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While we understand physical abuse, we rarely comprehend that verbal abuse too can have serious consequences for women.
If you’re already wondering about the title, let me illustrate with an example to give you a closer look as to what harassment of women is.
Harassment in simple words, is any abuse or violence, physical or mental but in most cases, while we know what physical wounds look like, we forget that injuries to your mental health too need to be cured before they turn into bruises like depression and severe anxiety attacks.
Recently, (a week before the lockdown began), my widowed mother, my brother and I had to move out of my father’s home. Reason? Simply put, mental abuse. Abuse can occur in the form of any gestures or words that make one feel severely depressed. This is what happened to us too.
The background to this was that we had some family land which my uncle (who is brother-in-law to my mother) used for cultivating his crops and hence paid us the rent regularly. This time something happened due to which he got a little late and didn’t even talk to my mother regarding this. She being a single parent got a little tense (as she has some severe anxiety issues). She decided to ask him and when this happened they abused her saying that she has no right to the property and that it only belongs to us, her children, and so when we are legally privileged, we can get the information (I am 17).
Later on, the dispute grew stronger and she was accused of having an evil eye on my father’s property from the very beginning and when she decided to move out, they said that she was leaving to “have fun” with other guys. My mother is a woman in her late 30s, and couldn’t bear all this; as a result, she has developed depression.
I see her taking pills each day and my heart shrinks at seeing all this. We have taken some legal help now, but the accusations and gossip she faces each day are becoming ridiculously cheap. If this isn’t a form of mental abuse, then what is?
My sole purpose of sharing this all is, if you are the one facing such things, don’t keep quiet or just ignore it (if it’s affecting you). Raise your voice! Sometimes, silence is the worst thing you can offer, in a situation that demands your courage and words.
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Just because they are married a husband isn’t entitled to be violent to his wife. Just because a man is "in love" with a woman, it doesn't give him a right to be violent.
Trigger Warning: This speaks of graphic details of violence against women and may be triggering for survivors.
Anger is a basic human emotion, just like happiness or being sad. One chooses his/her way of expressing that emotion. It is safe until that action stays within oneself.
What happens when that feeling is forced upon another? The former becomes the perpetrator, and the latter turns out to be the victim.
Rrashima Swaarup Verma's new bestselling book The Royal Scandal is a celebration of the spirit of womanhood set in the 18th Century.
Rrashima Swaarup Verma’s new bestselling book The Royal Scandal is a celebration of the spirit of womanhood.
A true love story. A tale of politics, treachery and war. A piece from India’s rich history. A vivid description of 18th century life in the Deccan. Yes, The Royal Scandal is all that and more. But it is also an aide-mémoire of the tremendous fortitude, the unbeatable spirit that women are, and have always been, capable of.
18th century, Hyderabad, India. A time and place when societal laws and rules came down heavy on the female gender, when zenanas separated and shielded the women from the world outside, when it was understood and accepted that the men in their lives would govern and dictate every big and small decision.
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