Wednesday 28 November 2018

ON THE WAY TO AN OPEN FIELD. The rape risk for women for open defecation.




On the night of 27th of May, in Katra Sahadatganj, two girls said to their parents they’d have left home for toilet. The girls were found hanged from a tree the following hours. From a first investigation, the girls have been raped, killed and then hanged to make it looks like a suicide. Unfortunately, as many cases like this, it turned in suicide leaving the culprits free. This is not an isolated case, especially in the villages, women who have to find an open field to defecate or only to cleanse themselves are many and they usually doing this under the cover of night, far from the village eyes. Many women say to prefer to wake up before down and think it is better doing with someone else like a female friend or relative, never alone. They know that men lurk, watch and worse. “Try to squat in a sari, while holding a cup of water to cleanse themselves and keeping an eye out for rapists” wrote Rose George for HuffPost. According to a 2015 UNICEF/WHO report, this is what about 300 million women and girls in India have to face every day because they have no access to toilets. A WaterAid, DFID-funded Sanitation and HARE study, explains that in the slums people have to share public toilets and girls under the age of 10 reported to face a higher risk to be raped on the way to reach the public toilets. In many interviews conducted by researchers, women from villages and slums narrate the high frequency of cases of assaults. In any case, women always faced lewd remarks, physical gestures and rape when they hide in the bush. Particularly, a mother said she had to fight with a group of delinquents for protecting her daughters from getting raped. She knew that or they kill her to rape her daughters or they back off. The frequency of this assaults is chilling.

Nearly half the world’s population lacks access to improved sanitation conditions and half of them reside in India, where almost half a billion people defecate in the open. The lack of adequate sanitary facilities lead women to an increased exposure to the risk of gang rape and lynching. This is one of the reasons why open defecation have to be stopped, in addition to diseases caused by faecal contamination. Indeed, according to the recent UNICEF survey, 102 813 children in India died, in the 2016, due to diarrhoea. No country in the world has more open defecation than India, where one in two people defecate outside. Although open defecation has been reduced by 31 percent since 1990, about 300 million women and girls in India still have no other choice.
The improvement of toilet infrastructures in the villages is a target for the decrease of women sexual violence for open defecation, providing them some level of protection. According to Approva Jadhav, a US researcher, the non-partner violence is a type of sexual violence closely linked to open defecation places. The research results suggest that women who use open defecation have twice the odds of non-partner sexual violence (NPSV) than women who use household toilets. So, it is necessary to improve infrastructures to provide women with some level of protection against NPSV.
However, the building of infrastructures for sanitation purposes has to face an important challenge regarding the changing of people behaviour. According to a study, at least 50 per cent of structures built for sanitation purposes in India remains unused or is used for other purposes. According to some critics, this is due to the fact that imposing an infrastructure never used before without a direct request from the population, leads to a psychological rejection in front of the change in their habits. The change of behaviour can be done only by a demand driven by the population. For example, it is known a movement called "No loo, No I do", through which brides refuse to get married into families which live in homes without toilet. This can be useful for rousing the population mind.
India is running far behind to attain its sanitation goals and the situation is getting difficult with each passing year. The researchers strongly recommends infrastructure improvements that can provide women with some level of protection against sexual violence, along with behaviour changes to utilise these built toilet facilities.
Currently, many campaigns and NGO’s action, like HEEALS committed in the UN’s WASH project,  and the Indian government are underway to raise awareness of the use of toilets and to stop open defecation, involving the aim in the national conversation and following the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2 for sanitation and hygiene. This is an important need that population can’t avoid anymore, because it regards public health and safety but also human dignity.






Elisa Stucchi-
WASH & MH Coordinator 

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