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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