[Rape is a crime where, quite weirdly enough, the "society" - backward societies in particular, makes the target of the crime bear the burden of "shame". It goes to the credit of Suzette Jordan that she showed the rare courage to defy this ridiculous norm, in a rather demonstrative manner.
It's truly unfortunate that she had to succumb to a fatal disease so much before her time; she was barely 40. But she will continue to be remembered as one of the long list of intrepid fighters who did their bits to make life for women less undignified than they had encountered at the commencement of their fights. To be sure, it's an unfinished and ongoing struggle. Long Live the Memory of Suzette Jordan! Long Live the Struggle!] I/II. http://scroll.in/article/713364/'I-am-not-the-Park-Street-rape-victim.-I-am-Suzette-Jordan':-remembering-a-survivor's-harrowing-ordeals TRIBUTE 'I am not the Park Street rape victim. I am Suzette Jordan': remembering a survivor's harrowing ordeals The courageous woman who took on the West Bengal government in her fight for justice has died of meningoencephalitis at a hospital in Kolkata. Harish Iyer Yesterday · 03:03 pm Suzette Jordan, 40, who took on the West Bengal government in her fight for justice in a case, that came to be known as the "Park Street Rape" in 2012, has died of meningoencephalitis at a hospital in Kolkata on Friday. She boldly revealed her identity to the world in 2013 and marched on the streets of Kolkata to protest a series of rapes and murders in West Bengal. As she said then: "Why should I hide my identity when it was not even my fault? Why should I be ashamed of something that I did not give rise to? I was subjected to brutality, I was subjected to torture, and I was subjected to rape, and I am fighting and I will fight." I met Suzette Katrina Jordan around a year back at the Think Conference, (ironically), in a panel on rape. She was scared and petrified, she had spoken on TV, but had never faced such a large and highprofile audience, she said. I went up to her to comfort her. I instantly told her, "I am gay, so you can hug me." She laughed and said she was scared. I replied, "Kaiko darti hai baba, tu bhi rape victim main bhi rape victim, audience mein bhi rape victims hai." She was shocked and she laughed at my ice-breaker. That very day, Suzette Jordan bonded with my friends Anuja, Ranadeep and Yudhajit. We got along like a house on fire. She and I shared our stories of rape. Pain united us, as we laughed over the abuse in our lives, a cruel black humour, it was, when we were narrating the joke in our country - rape and child sexual abuse. But we were not defeated by it, we were united by it. We refused to let our past affect us in any way. We didn't turn anti-men. We went on a hunt. She had the resilience no one could match. Later in the day, we made jokes on all the men at the conference like two gossiping college boys. We ogled, not leched at them together, and had our bets on who was gay and who was bi and who was worth a try. After we left the conference, we kept in touch over the phone. When the infamous Tehelka rape case happened, we both reached out to the affected person. Suzette called me and told me, "This is what is going to happen next with her... she is going to be shamed". She had her horrors of rape revisiting her with every story of rape she heard. The Nirbhaya rape case got her out of the closet - she famously said, "I am not the Park Street rape victim. I am Suzette Jordan." She was reminded again by the Tehelka case, and followed up with me, asking me to follow up with the ex-Tehelka complainant, as she was too overwhelmed with emotions every time she spoke to her. Suzette loved her daughters. She wanted to get them introduced to me and knew that we would get along like a house on fire. When she was here for shooting for the Satyamev Jayate episode hosted by Aamir Khan, we had a chance to meet. But we couldn't as she was here for a very short while. Satyamev Jayate is hush-hush about its recordings. But i was pre-informed about her visits, because the world knew that we were like love-birds, separated by a few seas. I missed a chance to meet her, and she cursed me for that. In the meantime, we had more tragedies. While she put up a real brave front, I used to tell her that she could let herself loose and cry. I used to call her and joke and laugh. Laugh, until she would start crying about her psychological unrest. There were secrets that only I knew. I have no qualms in letting them out now. Suzette was really upset about the fact that she was treated like an accused in the rape case. Mamata Banerjee, called her the enemy of the state. She accused her of lying about her rape to tarnish the image of the Trinamool Congress government. She was called a hooker whose client had harsh sex with her. If all of this was not enough, she was treated with absolute contempt inside the court. She told me that the "female" judge behaved with her very rudely with absolute lack of empathy. Her court case appearances were unending. She was asked to narrate her incident again and again as the defence looked for discrepancies in her earlier and later statements. She was determined to fight it out