Suzette Jordan, the girl who refused to take crap

“I’m just another woman. Just another simple woman who loves her family, loves her children and will not take crap.” That’s how Suzette Jordan described herself the first time I met her. She was a single mother with two daughters to raise, practically penniless, unable to find a job despite her best efforts, stigmatised by society, vilified by the state and dealing with the trauma of brutal rape. Yet Suzette had chosen to fight valiantly, not just for herself but also for other survivors of sexual violence. Suzette radiated courage and a unique kind of grace.

The year was 2013 and just a few weeks ago, Suzette had waived her right to annonymity as a rape survivor and revealed her name and face on television. It was an act of outstanding courage and when I asked Suzette why she chose to do this, she replied, “I want to fight wide open so that people can see me and see my pain. This is my way of fighting. I’m not a victim, but I have suffered and I want my pain to be felt. Besides, I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

That day I felt her pain, in every syllable Suzette uttered as she spoke of the events of February 5, 2012, the night a gang of men committed rape on her in a car in her hometown, Kolkata.

“As soon as the car started, the main guy, the one who is still missing, grabbed my body part. Spontaneously, I slapped him. I tried to open the car but the door was auto locked. And then I knew I was in big trouble. He started to really beat me up. When he shoved a gun into my mouth I thought it was the end. I couldn’t breath or swallow. I could taste my own blood. He had slapped me so much, my mouth was bleeding. And then he laughed. They guy next to him was cheering him on. I was semi-conscious by then, but I could see him. He was so close to my face, trying to strangulate me. I felt I would not make it out of the car alive.

 “There’s a lot that they did to me, which is hard for me to put into words. I was consumed with fright and rage. It’s a terrible feeling -- like you’re alive but somebody has buried you in a coffin and you’re trying to get out but you can’t. You want to breath because you are alive but you’re held down and confined. I kept telling myself it was a bad dream. But it was not. At some level I knew it was happening to me. I was being raped and beaten. And the rapist beat me with so much of violence it was as if he had some age old vendetta against me. But in fact we didn’t know each other at all. He kept asking his friends to rape me, actually insisting and forcing them. And the bashing up just went on and on until I passed out totally. It was like he had control. And he had the power to do that to me. And that made him feel good about himself.”

Battered, barely alive, Suzette was thrown out of the moving car after a few hours by her attackers. Hiding behind parked vehicles she managed to crawl to a taxi. Only  one thought kept passing through her head – “I am alive and I want to go home to my children”.

Suzette told me that she was raised as a very independent individual, made to believe in her own strength. Having lived at a boarding school from the age of seven to seventeen, she had learnt to fight her own battles. But that night, she felt utterly helpless and defeated. When she finally reached home, it was her older daughter, the teenaged Rhea, who stood beside her like a rock. “She was like a mother to me that night,” said Suzette. “So compassionate, understanding. Rhea just held me and let me cry my heart out. She nursed me and took care of me.”

For three whole days Suzette was unable to leave her bed. Four days later, Suzette was at the police station to register her complaint. “I made a conscious choice to file a complaint. Lots of people told me that I should just keep quiet and forget about it. That going to the police is traumatic and I would be buying myself a lot of trouble. But I wanted to fight for justice.” Two strong role models, Suzette told me, had shaped her personality very decisively. One was her “strict and straightforward” school-teacher grandmother who told her never to tolerate nonsense and the other was her “compassionate, loving and understanding” mother who taught her to stand up for her beliefs. Both her role models were willing to support her decision.

As she described to me her first ‘real’ brush with the police, Suzette actually burst out laughing. “I went to Park Street police station to file my FIR. I thought, you know, here I am, dealing with the fact that I have been raped and now I will have to fight and the police will be sympathetic to me. But I was so wrong! Filing that FIR was just horrible and humiliating. Each and every policeman there, came one by one and asked me, ‘Are you sure you were actually raped?’ ‘How it was possible to be raped in a car?’ ‘What were the positions in which you were raped?’ So much so that the Park Street police station is small and there was a prisoner in the lock up there who had been held for the  rape of an 11 year old girl.  Even he heard the entire conversation.” The doctor at the public hospital too was no paragon of compassion. Said Suzette, “He asked me to narrate my story in full public view. Then during the physical examination, he actually commented on my tattoo! ‘Hmm. Nice tattoo,’ he said.”

