If You Can’t Give Her Wings, At Least Don’t Seal Her Lips

The much hyped about “Girl child Day’ was celebrated on January 24th but what is the nuance of such a day? So much is being done to prevent incidents of female infanticides, child marriages and woman child education, but what about women who enter the world, get education and parry the blow of getting married before 18?

The inevitable happens. People start making decisions for her. From her mere identity at birth, school she goes to, clothes she wears, friends she makes, levels of education she can be morally supported through, to her surname. What else is left of a woman who is born? In a country where marriages are believed to last forever, no choice is given to the woman who lives.

Our country talks about sorting problems on a larger scale, problems that seem much graver than the trivial matters that involve a woman. There is an obvious link between the problems in society and the women who live here are seen. Blind are those who see her dreams shatter in the effort of making her parents’ come true, deaf are those who fail to hear her cries for true independence and dumb are those who see and hear but fail to talk about it.

I am not qualified enough to take such a sensitive subject and make open judgments, but what I have felt is what I will write. I am a journalist and I believe in using my freedom of speech.

Aaliya Nathan (name changed to protect identity) was a happy go lucky child, who went to the best of girls’ schools in the city. When she was eight, she was sexually abused by a distant relative, the act that continued for years. Her inability to understand what was happening, the taboo around topics related to men and women as a couple and her lack of knowledge pertaining to the opposite sex prevented her from talking about it to her parents. She grew withdrawn from her family and starting showing an unpalatable hatred towards men in the family and the mother to whom the abuser was related.

Aaliya spoke to nobody because of the fear of being judged as the trouble maker. To her, the family was the cause of her pain and constant guilt, but her parents failed to see it behind those innocent smiles. At 19, her parents started pushing her to get married, fearing that the withdrawn girl would commit crimes more serious than just aloofness.

Today Aaliya is just another wild woman in town, she rebelled against marriage, went dancing with her friends, loved drinking and driving, but also someone who constantly kept her eye open for someone to love her. Nobody could deny that were many more Aaliyas in India, women who were never heard but who were always told.

Why was it so difficult to listen to children without wearing a judge’s hat? This was a question that many parents forgot to ask themselves, before slowly pushing adolescent daughters into suicides and homicides. A home must be a place where any subject could be discussed to any intensity without harsh impulsive implications attached to it. When the home was a place where there was trust and unconditional love sans judgments, no child ventured out into the dark alleys of premarital sex and substance abuse. If parents put in a small effort to change this trend, bigger problems like HIV, murders, alcoholism, accidents and rapes in the country would also plummet a great deal. In short, if you can’t give her wings, at least don’t seal her lips.