“Accelerate Action” to gua-rantee gender equality and wo-men’s rights, focusing on impa-ctful solutions, inclusivity and intersectionality, is this year’s call for International Women’s Day on March 8. A promising demon-stration of such action is the out-reach by an India-based network of Catholic women called Sisters in Solidarity (SIS), established in 2019 to provide holistic support to a nun survivor of clergy sexual violence (CSV) and to her compa-nions. However, SIS members also respond in other capacities to sexual violence and other gend-er equality issues in the Church and broader society. Pertinent to the SIS response is its combined feminist theological and social science sensibility that undersco-res the commitment to gender equality and women’s rights in the Church and society. Anchored in understanding women’s experi-ence of sexual violence as a first principle, SIS and like-minded support groups assert that the traumatic psychological impacts on women from the onset of vio-lence through to complete healing, range from a swirl of mixed and swinging emotions (especially when the perpetrator is a known authority figure whose responsi-bility is to protect), to serious psychological dysfunctionality and self-harm. Emotional impacts may be worse in contexts that place a high premium on virginity, link sexual purity to women’s bodies, family and community honour, and resort to a range of discriminatory silencing and punitive tactics, in-cluding stigmatization by fami-lies, communities, work, religi-ous, and other institutions. This generates shame, self-blame guilt, fear, anger, feelings of a loss of self-worth, and an overall sense of hopelessness and despair. Sur-vivors of sexual violence, inclu-ding SIS-supported survivors, also find it difficult to access justice.
India’s poor deserve better than this
Concerns are being raised about whether the needs of poor and marginalized communities in India are receiving enough attention in current government policies. Observers say
