“…online activism has to be a supplementation to any sort of offline advocacy and activism. I think it’s just become easier and my fear is that over time that will become the route people choose to take. And while that, you know, maybe works for certain types of issues, it would definitely not work to dismantle some of the more deep-side issues. I see that happen more and more with youth communities, with any sort of group where it’s easier to like, click a button than to maybe come out on the streets and protest and even beyond that to actually see the effect of long-term community organising around an issue. And that’s where the MeToo movement also originates from, right? It originates from organising and doing long term sustained change efforts to get survivors to justice, whatever justice may look like for them.”
— Co-host Vandita Morarka reflects on feminist praxis and the importance of community organising as a tool for advocacy.
The MeToo movement was supposed to come in where legal systems failed. But as a community we failed survivors – starting with Raya Sarkar. What was supposed to be a space for healing, sisterhood and solidarity, and an opportunity to re-imagine our response to sexual violence, became a space derailed by conversations on “cancel culture”, gatekeeping by privileged members of communities and exploited trauma porn. In this episode of the In Search of Justice Podcast, co-hosts Vandita Morarka and Ruchika sit with feminist legal researcher and founder of Detention Solidarity Network Saumya Dadoo to reflect on where we have faltered, but more importantly talk about where do we go from here to get justice.
Content Warning: This conversation includes mentions of assault, rape, and mental, emotional, physical and institutional violence.
***
Love to read or want to revisit your favourite bits? Dive into the full transcript below!
Ruchika
Hello, welcome to the fourth episode of the In Search of Justice podcast. I am Ruchika.
Vandita
And I’m Vandita. And today we’re going to be talking about justice for survivors of gender-based violence in the Metoo era.
Ruchika
Content Warning: Before we begin, we’d like to give a trigger warning for discussion of traumatic events. We’ll be diving deep into the Me Too movement and its impact on survivors of gender-based violence. Please do feel free to step away from the episode for your well-being if it does get very heavy and triggering for you.
Vandita
Definitely. Thanks for that Ruchika. Just to start us off, the Me Too movement was founded by a black woman by the name of Tirana Burke in 2006, and as a survivor and activist herself, she developed a vision to bring resources, support, and pathways to healing when none had existed before. Since then, the MeToo movement has evolved into a very online movement that is often also left behind a lot of the goals and intentions of the initial movement to begin with.
Ruchika
So the way I see it, at least, what was supposed to be a space for healing, sisterhood, and solidarity call for accountability and a chance to reassess how we view justice in the context of sexual violence, especially with regards to the most marginalized communities of society. It became a space instead that perpetuated the same ideas it was supposed to challenge, and it was derailed by conversations on “cancel culture”, gatekeeping by more privileged upper caste feminists in India, and even exploited drama upon to a certain extent.
Vandita
Oh, definitely. I find that over time the Me Too movement has gotten derailed in multiple ways. However, alternatively, it has been such a source of comfort to be able to speak up, to be able to hear stories and find voices that resonate with ours. And today I’m very excited because while we explore what justice means when it comes to gender-based violence and the Mee Too movement, we have with us someone really special. We’re joined by feminist legal researcher and founder of the Detention Solidarity Network, Saumya Dadu. Hi, Soumya. Thank you for joining us today.
Ruchika
Hello, how are you doing?
Soumya
I’m doing well. Thanks for having me.
Ruchika
Thanks for taking time out to talk to us today.
Soumya
I’m really glad I could be part of this conversation.
Ruchika
So, I’m just gonna jump in with the first question we have for you. So, we’ve been seeing names and lists and detailed stories and accounts on sexual violence pop up on our social media for almost four years now in India, but the way we respond each time seems to be the same with every cycle of sort of call outs. It’s always the same response. What according to you, are we doing right in our response to the survivors speaking up online and where do you think we’re faltering?