Suzette’s determination to pursue her case came at a huge price. There was public humiliation at the hands of chief minister Mamata Banerji who had recently come to power and insinuated that Suzette’s story was cooked up to malign her government. Sections of society dubbed her a prostitute. And then there were the death threats from her attackers. “It’s been very hard, said Suzette. “Can’t people see that a rape survivor has already gone through so much pain? How much more can we put her through?”

For months Suzette kept a chopper under her pillow. Awake all night, she would pace through her home. “Behind my mask of strength, I am still very frightened,” she said to me. “But there have been many angels too. My family. Some friends. And police officers like Damayanti Sen who investigated my case and concluded that I was speaking the truth. These angels give me hope and keep me going.”

After our first meeting, Suzette and I became friends. I was always bowled over by her celebration of life. There were many terrible days at court, she had very few means and she was finding it hard to get a job. Yet she always managed to laugh.  She pursued happiness with determination. “Just because I have been raped, people feel I have no right to live and I certainly have no right to be happy. I feel as if  I am being blamed just for being alive. Punished for wanting to live my life despite being raped. I will prove all of them wrong,” she would say, the clinking of her bangles punctuating her words.

Suzette also became an iconic figure raising the concerns of survivors of sexual violence at various fora across the country. She articulated difficult and important issues such as the rights of survivors in the legal process or the need for social support for survivors of sexual violence, with vehemence and empathy. Being actively involved with the protests against rising cases of seuxal violence in her home state, Bengal, brought Suzette face to face with other rape survivors and bereaved families of victims who were raped and murdered.  She sometimes said to me that if she were ever rich enough to have a big house, her doors would be open for women in need. Her heart of course, was already open.

Suzette was so sparklingly alive that her death came as a terrible shock. In March 2015, Suzette succumbed to encephalitis. At a memorial meeting we organised in Mumbai after her death, dozens of people spoke about how Suzette had touched their lives very meaningfully. Yet most of these were people Suzette had never met. Among the speakers was a teenaged girl who called  “Suzette Didi” her “inspiration”. This young girl told us that Suzette’s struggle and the fact that she chose not to hide her identity had given her the courage to fight the acute discrimination she faces as the daughter of a commercial sex worker. I was reminded of something Suzette had said to me: “If I had chosen to just accept injustice submissively, would I ever be the right role model for my daughters?” Yes, Suzette wanted to be a good role model for her daughters. She ended up being a fabulous role model for the whole world.

When I visited her grave in Kolkata, I felt Suzette’s smiling presence as I gazed at her photograph, lovingly placed by her children on her grave stone. Suzette had sometimes spoken to me of her desire to leave Kolkata. “I wish I could go away from this city. Fight my case from somewhere else.” Now she had gone, really far away. How on earth would she fight her case from where she was, I wondered. There was news that her attackers on hearing of Suzette’s demise, were distributing sweets in anticipation of their freedom. I was deeply troubled and worried about the fate of the case.

Clearly, I had underestimated the power of Suzette’s determination. Even in death, she didn’t take crap. On December 10, 2015, a Kolkata court held three men guilty of raping 37 year old Suzette Jordan.

Her beloved younger sister and closest friend Nicqui, went bald, to celebrate the victory. She explained, “Suzie had said she would shave her head if she won. So I did it for her.” I smiled, trying to imagine Suzette bald. I couldn’t. Her glorious curls were her signature. She’d once said to me, “You know, during the rape, they pulled my hair so hard, it was coming off in clumps for weeks. I have some bald spots now.” And then she quickly smiled, tossed her head and continued with a laugh, “But I don’t care. I have lots of hair and it’s just beautiful.”  

  

World Day for Prevention of Child Abuse: Let's Break The Silence!

 A disturbing petition from Change.Org popped up in my mail box today. It was a petition addressed to YouTube, asking that sexually abusive videos featuring some children from India, be removed. The videos had apparently been shot by a tuition teacher who was making money out of them. I signed the petition noting the irony -- today, November 19, is World Day for Prevention of Child Abuse.  

Child sexual abuse of all forms in India is rampant. It would serve us well to remember that the Government of India has pegged the extent of child sexual abuse in the country at a staggering 53%.

But figures, no matter how devastating, are still just numbers on a page. They can never prepare you for the lives, life stories, faces and voices of the people who make those statistics frighteningly real. It was this frightening reality that I came face to face with when I began research for an episode on Child Sexual Abuse for the television show Satyamev Jayate in the year 2011. 

