have met lot of women who talk about being molested by their extended family members. Most of the times they were targeted at the age between 7-14. They never talked about it openly though. For many of them, when it happened they did not know how to express it to elders. They realise what happened only after some years. As an adult when they tried to be vocal about it, their mothers asked them to keep quiet or forget. The criminal roamed in the household openly.
What perplexes me in this blind chain of trust in the social capital which one gets in legacy? Can’t we protect our daughters first and then try maintaining our social capital or better enough, why can’t we just apply our brains and create a social capital worth banking on. We don’t need to sacrifice women of our family to protect the legacy. Let the heinous creatures go from your definition of ‘capital’. Moreover, pay heed to what the child is saying. Stop getting into moral dillema and asking your daughter to forget it. The only choice you have in such situation is to stand by a child. Respect the child and the childhood.
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