Soumya
So, I think in the Indian context, it’s quite important to just set the context back to Raya Sarkar. I think that the onset for this movement of women speaking out, primarily women speaking out about sexual violence and calling out mostly men who have harmed them, began with a list of academics that was collated by Raya Sarkar. The response to this, as we all know, came in the form of a letter that was drafted by prominent feminists including feminist academics, dismissing this list, calling for due process, something that they had so far criticized and effectively protecting their peers. So, the list as it has been called and the response to it itself tells us something very important about how we as a society as well as dominant caste feminists respond to sexual violence.
And I think that that fissure is really important because our collective response to sexual violence is not equal, just like people are not equal. I think that in a lot of lists and names where people have been vulnerable and have given their accounts of sexual violence, we still treat different stories differently depending on the the cast and class location of the survivor or also of the perpetrator. So, I think that there is a sensationalization when it comes to certain powerful people who may not- like nothing materially will change in their lives. And in the same way, the scrutiny that a survivor might go through also depends on this or even if a survivor’s heard, it all depends on their social location. So, I think that that is one response to sexual violence that kind of happening online that mirrors what happens in our everyday life as well outside of the online sphere. I think that that’s one thing that I wanted to mention. At the same time, I think one thing that has been a very important intervention of the Me Too movement has been that it has subverted the criminal justice system in a way it has shown to us that the criminal justice system is broken and clearly that it’s not been working for people, and I think that that’s one part of it that I find particularly meaningful as well, like that, that it is something so subversive. And secondly, it’s that unlike I think anything really before it, it has been a social and cultural reckoning with the pervasiveness of sexual harms. And I think that that has made more people kind of realize that they do need to have policies in place. It has made more people think about how they would respond if they, you know, learned about survivors or if they learned that someone amongst them was a harasser and that is not to say that all of these are not perfect responses. There are lots of issues with this- even online there are thousands of trolls, there are invasive questions. There have been genuine threats to life, but at the same time, I do think it’s kind of quite powerful that survivors have been able to kind of speak to each other and find solace and comfort with each other, being able to validate and heal together. So, I think that that has come through that online space that I think is really valuable in the long term.
Lastly, I think at the same time, one thing that I find interesting in our online responses again mirrors something that we do in real life. And I mean, I think that I read this really good article called ‘Me Too books in the post traumatic novel’ where the writer Lily Lupporo says, “One thing we often do with narratives of sexual assault is sort their respective parties into different temporalities. It seems we are interested in perpetrators’ futures and victims’ pasts”, and that really spoke to me and I think that that is something that we’re also seeing online where we are very, very invested in. Now what do we do with the perpetrators? Are they going to keep their jobs? Are they going to be fired? We’re still seeing a lot of questions come up about whether the victims said no firmly enough or whether they, you know, where they were before this or what was the nature of the relationship that they had with the person that they’re accusing that I think is being perpetuated online as well.
Vandita
Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I think you made some excellent and really powerful points. The quote definitely stays with me, but I think something you spoke about in the beginning about how different identities are not necessarily given the same sort of support when they speak up or when they share their incidence of harm or any sort of sexual abuse. We saw that with the Riasa card list and then we also have constantly been saying that.
Ruchika
What I’ve also observed is that the Me Too movement was started as an offline grassroots organisational movement and it has moved online, especially in India. It’s been pretty much online. And who is online? It’s a very small group of people, an extremely privileged, extremely urban group of people who have a voice online, who have the privilege to speak up online, who have the ability to speak up online and that sort of eliminates a lot of voices and experiences automatically. And I think that’s also something that we cannot ignore when we look at the Me Too movement in India.