The year-long process of research, threw up very disturbing stories. Across region, class and religion, men and women shared deeply personal narratives of their sexual abuse as children and the aftermath of the abuse in their adult lives.Many times over, I have heard people say, “This is the first time I am speaking about what happened with me.” “Yes, this happened a long time ago, but I am still not okay. It’s not okay.” The feelings of shame, guilt, shock, blame, betrayal went so deep that it seemed likely that many of the survivors might carry them, unresolved, to their grave.

For me, personally, the journey of research on this subject proved to be traumatic.It was very hard to maintain that thing called professional distance. It was impossible to remain immune; I got sucked in. Deeper and deeper, with every unforgettable meeting.

One such meeting was with a girl in a southern India metro. She became the target of sexual abuse when she was less than a year old. The abuser was a trusted relative. There were many things this girl said in her interview that pierced my heart.

For years, the myriad ways in which her abuse impacted her led her down a path of extreme self-harm. But she fought back valiantly. Today, she stands as an inspiration to those who are on the path of healing. She writes amazing prose and poetry and sometimes, donning a clown’s nose, she entertains sick children in hospitals.

After the interview (seasoned in equal measure with pain and humour), she played the most heavenly music on her piano. On the window in her room were gorgeous images of translucent butterflies.

Here’s what happened next. My teammate broke down in the vehicle on the way back to the office and started speaking about his own sexual abuse as a child. Listening to the interview had unlocked something within him. He vowed to take steps to heal from what he described as “an unattended illness I’ve been living with for 30 years”.

On May 13, 2012, the Satyamev Jaycee episode on Child Sexual Abuse was aired. I believe that every single survivor who spoke up, not just on the show but also in the research process, who shared his or her journey with generosity and courage, has made a valuable contribution towards shaping an understanding of the mechanics of child sexual abuse and its impact on survivors. Lakhs of people responded to the episode; many writing in with their own experiences of abuse. It was akin to a catharsis—an outpouring of pain like the breaking of a dam. And not just survivors, a few perpetrators wrote in too. I’d like to share a few of those responses here.

 “Childhood is said to be the purest part of one’s life but unfortunately I don’t have any pure memories of my childhood. I was in class 4 when my grandfather first abused me. I was shocked. I was never told about these things so I didn’t know what was happening with me. He touched me in the wrong places for 5 years. There were nights I couldn’t sleep as some incidents took place when I fell asleep. I locked my room one night but the next day I couldn’t tell my mom why I had locked it.

When I was in class 9, I had the courage to stop him; the courage to oppose him. I always thought of telling my parents but I was afraid that they would not believe me. I am 21 years old now but tears roll down my cheeks when I think of that time.

Last year, my cousin who is in class 6, told me about an incident that took place with her, which she wasn’t able to understand. The culprit was once again my grandfather. The moment I heard her, I decided that I wouldn’t let her suffer. I confronted my grandfather and warned him and then I told my parents about it. Everyone asked me why I had been quiet all these years but I had no answers. However, I really want to thank my aunt who supported me even more than my mother.

I always feel guilty about what happened to my cousin. If I had told my parents earlier, she wouldn’t have had to suffer. I can never forgive him. He took my childhood away from me.”

-- Radha (name changed)

Main B.Sc. second year ka student hoon Lucknow mein. Aaj ke pehle main sochta tha ki sirf mere saath hi child sexual abuse hua hai par aaj pata chala ki yeh aur logon ke saath bhi hota hai. Batate hue hichkichahat si ho rahi hai but picchle 12 saal se main yeh dard seh raha hoon, hala ki picchle 2 saal se hum khudko bachate aa rahe hain. Mera shoshan karne wala aur koi nahin par mera tau ka beta hai jo mujhse 10 saal bada hai.

Satyamev Jayate ka show dekhne ke baad chaurahe pe woh ittefaq se mere saamne aaya aur poori himmat juta ke maine usko jordar ek chaata maara. Road pe sab dekh rahe the aur usne kuch nahin bola par I am sure ki woh samajh gaya. Aaj main uss zindagi se mukt ho gaya aur anjaam jo hoga woh dekha jaayega. Main khush hoon ab.

-Sumedh (name changed)

I am 27-year-old and I work as a software engineer. For the past 12 years, I have questioned myself about what I did. I feel like a criminal. When I was in class 9, some of my friends and my neighbour’s older brothers, all betrayed me. They pushed me to sexually abuse children, whether it be a boy or a girl. I was a teenager and I didn’t understand what exactly I was doing.

