Name: 【TED】Meera Vijayann: Find your voice against gender violence (Meera Vijayann: Find your voice against gender violence)
Uploaded: 2014-10-22T18:27:05.000Z
Duration: 14 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Transition words & phrases

Because when we talk about empowerment, what affects us most are the stories.

So I want to begin with an everyday story.

What is it really like to be a young woman in India?

Now, I've spent the last 27 years of my life in India,

lived in three small towns, two major cities, and I've had several experiences.

When I was seven, a private tutor who used to come home to teach me mathematics molested me

He put his hand up my skirt and told me he knew how to make me feel good.

At 17, a boy from my high school circulated an email

Detailing all the sexually aggressive things he could do to me because I didn't pay attention to him.

At 19, I helped a friend whose parents had forcefully married her to an older man escape an abusive marriage

At 21, when my friend and I were walking down the road one afternoon

A man pulled down his pants and masturbated in front of us.

We called people for help, and nobody came.

At 25, when I was walking home one evening, two men on a motorcycle attacked me.

I spent two nights in the hospital recovering from trauma and injuries.

So throughout my life, I've seen women — family, friends, colleagues

— live through these experiences, and they seldom talk about it.

So in simple words, life in India is not easy.

But today I'm not going to talk to you about this fear.

I'm going to talk to you about an interesting path of learning that this fear took me on.

So, what happened one night in December 2012 changed my life.

boarded a bus in Delhi with her male friend.

There were six men on the bus, young men who you might encounter every day in India,

and the chilling account of what followed was played over and over again in the Indian and international media.

forcefully penetrated with a blunt rod, beaten, bitten, and left to die.

Her friend was gagged, attacked, and knocked unconscious.

And at a time when most of us here were preparing to welcome the new year, India plunged into darkness.

For the first time in our history, men and women in Indian cities woke up to the horrific truth about the true state of women in the country.

Now, like many other young women, I was absolutely terrified.

I couldn't believe that something like this could happen in a national capital.

I was angry and I was frustrated, but most of all, I felt utterly, completely helpless.

Some write blogs, some ignore it, some join protests.

I did all of it. In fact, that was what everyone was doing two years ago.

So the media was filled with stories about all the horrific deeds that Indian men are capable of.

They were compared to animals, sexually repressed beasts.

In fact, so alien and unthinkable was this event in an Indian mind

that the response from the Indian media, public and politicians proved one point:

No one knew what to do. And no one wanted to be responsible for it.

In fact, these were a few insensitive comments which were made in the media by prominent people

in response to sexual violence against women in general.

So the first one is made by a member of parliament,

the second one is made by a spiritual leader,

and the third one was actually the defendants' lawyer when the girl was fighting for her life and she passed away.

Now, as a woman watching this day after day, I was tired.

So as a writer and gender activist, I have written extensively on women,

but this time, I realized it was different,

because a part of me realized I was a part of that young woman too, and I decided I wanted to change this.

I logged on to a citizen journalism platform called iReport,

and I recorded a video talking about what the scene was like in Bangalore.

I talked about how I felt, I talked about the ground realities,

and I talked about the frustrations of living in India.

In a few hours, the blog was shared widely, and comments and thoughts poured in from across the world.

In that moment, a few things occurred to me.

One, technology was always at hand for many young women like me.

Two, like me, most young women hardly use it to express their views.

Three, I realized for the first time that my voice mattered.

So in the months that followed, I covered a trail of events in Bangalore

which had no space in the mainstream news.

In Cubbon Park, which is a big park in Bangalore

I gathered with over 100 others when groups of young men came forward to wear skirts

to prove that clothing does not invite rape.

When I reported about these events, I felt I had charge

I felt like I had a channel to release all the emotions I had inside me.

I attended the town hall march when students held up signs saying "Kill them, hang them."

"You wouldn't do this to your mothers or sisters."

I went to a candlelight vigil where citizens gathered together to talk about the issue of sexual violence openly,

and I recorded a lot of blogs in response to how worrying the situation was in India at that point.

While supportive comments poured in from across the world, as did vicious ones.

So some called me a hypocrite. Some called me a victim, a rape apologist.

But this one comment kind of describes what we are discussing here today.

But I was soon to learn that this was not all.

As empowered as I felt with the new liberty that this citizen journalism channel gave me

I found myself in an unfamiliar situation.

So sometime last August I logged onto Facebook and I was looking through my news feed

And I noticed there was a link that was being shared by my friends.

I clicked on the link; it led me back to a report uploaded by an American girl called Michaela Cross.

The report was titled, "India: The story you never wanted to hear."

And in this report, she recounted her firsthand account of facing sexual harassment in India.

She wrote, "There is no way to prepare for the eyes, the eyes that every day stared with such entitlement at my body,

with no change of expression whether I met their gaze or not.

Walking to the fruit seller's or the tailor's, I got stares so sharp that they sliced away bits of me piece by piece."

She called India a traveler's heaven and a woman's hell.

She said she was stalked, groped, and masturbated at.

Now, late that evening, the report went viral. It was on news channels across the world.

Everyone was discussing it. It had over a million views,

a thousand comments and shares, and I found myself witnessing a very similar thing.

The media was caught in this vicious cycle of opinion and outburst and no outcome whatsoever.

So that night, as I sat wondering how I should respond, I found myself filled with doubt.

You see, as a writer, I approached this issue as an observer,

as an Indian, I felt embarrassment and disbelief,

and as an activist, I looked at it as a defender of rights,