Rupa Jha talks about sexual abuse at home as opposed to out in the streets or on the buses.
She lived in a huge family in a two bedroom flat.
Distant relatives and cousins kept coming and going through the family home.
Being the youngest girl in the family, I was “loved” by them.These love sessions would happen only when I was alone with one of them.
I hated it but, like many others in the same situation, I was too petrified to talk about it.
Getting rubbed, touched, kissed or being locked in bathrooms was the “love”.
Even though the house was always full, I felt completely lonely and violated.
One day when she was about ten she finally had had enough, and sat on the floor howling. That relative was told to leave the house, but that’s all that happened.
But talking to my sisters, cousins and friends, I discovered a sorority of the abused – so many of them suffered similarly harrowing experiences.
Experiences of abuse which were followed swiftly by experiences of silence, forgetting, and then pretending these things did not happen at all.
So when the news came in about the four guilty men being handed the death penalty after being found guilty of the fatal gang rape of a student in Delhi last December, I again wondered: When will this omerta, this code of silence about abuse in Indian homes be broken?
One hopes it will be now.