Saturday, November 19, 2016

Touched at 6…

It took me a while to finally gather up the courage to write this and finally decide to share the experience of sexual abuse that I faced during my childhood.

In our times, there was no sex education at school, and discussing sex across the table with peers was a taboo. Till some extent I feel it still is, till a great extent despite all the liberation.

In the house where I was born and brought up, we often had relatives visiting us when I was a child. When I was 6, my maternal uncle’s son, touched my body for the first time. I was not in a state to understand what happened, but somehow that memory remains etched in my brain forever. My mother was busy cooking, and he was sitting next to me on the bed and talking to me. Suddenly his hand reached under my pants and I felt his touch for the first time. It lasted for a few minutes and then he told me that this is something I should never share with anyone. And I kept quiet, only because I had no clue to what was happening. He came over to our house again and again, and this is something that continued for quite some time. Somehow, after a certain period of time, it was over and before I could understand, there was a hidden box of mixed feelings that grew inside me as I grew up. Something I could not explain to myself for a very long period of time.

However, after this incident the experiences did not stop. The sexual abuses continued, as there were two other relatives, one my cousin and the other my brother-in-law, who abused me for each time they paid a visit to our house. Touching me, playing with my body, kissing me forcefully, grabbing me, fingering me, and making me touch them. And just not relatives, there were one or two neighbours who attempted and abused me. All that they had to say after each of their sexual exploitation was, ‘hush, hush!’ And maybe by then, I had got into the habit of keeping silent about these events, and no one, including myself, ever maybe thought that something like this could happen to a child, and therefore there was no conversation on this, ever.

At 11, when I started menstruating, my mother gradually became protective about me. Thankfully for her protectiveness, the sexual abuses stopped, but yet I was not able to open up to anyone. After a while, through school and being involved in LTS (A leadership training service), I met someone senior who treated me as his younger sister. He was the first person with whom I was able to gradually share these experiences and incidents and open up to him, trying to deal with the scars. It was he who helped me understand what had happened and enabled me to face myself. Looking back at those faces, moments, experiences only made things worse for me, because they not only harmed me mentally but also affected my physical development. He kept on talking to me, encouraging me to overcome the dark shadows that surrounded me and he also wanted to talk to my parents, but I don’t know why I stopped him that time. I tried many times to speak it out to my parents by myself later, but I was unable to do so. The moments haunted me for long, making my teen phase, much more complicated than it should have usually been.

Those dark moments left me scared, lonely, deserted, scattered, confused, abused and hurt with a sense of overpowering inferiority about myself engulfing me. It took years for me to come out of my shell, to finally break out of those lingering painful moments, moving out of those terrorizing shadows that shrouded my body and mind. However, when I was older and I saw those people eye to eye, it used to give me a kick that they always turned away their face from me. They thought they will break and finish me, and when they saw the bolder side of me, they were unable to face me.

 During my teens, I crossed a phase when I started looking at men as sexual objects. I started feeling proud of my body and thought that I can conquer men with the same. I thought that’s all that they needed, and even today some spineless men behave in that manner, expressing their demoralized sexuality by the thought that they can overpower women by being a male gender.

But I overcame that thought with time, with true strong men as my true friends, their support and conviction and also from strong, powerful female friends who understood the scars left on my soul and accepted me for who I am. And through this process and over times, I enabled myself to be bold enough to say NO to men for sexual pleasure when only they want to have it. Women have the power and the guts to move ahead in a positive way for sex when they want to, and yes, they prove it right.

Come to think of it today, I feel proud of my body and my mind. I feel sexually and mentally empowered, having been able to overpower those dark lone moments of my childhood. Its long I overcame those moments, the weakened soul that I felt because some people touched my body and soul without my permission - turned around to a stronger self. . Maybe it was because of those incidents and experiences; I overpowered the thought process of certain men at a certain point of time, by creating a comfort zone for them and get into their skin and sink in – not to give their demands a priority but to tell them in untold words, Yes, I am a powerful woman, respect me, appreciate me and be a true man if you can.