One day, I tried to abuse my neighbour’s 7-year-old daughter. He caught me and took me to my parents. My parents scolded me, hit me and made me promise that I would never do something like this again. But I think I was addicted to it. I tried it (only smooching) with my cousins as well. I was trying to kiss them and I was caught by my mother. Then I tried to commit suicide but I failed. It was after the suicide attempt that I decided I would never sexually abuse anyone again.

Those memories still torture me. I don’t know why I ever did those things and why my friends and brothers forced me to. How could I get provoked by them? I feel guilty each moment. I am very scared of discussing any of this with my parents. I have no strength to ask for forgiveness.  

-Krish

Even as I was writing this blog, another email has popped up from Change.Org -- YouTube has removed the offending videos. A victory! But the fight is far from over. Those videos have been replicated and float all over the Internet. And child sexual abuse is still a very frightening reality for very many. The strongest weapon against this menace is to speak up. Silence works in favor of the perpetrators. We must empower ourselves and our children to speak up. Let's break the silence on hold sexual abuse. Let's heal.

(Chuppi Todo, a booklet on Child Sexual Abuse that is free to download and share: bit.ly/CSABooklet)

A tribute to Manju Singh

My apologies to the readers of my blog for staying away a very, very, very long time. I'm back. With a piece on a very interesting person I met on my journeys as a field researcher for Satyamev Jayate. Her name is Manju Singh and this is her story...

"The day I was born, my father tried to bury me alive," Manju Singh tells me. "The moment he knew he'd had a daughter, he charged into the windowless room in which my mother had delivered me and started digging a hole in the mud floor. The umbilical cord had just been cut. My maternal grandmother scooped me up and fled."

Seated on her haunches before a wood stove in her outdoor kitchen in the north Indian state of Haryana, Singh is cooking breakfast. It's winter, around dawn, and the 35-year-old mother of two speaks in a matter-of-fact tone, not allowing her narrative to interrupt the rapid motion of her rolling pin. The year is 2012 and there's bad news from India’s census report that has just been published. The number of girls born versus the number of  boys in the previous decade has fallen drastically.

"That I lived is nothing short of a miracle," she continues. "My mother had to fight real hard to keep me alive. Even while I was growing up my father tried several times to kill me. He'd beat me to pulp. But somehow, I lived through it all. I was just that stubborn." She laughs.

For generations, no girl child in Singh's family had been allowed to live. When she was ten, her father told her that he had watched his own sister get buried alive by his father. Killing newborn female progeny was a family tradition. There was a strictly "sons only" policy, and it was implemented ruthlessly.

What happened in Singh's family over generations was neither an isolated instance nor an aberration. Female infanticide has been practiced in certain regions of India for centuries. The methods varied from region to region but all were equally macabre—feeding the baby grain husk to cut the windpipe, a morself of rice to choke her, tobacco juice to poison her. Also strangulation, starvation, overfeeding, and the fate Singh escaped—being buried alive.

 Throughout history and into the late 20th century, the practice of female infanticide has been an unfortunate confluence of culture and economics. "Some women," authors John Anderson and Molly Moore write, "believe that sacrificing a daughter guarantees a son in the next pregnancy. In other cases, the family cannot afford the dowry that would eventually be demanded for a girl's marriage. And for many mothers, sentencing a daughter to death is better than condemning her to life as a woman in the Third World, with cradle-to-grave discrimination, poverty, sickness and drudgery."

Breakfast cooked, Singh is now vigorously working the hand-pump in the courtyard to fill water for her family's needs for the day. While she works, she tells me about traditional rituals that accompanied infanticide in different parts of the country. "In the state of Rajasthan there's a popular song that urges the daughter not to return to this land. They used to sing that after they killed the infant. And in Punjab they would place the girl alive in an earthen pot with a lump of jaggery, some gram and raw cotton yarn. Then they buried the pot while chanting—'Eat this jaggery, spin this cotton. Don't come back. The next time, send your brother instead.'" When I ask why gram, jaggery and yarn, she explains, "Gram and jaggery are symbols of celebrating a boy child. And the cotton yarn is what a sister ties on her brother's wrist to ask for his protection. These male symbols are meant to invoke a son."

Singh now works as a health and gender rights advocate in her community in Ambala District, Haryana. An important part of her job involves helping educate village women to prevent the crime her father once tried to commit against her. "I work very closely with women to understand their concerns, the pressures they face. I never preach to them; I try to befriend them. That's the only way to make change happen. It's hard work and easier said than done," she says as she winds up her household chores and sets off for work.