even if it meant that she would be shot dead or raped again. She was a fighter. But people took her strength for granted. People forgot that she was human and she had the right to cry. She didn't want to be brave all the time. She didn't want to be the inspiration all the time. She was a normal person. She wanted to be seen as a normal average Joe though she had the worst humiliations to face. One incident that affected her very badly was when her undergarments that she was wearing when she was raped were openly exhibited. The defence lawyer held it with a stick and asked her if it was hers, and whether she wearing it on that day when she was "allegedly" raped. She told me that she broke down in court and pleaded to the judge, asking her to intervene. The judge, one of her own gender, did not. This one incident was one of the most devastating ones in Suzette's life. She described it as, "I was gang raped. Again and again in the court". She wanted to hold me and cry. I would coyly get her to laugh at her tragedy everytime we spoke. Once when she was too upset with the defence lawyer, I asked her, "Was the lawyer hot?" and she started giving me horrible Hindi abuses in jest. We both addressed each other by what we had experienced: "Hello, can I speak to the rape victim?" is how we would begin our conversations, and laugh before we cried. She was not raped by some gang of perverted men. She was raped by the people of this country. She was raped by the law process of our country. She was raped by each one of you who doubted her story. Some time back, she was denied entry into a restaurant called @Ginger, in Kolkata because *She was a rape victim*. There was an outrage on Twitter and Facebook when she spoke up. But actually, the restaurant staff was only holding a mirror to the attitude of people in our country. For us rape is a cause, and the rape victim is a story. Rape is something that happens to the person on TV, or someone you read about in the news, Rape doesn't happen in our homes. We live in a world of denial. Suzette died today at 3 am. Correction: India murdered Suzette with its mindset and attitude towards women and survivors of rape. She died of meningitis. We all know that once depression bites you, you become a reservoir of diseases. In the end, she listened to me. I used to tell her "it is okay to go weak sometimes. It is okay to give up fighting and love yourself just as yourself. It is okay to just 'Be'". She allowed herself to be. She stopped breathing. Her heart stopped beating. She passed away. If she was really empowered, if people didn't judge her. If the lawyers didn't ill-treat her in court, if the female judge was sensitive to a person similar to her own anatomy, if the restaurant didn't throw her out, if people didn't judge her, she would have survived, or for that matter, died happily. India killed Suzette. You killed her. Things have to change. I demand judicial reforms. No woman should be humiliated like Suzette was in court. No one. We welcome your comments at [email protected]. II. http://scroll.in/article/713502/Suzette-Jordan's-struggle-shows-that-India-has-failed-to-create-a-support-system-for-rape-survivors SEXUAL ASSAULT Suzette Jordan's struggle shows that India has failed to create a support system for rape survivors We need solid networks of emotional and career support, and practical financial assistance, instead of the endless, unproductive media debates on sexual assault. Nilanjana S Roy Yesterday · 07:38 pm Her name was Suzette Jordan, and by the time she died of meningitis in a Kolkata hospital, many in India and across the world knew that name, and honoured the woman who refused to be anonymous. In February 2012, Jordan was raped by four men after she came out of a club on Park Street, a broad thoroughfare in Kolkata well-known for its restaurants and nightclubs. Kolkata's politicians and police officials drew immense public ire when they blamed the victim for the violence she had suffered; West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee notoriously called Jordan a liar, and said she was trying to besmirch the state's reputation. But "the Park Street rape victim", as the media called her, was a fighter. She insisted on filing charges against her rapists, though the local police were so reluctant to do so that the process took hours. Jordan faced the legal battle ahead of her with determination, no easy thing. Rape victims and survivors face long and often lonely court battles; sentencing can take three years or more. In 2014, the Chief Justice of India, P Sathasivam, expressed his unhappiness at declining conviction rates in cases of rape and other crimes against women - the conviction rate for rape had dropped from 26.6 (percent) in 2010 to 24.2 in 2012, he said, citing National Crime Records Bureau figures. Revealing her identity A year and four months after the attack on her, Jordan decided to dispense with the anonymity that is every rape victim's right. "Enough is enough," she had told the BBC. "I am tired of being made to feel ashamed. I am tired of feeling scared because I have been raped. My name is Suzette Jordan and I don't want to be known any longer as the victim of Calcutta's Park