I feel the streets are never safe – day or night. Walking on the street that reaches my home, out of nowhere, a figure on a bike gropes my breast and drives away leaving me dumbfounded. Too slow to react, too numb to realise. That incident was more than four years ago and I am still scared.”
This is an excerpt from a post on howrevealing.com, a website that lets victims of sexual crimes share their stories. We don’t know who wrote it, their age, or profession. The website specifies it’s a female author, but we don’t know what she was wearing at the time of the attack, what time of day she was out on the street, or whether she was drunk or sober. In other words, there is no chance of victim blaming.
They get uncensored, horrifying stories of a traumatic sexual assaults. “Identity and descriptions of the victims and perpetrators of sexual crimes often create bias. People team up, and judgments are passed. Anonymity, hopefully, makes it raw and scary,” says the founder of the website, Urmila (29), a Bengaluru-based lawyer and researcher.
Urmila, who wishes her second name be kept a secret for her own safety, first came up with the idea of the website after the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case. She was studying in Delhi at the time, and witnessed the sudden, vocal outrage first-hand.
It was also the first time she realised that women, from all walks of life, collectively shared experiences of harassment, gender-based violence, rape threats, and sexism. But only a few spoke out, or reported them to the authorities.