Our first stop is a village meeting. A crowd of women has gathered and a raucous debate is underway. The topic of discussion is the relative merits of sons over daughters. Many women provide a rationale for wanting male children: "Daughters are expensive to bring up. We need to spend on their dowries;" "Sons earn money, they bring dowries. Daughters only take from their families;" "A daughter gets married and goes away but a son is always there to look after you;" "Raising a daughter is like watering a tree in your neighbour's garden."

Suddenly, a middle aged woman at the back of the crowd pipes up in a robust tone, "All of you who want only sons, can you tell me who will make the babies? Can men give birth to children? We need girls too. Girls are great! Ask me, I have two daughters!" The air is thick with cheering.

But the truth is there is very little to cheer. There aren't enough girls in Haryana for young men to marry. Entire villages in the state are now devoid of brides. Bachelors are desperate, trying everything from propitiating the gods to buying brides from other states and arm-twisting local politicians to get them brides in exchange for votes. 

The practice of female infanticide in India was once widespread enough to necessitate a law against it: The Female Infanticide Prevention Act of 1870. But the law only succeeded in making the killers more furtive, their crimes harder to detect.

What actually worked to practically eradicate the specific practice of infanticide was ultrasound, a technology that came to India in the late 1980s. Ultrasound imaging techniques gave parents the ability to identify the gender of their unborn child in the womb. Gender identification services combined with sex-selective abortions at affordable prices mushroomed all over India. Though the practice of infanticide declined, many more girls actually ended up dead.

In 1994, India passed the Pre-Conception and Pre Natal Diagnostics Techniques Act, which was meant to prohibit sex determination during ultrasound and therefore hypothetically cut down on the number of sex-selective abortions performed in the country. However, the act ultimately proved ineffective. India's ratio of young girls to young boys slid lower every decade. In 2003, an amendment to the PCPNDT Act was passed by government with the intention of preventing the selection of a child's sex before conception. However, the measure has proven ineffective as well: Per the Indian government’s data from its most recent census held in 2011, there are 914 girls under six years-old per every thousand boys. The numbers have dropped further from 1991, when it was 927 girls per every thousand boys.

The problem is so acute that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to address it as a key concern within weeks of taking office in May 2014. In June this year Modi announced a "Beti Bachao, Selfie Banao" (Save Daughters, Take Selfies) contest where proud fathers submitted selfies they took with their daughters.  Quite ironically, the winner of Modi's #SelfieWithDaughter comes from Bibipur, a village in Haryana's Jind district which is so desperately starved of girls that villagers launched a "Give Bride, Get Vote" campaign during the 2014 state elections. 

Singh's experiences speak to this reality from the ground up. "When I got married I learned about sex-selective abortions. It was all around me. It was happening in practically every home. Women were under immense pressure to do it. Many of them were undergoing five, six, even ten abortions in the quest for a son. It's physical and mental torture. I felt very strongly that I should work with women to try and stop the killing of the girl child. It was a calling from deep within."

According to data from the 2011 census, Singh's home of Haryana has only 834 girls for every 1000 boys in the age group zero to six years. The numbers underscore the difficulty of her work as a health and gender rights advocate with a community-based organization called Voluntary Health Association of India. Her primary focus is on women's health and preventing sex-selective abortions.

"Even medicine can become a poison if not used correctly," Singh tells me. "Ultrasound was actually supposed to be used to improve the health of mothers and babies. But society has used it as a killing tool. People are complicit. So are doctors. It's illegal to reveal the sex of the child and sex-selective abortion is illegal too. But it happens all the time. There are clinics that do this everywhere. And it's so much easier compared to infanticide that people feel it's okay."

At the end of a day of trudging from village to village addressing meetings, gathering data, chatting up pregnant women, and encouraging young mothers who've just given birth to female children, it's time for Singh to head home. The sun is setting and there's a cold wind blowing. Her daughter is back from school and has been busy preparing for her mother's arrival. Steaming cups of tea and biscuits await us. Ruffling her daughter's hair, Singh praises her efforts and then turns to me and asks, "Do you have a daughter?"

"Yes," I answer.

"Then," she says, "you'll know what I mean when I say that they are so precious. When I was pregnant for the first time, I prayed for a girl. And God heard me. I love my son too, but my daughter is very special."