Street rape." Jordan had worked as a counsellor for a helpline on domestic abuse and violence; she was the mother of two children. Her refusal to accept the shame that is often visited on survivors of sexual assault was inspirational to women who would never know or get to meet her. And she was a giant source of inspiration, with her honesty, her feistiness, her ability to hold on to her fun-loving self, despite all that she went through. But over the last three years, Jordan's struggles and small victories were also a stark illustration of India's colossal failure to create pragmatic and functional support systems for victims of rape, or other kinds of gender violence. Almost all the help that Jordan received after February 2012 was either offered by individuals or by local organisations such as Kolkata-based Maitree, an umbrella network for women's rights activists, or Bangalore-based TFC. When she lost her job, it was Santasree, a former victim of domestic violence herself, who stepped in. When the news spread that Jordan was seriously ill, it was again left to her family and individuals who had worked with women's causes to try to help. This was considered unremarkable - even those journalists who covered Jordan's case would not have found it in any way unusual that a survivor would have no recourse to public services or funds for her legal fees, medical treatment or for PTSD counselling. Violence against women in India is often meticulously covered and discussed, and yet the wellbeing of victims and survivors is seen as their individual burden, not as the responsibility of the community or the state. Discussions on rape, in particular, tend to dwell on the exact nature of the violence suffered by victims, on the fear of sexual assault, the trauma of the survivors and the punishment that should be meted out to rapists. Problems go unaddressed But media discussions seldom address problems with the legal and judicial process, on the quality of care and support networks that victims across social classes can access, on the medical, legal and personal costs that often accompany reporting or otherwise dealing with rape and sexual violence. And yet, these problems are what are most urgent to those who survive rape. As with other victims, Suzette Jordan's life for the last three years might have been far less stressful and fraught if she hadn't had to be brave on her own, with just a handful of individuals to help her along. What do victims and survivors need? The answer isn't simple: it includes but is not limited to 24-hour helplines, well-planned crisis centres, access for women across rural and urban India to long-term medical and psychiatric help, much more sensitivity in police stations and hospitals, and a far more streamlined and responsive legal and judicial process. When the present government decided to roll back one-stop crisis centres, they were quite rightly criticised - instead of 660 Nirbhaya Centres, to be rolled out across 640 districts and 20 major metros, there will now be only 36; the budget for the programme has been cut from Rs 244 crore to Rs 18 crore. This is not to say that one-stop crisis centres are the answer. Lawyer and women's rights expert Flavia Agnes wrote in July that quick-fix solutions are not the way forward. Speaking of a previous scheme to appoint Protection Officers, she writes: "A convergent model between the PO, shelter homes, hospitals, legal aid and the courts has not been put in place." There is a risk attached to dumping this problem on one-stop crisis centres, she warns: "If the counselling centre is projected as a specialised centre, all hospitals will shun their responsibility." But at present, Kolkata has no functional 24-hour rape, gender or domestic violence hotlines; Mumbai has an efficient hotline but the links between police stations, NGOs and legal services are still not as strong as they could be; Delhi has a hotline that functions well when it's operational, but callers often complain that no one is there to answer calls. Patchy networks Only two of Delhi's hospitals have experimental rape crisis desks/centres. The situation for victims outside the metros is far worse; the availability of actual, useful aid on the ground is entirely dependent on the presence of local NGOs and the willingness of individual police and district officials to step in and assist victims. Across India, people responded to Suzette Jordan's case with compassion, and that was some balm for the stigma that others had visited on "the Park Street victim". Many gave Suzette their respect and admiration, and did their best to help. But I wish she and every other victim of gender violence out there, including LGBT and children victims, also had access to doctors and the best lawyers by right. Along with the respect and caring, I wish that there had been solid networks of emotional and career support, and practical financial assistance, instead of the endless, unproductive media debates on rape. She faced what came her way with bravery and courage, but I wish that all the Suzette Jordans out there had access to concrete, long-term resources - not just our admiration. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
