I want you to think about torture.
I want you to close your eyes and envision the cruellest form of destroying, of crushing a soul.
Picture disgusting violation.
Can you imagine agonising pain so vivid, so real, that you can almost feel it? This pain is forced upon you by another human. Another living being who bleeds the same blood, breathes the same air and has the ability to feel the same pain.
Now, face the reality of a beautifully delicate 6 year old child in Nepal who is brutally gang raped.
Feel the viscously chilling nature of a wide eyed 4 year old girl being purchased as a mere commodity and sold for sex.
And realise the probability of being raped, sexually abused or assaulted for girls in Nepal is higher than the likeliness of gaining an adequate education.
If you can, focus on what it feels liked to be touched when you don't like being touched, in places of great privacy.
Now, what do you feel? Repulsion…Violation… Rage… Terror...?
Think of having a physically stronger stranger or trusted one violently strip your bones bare and force themself inside of you.
Listen to the shrieks of fear and powerlessness.
You're struggling, biting, helplessly screaming and pleading to die, begging for the sweet stillness of death to stop the torture.
At last you are numb, physically living (barely), but mentally dead. Simply waiting...
Bring your thoughts back to the innocence and purity of a child and finally remember the 6-year-old girl helplessly, powerlessly being passed from man to man.
This is reality…
Not for just one child.
Not for a few…
But for thousands of young girls in Nepal and millions around the world, this horrific reality is a part of their existence.
Yes. What we dare not even think about and feel EXTREMELY uncomfortable in imagining or discussing happens on an OUTRAGEOUSLY regular basis in Nepal and other parts of the world.
Words cannot, and will never be able to validate the level of suffering inflicted by sexual vilification, harassment, rape and sex trafficking. No one individual can understand the type of gruesome cruelty and torture endured by such acts other than the victims. Each act is personal, every experience is unlike the next, and each soul dies in a distinctive, revoltingly perverse way.
Once destroyed, the only way to escape the prison of depression is rebirth. Summoning the strength and support to conquer the fear of life, the terror of potentials, chances and probabilities of ever being tortured in such ways again, is chillingly petrifying. For many this way out, a way of manipulating the trauma and transforming it into empowerment, strength and leadership, is not an option, especially for the children of Nepal. When adults, teenagers and particularly young children encounter such experiences and then lack access to sufficient support networks, a way out of the darkness is almost impossible. Even more demoralising is the fact that for the majority of victims who are trafficked in South East Asia their first experience of sexual abuse is often far from their last. For hundreds of thousands of girls around the globe, the first rape is merely just a beginning of the long, winding and shameful numbness that their future holds.
When we think of Nepal, too often we think of an extremely peaceful part of Asia, the home to the world’s highest mountain range, a tourist hub for the most adventurous trekker, a holy kingdom. Rarely do we associate Nepal as a nation severely poisoned by nauseatingly high levels of gender discrimination and human trafficking. Nearly 7,000 Nepali girls as young as six years old are sold every year into India’s red-light district—or 200,000 in the last decade. Ten thousand children between the ages of six and 14 are in Sri Lanka brothels.
During my time in Nepal I formed relationships with perhaps the most vibrantly energetic and benevolent children I have ever encountered. These girls were victims of the most brutal, inhumane actions of cruelty. One unbelievably fragile girl at the age of twelve had been violently gang raped by prestigious members of the Nepalese community, subsequently she was disowned and abandoned by her family who didn’t want to loose their reputation. The young girl suffered immense physical problems as a consequence of her aggressive rape and neglect. Nearly succumbing to death where she lay in her hospital bed, she resembled a pile of bones with haunted eyes and a broken smile. I now know this young girl as an exuberant, cheerful and healthy child who has been reborn from the torturous life she once lead thanks to the support of one incredible Nepalese change maker named Indira Ghale.
I was humbled to work with a woman of power, one of inconceivable strength and empathy; Indira Ghale- a big sister (Didi) to some and a mother to many. Together with the help of a passionate future journalist Joshua Ryan, we started the process of regenerating her organisation Change Action Nepal (CAN) through the development of a website, brochure and distributing new resources for some of the girls. CAN was created 18 years ago, Indira has been resiliently fighting sex trafficking through her organisation which provides girls around the country whom are affected by sexual exploitation a light in the dullest of prisons, an escape from the darkness through the brightness of education. Currently she supplies over 82 scholarships towards the education of girls who have been victims of sexual abuse. Indira’s organisation fights sex slavery, rape, trafficking and gender injustice not with weapons, but with books; through the power of knowledge. A more compassionate and active change maker than Indira would certainly be challenging to find, this is a woman who fights against all the social norms and taboos of her culture and devotes herself entirely to her cause. Indira provides hundreds of girls in Nepal with opportunities to escape their current circumstance and offers her home with warmth to those who have survived sex abuse and trafficking. This is a woman who gives me courage, who motivates me through her actions and words to become fearlessly determined.
For the sake of the girls Indira supports and for many who don’t receive such care, what we need to understand, as a global society is that rape and sexual exploitation exist because the world has generated a demand for sex not only in terms of power and pleasure but also in terms of business and money. Sex trafficking is on a repulsive rise around the globe; according to the State of Human Trafficking in California and many other recent reports, “Human trafficking is the world's fastest growing criminal enterprise and is an estimated $32 billion-a-year global industry.”
