#MeToo Arrives in India

In the last month, the #MeToo movement has finally arrived in India with various women in media sectors naming and shaming the male predators in the industry from Bollywood to comedy to journalism. Though sexual harassment is rampant in India, the usual course of action is to be silent and cases are often not reported. Media discourse symbolically annihilates the victims and survivors of gender violence by focusing on what the victim was wearing or other forms of victim blaming. Justice takes a long time processing through the courts, as evident in the 2012 Delhi gang rape case where the death sentencing of the 5 men who raped and killed a woman had to be upheld again in 2018. This #MeToo movement could actually hold sexual assaulters and abusers accountable for the damage they have caused with some of the accused resigning from their positions.

Though this is progress headed in the right direction, there still are voices are missing from this online activism. The voices of poor and rural women who do not have the internet access or the means to escape their circumstances are missing from this picture. Transwomen or hijras face extreme risk of sexual violence but since they're a highly socially and economically marginalized group that is symbolically annihilated, their issues do not register among the wider mainstream population.

I also want to point out that as we've been discussing the impact of orientalism on the non-Western world, where Asian women are seen as submissive and can only do what a man tells them to do. Indian women themselves have been protesting and calling attention to gender violence in the country for a very long time. It is great to see social media now catching up with this issue and hopefully the government can as well but that should not detract from the years of agency practiced by Indian women to solve this problem. Additionally as we discussed the white savior complex and how it tries to help women by harming them instead, Indian women do not have to credit white people for opening their eyes to the dangers of their society. Indian women are speaking on their own lived experience in a country that often enables and turns a cheek when it comes to sexual violence.