SURVIVOR'S STORY

Journalist Urmi Bhattacheryya’s hard-hitting new book looks at the aftermath of sexual assault for five girls and women in India

An independent journalist based in Delhi, Urmi Bhat-tacheryya’s debut book After I Was Raped (Pan Macmillan India, ₹399) tells the heart-breaking story of five survivors of rape and gangrape. Urmi writes for various national and international publications on issues of sexual assault, women’s health and culture. In 2020, Urmi won the UNFPA Laadli Award for Gender Sensitivity for her reporting on child sexual abuse.

Even while laying bare the apathy, cruelty and injustice that survivors of sexual violence have to deal with during and after the assault, the book is grounded in empathy, objectivity and a sincere search for solutions.

We asked Urmi about her key learnings from her years of research.

You have interviewed rape survivors of very varied backgrounds in this book. What were the main insights about violence against women that you gathered during these interviews?

That it is a systemic and systematic problem and it isn’t going to go away without active, concerted effort. That we still don’t hold men responsible and accountable – both for the crime of rape and for rape culture that perpetuates it. Men aren’t held responsible – particularly, cisgender heterosexual men – because that’s what patriarchy does: make one loath to question the abusers of power – men themselves. Until we stop tiptoeing around this problem, until we stop judging women for their clothes, how late they were out at night or not (sometimes, inadvertently – sometimes, blatantly – saying women “deserved that rape”), the crime will continue unabated.