There is an unquestionably URGENT need to create an educational approach towards changing the stigma associated with sex and all the fragments of modern sexual culture. When we think of sex we often think of women, pornography, prostitution and stripers these factors are derivatives of sexual commercialisation, money, alcohol, and drugs. Unfortunately in this day and age we have trivialized the act of sexual intercourse and consequently created a world revolved and obsessed by sexual behaviour and all of its miscellaneous implications. The fact that women often become typecasts of sex objects assists in the rapid development of sexual slavery worldwide. It is about time we develop the human decency and dignity to recognise that as long as we continue to sexualise women and worship pornography, sexual exploitation and torture will continue to permeate.
My question is WHY? Why is it that all over the world we value sex over human life? Too many of us sit back and continue to feed an industry which has such horrific consequences for women and children all over the world. Yet we dismiss our indulgence in these sexual commodities like watching pornography, paying for prostitution, dance bars, brothels, participating in sex tourism by attending ‘ping pong shows’ etc, purchasing over sexualised clothing and toys for children, watching movies like ‘50 shades of grey’, listening to sexualised and degrading music, or simply adopting language which is used to shame and objectify women as sexual entities. This behaviour has costs which are so immense, so unfair and inhumane that we feel uncomfortable just thinking about them, we put these concerns to the back of our minds and dismiss them as having any relation what so ever with our actions in the western world. The fact is that human trafficking around the globe is estimated to generate a profit of anywhere from $9 billion to $31.6 billion. Half of these profits are made in industrialized countries. In no ways am I criticizing the individuals who are often simply controlled by the industry, but I am trying to communicate to every person who reads this, that you have power over yourselves, over the choices you make and the actions you take, I am begging you to realise the impact of your thoughts, words and actions and the capacity you have to refrain from indulging in such commodities.
To shine more insight on the consequences of sexual abuse I will share with you a story about a girl I worked with in Nepal. A ten-year-old girl, whom I adored was raped by her grandfather and once again the family was so ashamed that they forced the child to leave her home and community, to live on the filthy streets in absolute poverty, a place where as a result of her circumstance, she now ‘belonged’. In Nepal if a girl is raped and the community finds out this information then the youngster, no matter what age will be publicly shamed, they will pin the child down to the ground and shave off their hair as the ultimate symbol of worthlessness. When a child falls victim to rape or sex trafficking they loose all purity, all respect and are now considered to be the lowest, most despicable and disgusting form of life. This is reality… THIS IS LIFE. This is what it can mean to be a woman in Nepal and in so many different places around the world. All over the globe we value the act of sex more than a life of a CHILD. Not surprisingly, over 71% of trafficked children show suicidal tendencies.As far as I can tell these girls have longed for death to escape the hell of enduring everyday, they've lived in the most sickening, revolting and frightening of nightmares, a hell that they were subjected to simply by being born.
If you are still reading this, solely by spending your time listening to me, you have demonstrated your agency as an autonomous being. I am pleading for you to take that agency and to start using it, perhaps by starting to make decisions you think more carefully about, or becoming actively involved in change through writing, or chatting to your friends about issues that remain unspoken, which are in many ways silenced, or through an organisation, or changing the way you speak, or the things you buy, or the music you listen to. Please if you take anything from these words let yourself feel something towards the suffering of millions of women around the world, don’t be afraid to feel a sense of responsibility, of empowerment, of motivation and compassion, to start fighting back from the atrocious inequality that dominates our world.
Today is International Women’s day.
A day I wish I could celebrate in full spirit and in confidence knowing how much our society values and respects women as humans, humans who are entitled to the same worth, the same level of dignity and the same humanity to that of a man.
But unfortunately today I don’t celebrate. Today I mourn. I mourn the inequality of women around the world, I mourn the horror young children in Nepal and other parts of the globe are subjected to (the lowest forms of torture), I mourn for every girl and woman who as ever felt unsafe walking home at night. I mourn for every child that is killed in China because of her sex. I mourn for every woman in Africa who is born into a life where they have no agency, no control over their circumstance. I mourn for all the girls around the world who, like me have been subjected to sexual abuse, or domestic abuse or to any form of degradation based on what we label as their ‘biology’. I mourn for every spooky catcall, every sly groping, or sexist slur. I mourn for each and every time a victim has been blamed for their abuse. The only thing I celebrate today is the endurance and strength of womankind and even this I concurrently mourn. Today is a day like any other, which calls for reflection. A day, which demands to be heard. A day in which, like every other day requires a change in our attitude, a dramatic shift in our behaviour and values. Let us use this day and every other day to speak about the unspoken, to voice the stories we have silenced and to start talking about things that make us uncomfortable. Let us realise that the suffering and inequality of women all over the world is so much bigger than personal discomfort and more important than embarrassment.
Women from all walks of life, from all around the world have the right to live without fear. We have the right to live in a world, which grants all human beings equal safety, one that doesn’t deal out human rights and access to security based on biology, or other factors such as race and class. A world whereby the ‘fear of being female’ does not exist!
For more information about Change Action Nepal please contact Indira on Ighale@gmail.com, or Ruby at Ruby.ann.thorburn@gmail.com and check out the website below: http://ighale.wix.com/actionforchangenepal
