I Am Not Ashamed That I Was Raped

I was 11 then. It is not easy for a girl to tell the world the pain she once felt in the dark. Lips tremble and knees go weak. 

I had just started menstruating. My periods were irregular and my parents were thinking of taking me to a doctor.

It was a Saturday evening and I had gone out with the maid to buy some copies. I had barely noticed the middle aged person, dressed in kurta and pyjamas, who was standing just outside the shop and staring at us. When we came out of the shop, suddenly he came forward and confidently looked into my eyes. He then said that my dad had sent him and told my maid to stand a bit away. My maid, Tara di, had thought he might be a relative of us and silently stood at a distance. He then took a hanky in his hand, opened it and whispered to my ears "I am Tapash uncle. Your father just called me and said you are not having your periods. I am a doctor and I will take you to my clinic for a check-up." I have no clue how he came to know about my menstruation irregularity but this is a very common problem of most of the girls at that age. So maybe he was just trying it.

I don't know whether I was hypnotized but I started acting weirdly. I could see and feel everything but I was kind of losing control over myself.  I still can recall every incident of that evening but at that time I was partly subconscious, blindly following that man. I could not protest or say a single word and kept going with him. I could not hear my maid crying my name behind me nor the honking cars. I was petrified. I remember crossing the busy Vivekananda Road, led by him. He took me to a narrow lane, which was quiet, dark and lonely.

All of a sudden he held me tightly against the wall of a house and told me to undress my top. I was gaining my strength back slowly but was too weak to protest. I pushed him away and he held me even more tightly and pulled up my shirt. He pressed me against the wall bitterly and touched my private parts. It hurt. He started sucking my nipples and bit them. Then he asked me to remove my skirt. I protested and asked him to leave me. I begged. He didn't listen. He snatched open my skirt and grabbed me. He untied his pyjamas and started rubbing his genital against mine and kept on pressing my breasts. He entered inside my body and kept pushing hard till I started bleeding. It hurt a lot. I was unable to shout. And maybe, deep inside my heart, I was determined not to show my pain before this animal. I kept trying to fight and he went on.

And then, suddenly he left me and said "go back and don't tell these to anyone." I got back my strength and started running. I was still weak and didn't want to look back at the man again. I kept running through the lanes till I found the main road. I was fully conscious by that time and crossed the road to find my uncle. I didn't realize I was away for more than an hour. My maid had meanwhile run to the house as soon as I had vanished and told my parents that I was missing and now they were on the road, tense, searching for me. I gathered courage and told them that nothing has happened. When I returned home my mom was already crying. She asked repeatedly if that person had touched me in any way. I decided to keep quiet and ran to the washroom to find my genitals injured and bleeding.

I was too young then to understand what a "sexual crime" is, too small to realize that I could have filed a FIR. All I knew was, what had happened was absolutely wrong and my parents would get hurt if they knew this. So I somehow remained strong. I kept quiet for years and finally told my parents six years later when I couldn't bear it any more. I would like to specially mention that THIS INCIDENT DOES NOT HAUNT ME.

It took me years to realize that keeping quiet is not the solution and it only encourages this kind of crime. With time, I understood that it was not just for my parents’ sake that I kept quiet.  Rather in the back of my mind, society was playing a big role without my knowledge. Our society has directly and indirectly always taught us that RAPE, MOLESTATION OR ANY KIND OF HARRASMENT IS SHAMEFUL FOR THE VICTIM AND HE/SHE HAS TO KEEP IT SECRET. By various means of media, the patriarchy has been successful in engraving in our minds that rape is a private issue, and victims should never talk about it.

I would like to call people forward and speak about the harassment they are facing now or had faced in the past. When a girl gets raped, we try to find out the dress she was wearing, the time she was out etc. This is probably a main feature of patriarchy, where men point towards the women in order to satisfy their ego. Society hardly bothers about male rape victims. No. rape or molestation is a crime which is equally punishable whether the victim is male, female or transgender. It is not a shame for the victim, but for the rapist. Our identity or our prestige does not lie in our genitals, but in the character that we build. A rape is another crime irrespective of the religion or gender of the victim. Before changing the society, we need to change our minds. The society needs to stop judging whether the victim was wearing a saree or a bikini, whether he/she is a clerk, or a sex worker. Sex against consent or any kind of verbal and physical harassment should be openly discussed because keeping mouth shut is nothing but letting the rapists win over us. We are not weak, and we are going to fight against sexual crime of any form. For me it was initially tough to tell the world in such details, but now it's not because I'm aware of the fact that BEING MOLESTED OR RAPED IS NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED ABOUT. Thousands of people go through these things every day. It's high time we need to open our mouth and protest. I write about this incident in hope that this will give more people enough courage to speak against the wrong.

I am Sampurna Bose, a final year B.Sc. economics student, and I’m not afraid to tell the world that I WAS RAPED WHEN I WAS 11 YEARS OLD AND I AM NOT ASHAMED OF IT.