Vandita
Definitely, you know Ruchika, when you say that something comes to mind that I read recently, or someone seems to have posted a story, actually. We spoke about how parallel movements are needed. So, when you share that it went from offline to online. I often hear the argument that there is no harm in that, and even people from privileged backgrounds do need a space to speak up and share their stories because a lot of us are survivors in different ways, and I always had an unsettling feeling when I would hear this. Recently I read something about a certain capacity for people giving energy to a cause right- each of us have within us a certain limitation to how much we can care, we might want to care so much, but we’re limited by our own potential to care. What often happens is that because these online spaces take up so much of our caring, that we’re unable to direct any of this energy or care towards other spaces that are often way, way more marginalised, that have not had the same access, that have not had their stories heard, and are more and more with the increasing digital divide, having their stories completely invisible eyes and completely silenced. I think that becomes important when we say that there is a need for all stories to be heard and there is a need for, say, stories of survivors of every background to be heard. We have to balance that out with thinking about how we can at the same time ensure their voices that are traditionally at the margins or that are not online or not lost in this.
Soumya
Yeah, I mean, I think another thing that this makes me think about is just how the Internet allows everyone. I mean, especially if you are on a social media platform and you are participating in an online movement, it allows you to believe that something is happening, that you are being able to make a change happen. And in a way, more recently I’ve just been reading about whether it has been a failure or not. I think that, you know, so many people have bared their stories with vulnerability only for sometimes little action to be taken or sometimes, like for the material conditions to not actually change, for people who hold a lot of power to not actually step down even after these allegations come out. So in a lot of these cases, people have been countersued- people have like- a lot of the people in Bollywood like Sajid Khan for example, remained out of the public eye for some time and then they come back because I think that the online culture is also something to account for and it allows us to look at things and like sensationalise things at a particular moment and then allows us to forget. Those characteristics also have to be taken into consideration when building any kind of movement or whether it has to be online or offline. And more and more I think that we are turning to just being online and I think perhaps missing out on really like making sure that we are creating some effective change and long-term change.
Vandita
Oh definitely. I feel like something a lot of us forget is that online activism has to be a supplementation to any sort of offline advocacy and activism. I think it’s just become easier and my fear is that over time that will become the route people choose to take. And while that, you know, maybe works for certain types of issues, it would definitely not work to dismantle some of the more deep-side issues. I see that happen more and more with youth communities, with any sort of group where it’s easier to like, click a button than to maybe come out on the streets and protest and even beyond that to actually see the effect of long-term community organising around an issue. And that’s where the Me Too movement also originates from, right? It originates from organising and doing long term sustained change efforts to get survivors to justice, whatever justice may look like for them.
In fact, in relation to this Soumya, I had another question for you. Considering your work around prison abolishment and everything that you do around thinking and rethinking punishment as being an effective or ineffective pathway to tackling gender-based violence quite often, right? And I’ve also seen those ideals reflected in the work that you do, a detention solidarity network. So, when you think about the Me Too movement, do you think that in some ways the Me Too movement has been recreating some of the punitive systems that we currently have or do you think it’s also provided an alternative?
Soumya
Yeah. So, I think that I want to respond to this in maybe a broader sort of way and I want to clarify that one thing that I’m very against is harsher sentencing for gender-based violence, right. I think that the belief, that by calling for the death penalty or by having or increasing the years that someone has to spend time in prison, we are not going to effectively be able to solve the concerns that we are facing with gender-based violence primarily because there are many ways in which the criminal justice system is broken. It disproportionately targets the working class, Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Muslim and other marginalised people. The issues with accessing justice, including accessing legal aid lawyers are so dramatic that the meaning of formal justice has become completely different for different people in this country. So, we also put more people at the risk of harm within prisons, including gender-based violence, relegating them to the status of lesser beings or people who can’t change.
So, I think that the carceral system one, creates this problem with the people who have to go through it as perpetrators, but also for survivors of gender-based violence. I think that it doesn’t give them enough agency and autonomy to articulate the harm that they faced and what their needs are also because the system can be quite tedious and invasive and that law enforcement remains biased against a lot of survivors of gender-based violence. The legal journey itself can be re-traumatizing for survivors and it may not be something that many choose to access, and so I think that this is the core problem that I would say where my criticism lies with the system that we have legally for dealing with gender-based violence.
