Day: June 14, 2011

Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen…

Not sure how I feel about this… maybe it is a good thing?

NEW DELHI — When 19-year-old Umang Sabarwal set up a Facebook page urging her friends to support SlutWalk Delhi, she may not have appreciated what she’d set in motion.

Ms. Sabarwal, a student who returned to India four years ago after living in Canada, was reacting out of frustration at the Indian capital’s history of violence against women. Of India’s major cities, Delhi has among the highest rates of rape (489 reported in 2010), street violence and harassment of women.

“The way the men stare, you feel like meat,” Ms. Sabarwal said.

The headlines for just the past week in and around the capital were depressingly familiar: The police were investigating the gang rape of a woman whose attackers had videotaped the act; a woman was allegedly assaulted by a property broker and thrown from his moving car when she resisted. And in the case of the rape of a 15-year-old girl, a court awarded the rapist a reduced prison sentence on the grounds that he was his family’s only wage earner.

Still, Delhi hadn’t yet experienced the kind of activism that quickly turned SlutWalk in Toronto into a global movement. The first SlutWalk was held there in April, after a Toronto police officer said that if women wanted to avoid rape, they should “avoid dressing like sluts.” Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis organized SlutWalk as a protest against the ways women are judged by their sexuality. Participants are encouraged to dress as they please, without restriction or fear. The movement went viral, with marches in Amsterdam, São Paolo, Seattle, Sydney and other cities.

But trying to hold a SlutWalk in Delhi, the first Asian city where such an action is planned, has raised a range of contentious issues, including class differences and feminist priorities. Ms. Sabarwal has pushed the date back from June to July to involve as many women’s rights organizations as possible, and to explain what SlutWalk is all about.

Many Indian feminists who support the idea of the march grapple with the name, which employs an English word infrequently heard here.

“Only a very tiny percentage of upper-class, elite people use the word ‘slut’ in India,” said Annie Zaidi, a journalist. “On the street, it’s never thrown at you. You’re never called ‘slut.’ It’s hard to reclaim a word that isn’t used.”

At the Badarpur subway station, Mita Desai, 17, said she didn’t understand it at all.

“Is slut like randi?” she asked, using the Hindi word for prostitute. “It’s not like the men here need to call you names to grab your breasts or threaten you.”

Ms. Desai, a salesgirl at a cosmetics shop, said she often dealt with sexual harassment on her commute to and from work. But she said she wouldn’t participate in SlutWalk. “My parents won’t like it,” she said. “And it’s for rich college women, not for women like me.”

Others are less closed to the idea of SlutWalk. Leela Nath, a housewife in the Delhi suburb of Shahdara, grasped the need for the march immediately. “I hope the men will come too,” she said. “They need to understand what women go through, why we are sometimes scared even to go to the market. But this business of wearing what we want to is a joke. You can be raped wearing a salwar kameez, wearing a sari,” traditional garments. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

Rosalyn D’Mello, a consultant at a feminist press, understands some of the problems of organizing protests in Delhi. A few months ago, angered by the authorities’ lack of action when a friend was harassed on the Delhi subway, Ms. D’Mello and others began a movement called Please Mend the Gap. The aim was to make the authorities more aware of women’s security needs and to change attitudes of male passengers towards women, who are often seen as easy prey for harassment if they travel outside the special women’s compartments. The flash mobs organized by Ms. D’Mello and her group of activists have drawn a strong response from officials and the public.

“The public space of the city is a battleground,” she said. “SlutWalk is an urban struggle of necessity, but while I support the initiative, I’m not so sure you can take it out of context. How do I explain SlutWalk to my maid? I feel it’s confined to class, to a certain kind of woman.”

It might be difficult for a domestic worker to identify with a more privileged woman’s fight to dress with freedom, if she is more concerned with low wages or workplace safety.

This is something that Ms. Sabarwal and the other organizers will have to work hard to address in the weeks leading up to SlutWalk Delhi. Ms. Sabarwal has had to explain to the sometimes prurient news media that SlutWalk is not just about “scantily clad women” taking to the streets. That phrase surfaces in many reports.

“Women can wear whatever they want, because the point we’re trying to make is that it is not the clothes you wear that cause harassment,” she said.

Bishakha De Sarkar, a journalist who has followed the women’s rights movement in India for years, puts SlutWalk into context.

“There are, of course, many, many more important issues for women” than the right to dress as they please, she said. “But there is no reason why we can’t have many movements at different levels — on the street, in the corridors of power, in schools and colleges, and everywhere else.”

This may be Ms. Sabarwal’s greatest achievement — not the walk itself, but the debate it has opened. She has kicked off the kind of discussion — about personal safety, sexuality and class — that is seldom heard here. It remains to be seen if SlutWalk Delhi will meet all its goals, but it’s done half the job by starting a difficult conversation.  

via nytimes.com