Survivor has cause for hope

RAPE DRAINS THE LIGHT, Sohaila Abdulali (right) wrote in her treatise on the crime, but the actions of women all over the world give her hope that courage will drive the darkness into retreat. Recently, in Sohaila’s birthplace of India, millions of women joined hands to form a “women’s wall” that stretched more than 600km in a powerful demonstration of resistance. “I hope it was a sign of substantial change,” Sohalia says of the latest example of women giving voice to their rage, following the pink-hued women’s marches in cities from Washington to West Java. A writer and survivor, Sohaila saw a hint the winds of change had reached India in 2012 when a decades-old article she had written on her own gang rape went viral. The interest was a reaction to the brutal rape of student Jyoti Singh, a young country woman who had come to a big city to build a better life, and her story struck a nerve, Sohalia says.

“I know that the conversation has changed because before there was no conversation in India about rape,” Sohaila tells The Weekly.

“When I went back to do my thesis, rape was this foreign Western concept that nobody had ever heard of. That doesn’t happen anymore. So the conversation has changed in that people talk about it more.”

More recently the global rejection of harassment and abuse has strengthened the resolve of women in India. “The #MeToo campaign has shone a startling spotlight on sexual harassment,” Sohaila writes in her

book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape. The clarion call has given women the confidence to speak out. India remains constrained by “the right wing fascist government” that is “actively working to erase women and Muslims”, Sohalia says, but the feminist movement is gaining ground. Sohaila can’t say that a single rape has been prevented by #MeToo, but there have been consequences for the criminals who perpetrate the vile act.

Raised about 60km outside of Bombay by progressive, loving and unconventional parents, Sohaila was 17 years old when a pack of men attacked and raped her. “I never felt oppressed as a woman but when I look back now there were many things that could have crushed me,” she tells The Weekly.

In her heart, she is an optimist, and she has faith in humanity’s cleansing light. “I have seen very bad things but I have seen good things too,” she says. “I have seen good behaviour by both men and women. I see hope most days.”