I think there is also a difference between carceral feminism and what we are seeing on the Internet. So, carceral feminism specifically refers to a reliance on policing, prosecution, and imprisonment to resolve gendered or sexual violence and so the argument against this approach is that it limits the feminist imagination. It zeroes in on State and legal responses that are individualised and not on the context on which harm is produced. The argument against turning to criminal justice where the end option is only imprisonment or I guess death is that for me is particularly important comes from recognizing that people from marginalised communities are disproportionately targeted by the state and gender-based harm. And here I’m thinking of things like, you know, triple talaq or love jihad that are intended to protect and save women and they themselves become tools that are appropriated for the state to commit violence and remain seen as the protective patriarch. So, I think that I’m clarifying this because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of links are being drawn between carceral feminism and the Me Too movement online where “cancel culture” or call out culture are equated to ostracization. They’re equated to carceral feminism and I think that the latter, that is carceral feminism has a lot more to do with this state and with these systems that have immense and violent power. So, I think that I would just want to be a little careful when we’re drawing that connection between carceral feminism and the Me Too movement online because there are a lot of differences as well, and that nuance I think is quite essential because we can’t collapse. I think it weakens both the criticisms if we collapse them into one. I really do want there to be enough of a movement also against carceral feminism and against the prison system and these forms of punishment that we are seeing but there are ways in which I think that these are similar. I think that at the core of it, when there is any form of harm or wrongdoing, we see these things as rules that we have as a society that are broken, and so our immediate response to them is that people are to be blamed, that we can find one individual who can hold the blame and be held responsible. What that creates is this fear and everyone kind of lives with this fear that they are going to get into trouble and so there is a kind of defensiveness and avoidance of coming face to face with the harms that we might commit. So I think that we are still not paying attention to the context where this harm has taken place and taking kind of collective responsibility for it recognizing that this harm is built in a specific context and in the case of gender-based violence, it’s built in a patriarchal society but so we completely sort of individualise it. We distance ourselves from this person, we cut all ties with them, you know, and we are able to kind of rally against this person online. And that I think, like, makes it difficult for us to kind of see the harm as an opportunity for learning for the people who are around the person who may have caused this harm. So, there isn’t any space left for there to be, like, accountability. We aren’t taught how to like, apologise or consider our own role within this harm. We are pushed towards pushing this person away. In that way, I think that the Me Too movement online does resemble the forms of legal punishment that we are quite used to as a society.
Ruchika
I just want to clarify. There’s a distinction between just punishment versus carceral feminism. Carceral feminism sort of goes more deeper where it involves the State rather than just punishment, where it’s not that broad. Am I getting it right?
Soumya
Yeah. Yeah. So, I think that the State and its institutions are an important point with carceral feminism because I think that we do have a punitive culture and that is perpetuated by the criminal justice system, but we don’t as individuals or a society necessarily have the power to be as violent as the state does. We don’t have the military or we don’t have those like tools at hand, right. So, we are dealing with things like call out culture and cancel culture, but these have come in response to a long context where there is a culture of silence, right? There has been so much silencing of survivors of gender-based violence. So, I’m very, I think I’m just at the stage right now where I’m really concerned about the quick response where people are like oh is this person now cancelled? Do people not have an option to change or you know, this kind of scapegoating that is being used instead of allowing for there to be a more complex understanding of what punitive culture it really looks like? And what I mean, one of the things with this is that I just think that using this to shut down survivors or to police survivors or to tell survivors that they aren’t allowed to feel what they feel or express their anger or have the needs that they might have because they might be participating in carceral feminism. That is something that I’m very worried about and I just think that that kind of collapses a lot of the complex things that we are trying to create space for.
Vandita
No, definitely Soumya. I think two things that really stand out for me is one, that even the ideas of what punishment and justice can look like are so driven by a legal understanding of punishment and justice and how it stands in India, which is not only State backed. I think it also comes from a very patriarchal idea of having this one person who’s going to decide what is right and what is wrong in a very preconceived like set formula and then you know, allocate some sort of punishment. I think forever in India at least, any sort of community-based accountability methods has often been very patriarchal and that has always meant that survivors of gender-based violence don’t get as much space for even speaking up and chances of justice are so reduced, right? Which I think also just lends to a certain fear when it comes to thinking about community-based accountability because often when we do that sort of work it becomes so important to first create these communities that you can trust accountability with that you can trust that you will get justice or you will be heard in.
