“Sexual abuse is one of the few crimes that brings more shame to the victim than to the offender.”

"I came across this quote a few days before the gruesome Hyderabad rape and murder. Since then I can’t stop thinking about the issues related to sexual abuse in India. It brought back some terrible memories of my childhood abuse, when I was raped by Kashmir’s most notorious known child rapist – Aijaz Sheikh.

People all over India reacted in different ways after the four accused in the Hyderabad rape and murder were killed by the Telangana police in an encounter. One of the most disturbing reactions was people celebrating the shootout. Given how corrupt our institutions have become, it is now very unlikely to know that the people killed in the encounter were the real culprits. It is to trust the theory propagated by the Telangana police. I have been trying to comprehend why most of our people don’t think critically and try to look at this issue at a much deeper level. It is perhaps partly because of the poor, exhausting and primitive processes that a victim/survivor of sexual abuse has to go through in India’s Judicial System. Maybe that’s why many people celebrated the shootout and prefer the Bollywood style of justice instead of letting the legal system take its due course.

We need to think about a few underlying issues here. Exhaustive Judicial processes hinder fast track justice, resulting into survivors of sexual abuse giving up under pressure."

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