When One Billion Rises
It is hard to escape three words strung together: “One Billion Rising”. Fast being known simply as OBR, the word and the abbreviation keep on popping up as a common theme across social networking sites and in conversation and serious discussions across towns, cities and countries. Just as there are young and old people getting together to talk and plan out the day, which will be observed worldwide on February 14, there are a lot others who believe that the observation is something to do with Valentines’ Day. The history of the V-day, on which the One Billion Rising campaign is pegged; is much more than the raw consumerism of Valentine’s Day. It all started in 1998 as reactions to a politically and sexually charged play called The Vagina Monologues written by Eve Ensler, an American playwright, performer, feminist and activist. Made up of a number of monologues read by a number of women, dealing with feminine experiences touching on sex, love, rape, menstruation, female genital mutilation, masturbation, birth, orgasm, the various common names for the vagina, or simply as a physical aspect of the body, The Vagina Monologues became more than just a play but slowly took on the shades of a movement with its central theme on preventing sexual violence. Every year a new monologue is added to highlight a current issue that affects women around the world. The V-day as the movement became to be known started from discussions post the play and spread to countries on a global scale.
This time, given the context and the public and social debate over areas of safety for women, it is only apt that the One Billion Rising movement gets into the spotlight in India as well. While the theme may be making itself heard around us, partly because of the rage and events that has unfolded in the country after the brutal rape and subsequent death of a 23 year old in New Delhi, it is a fact that issues around women’s safety are hardly addressed with the seriousness that it deserves. It is common for most people to lay blame on women for sexual crimes committed against them. If it is a case of domestic violence, the accepted norm is that the wife must not have tried enough to keep the husband happy. If a woman gets raped, it is her fault for various reasons: the time she was going somewhere, the dress she was wearing, the company she was keeping, the community she is from. There will never be any mention of responsibilities towards women being safe from abuse, ultimately leading to figures that shock: one in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime!
India or even Manipur are not the only places where the onus for women to stay safe rests on how they dress and how they look, where they go and whom they go with. In fact the V-day movement also came about as a response to a statement made by Republican U.S. Representative Todd Akin of Missouri who said pregnancy rarely occurs as a result of what he called “legitimate rape”. This is no different to various leaders on the national level and at the state level who have given their pearls of wisdom on women’s sexual rights and freedom. Some years ago, an MLA always prone to be in the Opposition party famously went about distributing knives and scissors to women ‘to protect themselves from rape’ and struck by that same helpful gesture, a political party in Maharashtra advised that women should carry knives for protection. Missing in the area of discussion of course, was that sexual violence on women are committed by men and that they are the ones who need to be brought to book.
And while the country’s leaders set about getting the ordinance on preventing violence against women and their sexual abuse into legal implementation mode in the backdrop of calls to also look into existing gaps that have been left out and more so in the context of the safety of women in militarized zones in the country, the rallying point of the One Billion Rising Campaign should hopefully keep the talk going on till it hits home.