Soumya
Yeah for sure. I mean, I think, so I used to previously work at an organisation that works with survivors of gender-based violence and one thing that I became acutely aware of, while I was working there – I mean it works on litigation and legal support for survivors of gender-based violence. So, one thing that I became aware of was how a lot of mediation works where a lot of times there are religious kinds of groups or groups that have different ideas of what a family is. Many of them are very patriarchal that mediate between say a husband and wife, and they kind of reinstate these kinds of patriarchal values by suggesting that the survivors of gender based harm put up with that or like women in these relationships put up with this kind of violence and carry on with it, because marriage is seen as so sanctimonious, right- that always comes to mind for me when I think about the term community accountability and especially what we don’t want from community accountability because yes, we very much have very patriarchal non-legal systems in place like these mediation counselling kind of things. I mean there are other kinds as well, that’s not to put them all under one, paint them all with the same brush, but there are those kinds of groups, and there are also like panchayat systems, right- like there are panchayats which you could say can be equated as alternative forms of justice, say like in a horrifying kind of scenario where we could think of them like that, they are not geared towards gender justice. So, that’s a really good point.
Ruchika
I was reading this blog post by this user called ‘Querying Psychology’ and they specifically talked about cancel culture and restorative justice and all of that and this one sentence that really stood out to me- they said restorative justice and change for those who have caused harm is not possible if the community or environment is not set up for change. Everything you just mentioned about these alternative systems that we have in place sort of reminded me of that and that really leads me to the question, if we’re not ready for a non-punitive response or a sort of a community response to gender-based violence, which sort of diverts from punishment and punitive measures and focuses on accountability and scope for change and improvement and looks at systems that cause harm rather than individuals causing harm, how do we get to a place where we can have that? What can we do? I mean it’s something, I don’t know if you have an answer to that. I don’t know how to find the answer to that question, but how do we get there?
Soumya
Yeah, I mean, I’m going to start by saying I definitely don’t have an answer. It’s a really great quote I think and a really great point. I think that the only response that I have to it is just that these changes that we want to see have to happen simultaneously in the sense that we aren’t ready for it, but we also won’t be ready for it if we were continuing in the same way. I think that kind of makes sense. So some of the things like- I’m learning more about restorative justice and I just think that there are a lot of ways in which it pushes us to rethink how we’ve thought about harm and how we think about punishment and what our options are and how we can, you know, learn to hold ourselves accountable; How we can build boundaries, how we can create systems of care, how we can de-escalate or intervene, and I just think that a lot of these things we will have to learn and figure out together and that it happens fairly slowly. But that creates that context where I hope that you know we are chipping away at something else and that that ultimately does create a community or environment that sets up for that kind of change. Does that kind of make sense?
Vandita
Soumya, thank you for sharing what you have been sharing with us about punishment, about r- imagining justice and about restorative justice. I think for me it’s really important to also understand that for the survivors that spoke up both during the Me Too wave that happened globally in India and also now those that continue to speak up in digital spaces in other forums. What does Justice look like for them and what can communities do to better support them both online and offline?
Soumya
I think that one of the essential things that anyone needs to do and I mean I think online or offline is to really listen and express that support. I think validation is a critical first step. I think that kind of counterbalances- hopefully counterbalances- to a great extent a lot of the kind of trolling and invasive questioning that a lot of survivors who are speaking up face. I think that creating that kind of network for them and stepping up and kind of doing that, like listening is immensely powerful. Then I think the other thing that’s really essential is to listen to and understand and help think through what it is that survivors say that they would like done; What would they like to see happen and kind of support them through that journey. I think that that is something that we can definitely do and I feel like, is a response that is centering the survivor and their needs and not seeing this kind of harm that they’ve talked about as the end all and recognizing that you know they have a life to live, right. So being there for them for that, I think, is essential.
