Why Didn’t I Say?. Why didn’t I say?
By: Kaamna Bhojwani Dhawan
Tags: Toxic Masculinity, Patriarchy, Me Too Movement, Raising Girls, Sexual Harassment

Why do girls who have a good chance of being believed still don’t speak up about sexual harassment?

This weekend at a 4-person socially distant dinner party, someone asked me to recount seminal moments in my life. I did a quick run through of the usual suspects: college, marriage, kids, moving countries — lots of memories but nothing really standing out as having influenced the future direction of my life.

“When I was ten a waiter at a restaurant I visited with my parents rubbed and squeezed my little bud of a breast.”

Awkward silence.

“A few years later on holi, I was thrown into the pool by a couple of boys who grabbed and pinched my nipples underwater.”

My answers were not good for the casual Friday-dinner-under-the-stars vibe my host was going for, but I persisted nevertheless (see what I did there?), almost unwrapping the incidents in my head for the first time since they occurred:

“What’s surprising about both those incidents is how reluctant I was to say anything. In the first, I told no one. In the second, I told one friend whose big brother took it upon himself to ‘defend my honor’. Where did I learn that what happened to me is something I should be embarrassed for?

Why didn’t I say? Why didn’t I fight?

Unlike many victims of harassment, I grew up in a family that would have believed. That waiter could have gone down. Hell, the whole restaurant could have. But something inside the little girl didn’t think she was worth the trouble. Where did I learn that?

In an educated, liberal, affluent family that truly believed girls were equal to boys, if I didn’t feel compelled to scream and shout and haul the perpetrators by their grubby, unwelcome, disrespectful hands, who the hell would?”

Seminal indeed.

Patriarchy is a doozy. It is sinister and sustained because it is subtle and ubiquitous.

No one told me: “Darling, if a man touches you inappropriately be quiet about it”. But no one told me to scream either.

#MeToo was so powerful because horrifically, every woman was able to identify. EVERY WOMAN. That’s absurd. Even the other woman at our dinner party didn’t flinch. It’s so commonplace.

But that man in the restaurant who bet his job on the fact that I wouldn’t tell and the delinquents by the pool who came from “good homes” have ensured one thing: Me and mine will never be silent again.

Our instinct as parents is to protect our children, to let them live out the fantasy of a safe and utopian world as long as they can, without alerting them to the dangers that lurk in dark alleys and in upscale restaurants.

Wrong.

Not a luxury we can afford frankly, in a world in which one in 9 girls is a victim of sexual harassment or assault (Source: RAINN). And that number is in the US and it’s reported so we know that the actual incidences are much higher. We ALL know.

Teach your kids, boys and girls, that they matter enough to cause some disturbances, to make a ruckus, to disrupt the status quo. Don’t let it be implied, say it out loud. We have to raise the decibels of what we won’t stand for to compensate for the deafening silences of what we’ve allowed.

No rose colored glasses for my 9 year old who begrudgingly takes tae kwon do twice a week. She’s learning how to defend against a chokehold this week. I’m downright excited. There will come a time when she will have to use her voice and maybe even deliver a sharp blow to the genitals to protect herself. So be it. She will be ready.

WATCH: Indian activist Kamla Bhasin discusses patriarchy, including rape culture.