Ruchika
Yeah, yeah. I think something that really stuck with me is centering survivors’ needs. I don’t think when someone speaks up, we don’t ask them what do they need? We’re so focused on who they’re speaking up about and what we’re going to do with the perpetrator now instead of really focusing on hey, OK, like, so this happened to you. What is it that you need to recover, to heal, to move, to find yourself in a good space again? If you’re not in a good space, or to find your footing in society again, where can we come to your assistance? We never ask that question. I’ve never seen and been asked and I think that’s supremely important to do.
Soumya
Yeah, I definitely. I mean, I also like basic safety, like checking in to see if they are eating, sleeping, like what, just what their everyday looks like, those kinds of things are also ways of caring. I think that that care is, I mean at least as a survivor, I think that was the most important thing for me. I just think that that is one of the best ways that someone can really like, make sure that they are acting and responding.
Vandita
Thanks Soumya. I think both of what you’ve shared Ruchika and Soumya is so powerful. I think for me something that also adds on in terms of the sort of community support I would want and it’s so sad that it starts here is that I would just not want to be punished for speaking up. I would not want to be scared about what the consequences will be for me, of course, societally, but also say legally or otherwise. I find that that’s such a deterrent, especially for those persons that come from backgrounds where they will not have the support system right, financial or otherwise, to be able to support them, which is where these legal and punitive systems work against the survivor even speaking up. It works so much worse on people who don’t have that sort of access. As a lawyer, I often work with survivors whose biggest fear is about a defamation case, or whose biggest fears are about complete lack of financial support or familial support. So, you could have survivors that come from fairly well off backgrounds, but if they don’t have familiar support, they really cannot take on a defamation suit, right? We’ve seen it happen with people who are internationally renowned that there have been defamation suits filed against them and to have that sort of financial, political, legal power work against you, just sharing your story and sharing something that happened with you can be such a scary and dangerous place to be in. And I know I’m talking about this at a larger level, but I’ve seen this play out with young survivors that come to me and the fear of this in their college communities where they’ve been told that if you speak up, the college will take action against you for lying, for bullying, for intimidating the person. This is just this very basic need, when I speak up, I want to be heard and I would like for communities that I am in have a first instinct response to believe me and then think about other things. I think that’s why I would love for communities to start from as well.
Soumya
Yeah. Thanks for triggering that actually because I’m just thinking that it’s decentering- I mean a lot of institutions seem to work against you and there is no proactive concern, that you know because you know that there is such a strong likelihood that they’ll respond adversarially to you speaking up. So, there is nothing like proactively created where you know that- and there are cases in which you want to speak up and there are cases where you want to remain anonymous and things like that and I from what I’ve learned like a lot of places don’t and a lot of institutions don’t allow you even to do something like that. So, you are at so much risk and I think that definitely is a very important first thing that is for this environment to be created where you know that you’ll be heard and what you faced is valid and you would be supported in that way and that would be recognized.
Vandita
Yeah. So, for sure, like from workplaces to otherwise, there’s just so much pressure. They wouldn’t hire someone, say, who spoke up about being sexually harassed or someone wouldn’t get married, right. Like, I’ve had concerns of women saying that if I share this or if I actually take some action, no one’s going to marry me or I won’t get a job. These are very real concerns that people have on a daily basis, even beyond just like, say, a legal system and I think that is just ways in which society finds a pathway to punish survivors just for daring to share their story. I think that is such an embedded trait in all of us that either you prove your story and you prove it in a way where we feel sorry for you and we see you as the perfect victim, otherwise, we will then punish you because in any situation, they need someone who’s being punished.
Soumya
That’s very true. Yeah. And I also, I also see your point about like the Perfect Victim as like the very, this very story, who’s traumatized in the most visible way. And that being the only kind of way in which you can express or be a survivor. Yeah.
Ruchika
The Me Too movement became automatically something that worked for a lot of survivors because there was a clear issue with the way in which the criminal justice system, which seems to be the only response that we can have to gender-based violence, allowed for people to actually get justice. All the way from the way in which survivors are treated when they go and make a complaint to the police or how tedious and invasive the whole process of going through- like the whole legal journey might be. How much money is spent actually going through a legal journey, finding the right lawyer, and at the end of it all, the likelihood that you will really get justice is so limited that has deterred a lot of people from going through this path. So, knowing that you know seeing that a lot of perpetrators still go scot-free and its actually survivors who lose their job, who are shamed for bringing up this case, who are scrutinized in the media. I think all of these things have deterred survivors of gender-based violence to use this approach and has caused a level of infuriation I think and frustration which I think is at the core of the Me Too movement, of realizing that we always have each other and we can always talk to each other and we can always just speak out and not actually maintain that kind of culture of silence and break into it. So, I think that it has subverted the criminal justice system in that way.
Ruchika
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Soumya, and sharing your thoughts and your insights and all of your knowledge with us. It was very, very enlightening and informative. And it certainly pushed how I perceived justice and how I viewed the Me Too movement up until this point.
Vandita
Definitely. Thank you so much, Soumya. It’s always such a pleasure to listen to your thoughts and thank you for spending time with us today.
Soumya
Thank you. I really, really enjoyed the conversation. I learned so much. Thank you for having me.
Ruchika
Soumya, If you could share handles of where people can follow you, people listening, they can follow you and Detention Solidarity Network and all the work you do there.
Soumya
To learn more about the Detention Solidarity Network, you can visit www.detentionsolidarity.net and we are on Twitter (X) as well @detsolnet.
Ruchika
We hope to have all of you listeners listening to our future episodes where we can work with various guests in search of justice, until next time.
| Me Too by Kamla Bhasin Saikdo dilo se ek saath lava put padhna hai Me too. {A volcanic eruption from the hearts of millions, is Me Too} Bandh zabano ka achanak khul Jana hai Me too. {An unlocking of silenced voices is Me Too} Chupaye sach ko ab aur na chupa paana hai Me too. {The inability to hide the discreet truth anymore is Me Too} Apne dar se peecha chudaana hai Me too. {To outrun your fears, is Me Too} Zor zabardasti nainsafi ke zaher ko aur na pee pana hai Me too. {To refuse to sip the poison of brutality is Me Too} Samaajh ke nasuro ko sare aam dikhna hai Me too. {To bring forth the wrongdoers of our society is Me Too} Pittra satta se bekhouf aankhe milana hai, Me too. {To unabashedly stare in the face of patriarchy is Me Too} Zulmi ko benakab kar, sabke Samne le aana hai Me too. {To bring forth the wrongdoer is Me Too} Me too. |
***
Do you have thoughts on this episode, and want to share them with us? Use the comment box to tell us what you think! Stay tuned for the next episode.
About the In Search of Justice Podcast
As we strive to collectively build towards social justice, it becomes imperative to challenge and reorient the very conceptions of justice. Justice, in popular culture and the zeitgeist overall, has been synonymised with carcerality, which presents a very myopic perspective of justice and diminishes the significance of justice as an intrinsic human right. Further, in the case of survivors of abuse, pathways to justice are further limited and often don’t include the survivors themselves in the process. Justice thus, becomes a destination, an outcome, rather than a collaborative, collectively-built journey or process. Through this compilation of the transcripts of the In Search of Justice Podcast, we aim to explore this discourse surrounding justice, particularly in the context of gender-based violence, in bite-sized episodes. Co-hosted by Vandita and Ruchika, these conversations seek to navigate the multiple meanings of justice, especially when it is considered the penultimate goal by questioning carceral systems, introducing alternative justice systems and leading the conversation into how we can build justice systems that are receptive and responsive to the various needs and desires of survivors.