by Ira Trivedi
AHEAD OF THE CURVE
Almost three years ago, Tehelka, the investigative website and magazine, found that ‘age was more than just a number to several young people—it was a ticking stopwatch in the race to outdo each other in the bedroom’.103
Through interviews across the country the magazine’s interviewers ‘met terrifyingly sexual creatures of all shapes and sizes—nine-year-olds who distributed porn in class (spiral-bound and printed in booklets), 12-year-olds already visiting shrinks for relationships that had turned sour (because their parents discovered them having oral sex), 14-year-olds who had photographed themselves in the nude, made videos of their accomplishments and passed them around for classmates to cackle over and 16-year-olds who had impregnated 19-year-olds (and knew exactly “how to take care of it”)’.
The revolution is apparent—through the eyes of those in it, those watching and those looking back.
Dr Shireen Jejeebhoy of the Population Council in India has been studying the situation and the needs of young people for three decades now, and has realized that addressing these needs is an integral part of addressing India’s future and India’s ability to reap what it sows. A survey of the literature and academic work makes it very clear that there isn’t a comprehensive understanding of young people, particularly in a changing India.
From Dr Jejeebhoy’s public health perspective, one thing is obvious: young people’s sexual and reproductive health vulnerabilities are being ignored, the information and services for supportive socialization are being ‘swept under the carpet’ and a comprehensive discourse on addressing these concerns is non-existent.
Between November 2007 and December 2008, Dr Jejeebhoy and her team headed off to Bihar and Jharkhand to conduct a facility-based survey at abortion clinics across the states. Of their respondents, 78.3 per cent were residents of urban areas. Studies over the last few decades suggest that patterns in rural and urban areas are often similar when it comes to the proportion of young, unmarried women seeking abortions. Together with an NGO, Janani, which performs most of the abortions across the two states, they surveyed 549 young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four at sixteen clinics. Young and naive, a lot of these unmarried women had never before spoken about their qualms about abortion and pregnancies out of wedlock.
Dr Jejeebhoy was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic response the team received. They were expecting to be stoned and thrown out of villages for prying into private lives. In fact, community members agreed that it was important to discuss sexual behaviour and violence. ‘Of course, they denied that their children are sexually active…’ Dr Jejeebhoy said.
She recalled that, initially, many women hid their marital status but the research team deployed a strategy to conceal the interviewees’ identities and maintain that anonymity. After all, they were unmarried, young and pregnant—an unforgivable transgression in the eyes of the community.
The results of Dr Jejeebhoy’s study couldn’t have been more explicit—India’s social infrastructure was ‘devastatingly fractured’.104
Young, unmarried women were having sex and two thirds of the sample had wanted to have sex. Most of them had delayed realizations that they were pregnant. Then, they were having abortions in unsafe ways—from the foetus being beaten out of them to medical abortion pills to ‘eating unripe papaya or drinking a brew made from peppercorn, papaya seeds and coffee’. These were unregistered abortions in unsanctioned places. What was interesting was that most of the women were either scared or anxious, but did not feel guilty.
Consensual encounters seemed to far outweigh non-consensual ones. And, as Jejeebhoy explained to me, the unintended and unwanted pregnancies were more likely to be a consequence of consensual encounters.105
That’s a positive sign. However, scratching the surface exposes what is really happening under the sheets and behind closed doors; these affairs are largely driven by young men with a ‘sense of experiment’ in sexual relationships with young women who are usually coaxed into it under false pretences like marriage or a future together, Dr Jejeebhoy told me. Moreover, male manipulation was complemented by female naiveté.
Both the young woman and the young man were active participants in the act, yet the burden of honour was rooted in a woman’s sexuality.106 ‘A “tainted” girl makes her family lose their reputation—it is very closely linked to girls, not to boys,’ she said. Women were sexual capital and this had solidified the underpinnings of sexual stratification.107 In India, this capital is the property of and transferrable by men; hence the entitlement.
Violence pervades this backdrop of male entitlement and female irrelevance—in homes, through workplaces, through lives visible and invisible.
Together, they make a potent concoction that engenders many forms of violence, and rape is only the tip of the iceberg. Dr Jejeebhoy says the women in Bihar saw only one possible alternative to the violence they endured everyday: death. ‘When they talk about alternatives to sustain, they talk about suicide and taking pills, taking poison, burning themselves,’ she told me.
Although Dr Jejeebhoy’s sample was principally composed of girls in rural and semi-urban areas who could only be said to have been impacted by the sexual revolution that is taking place in India’s cities at one remove, her findings do make an important point. For all the newfound freedom and sexual experimentation that girls seem to be engaging in, very little seems to have changed in the larger context, which has inevitably led to conflict and mayhem—the dark side.
‘It’s the culture we live in,’ she said.
As is well known, women in Indian society are enshrined in religion or spirituality; there they are objectified as goddesses but they are otherwise never seen as harbingers of good luck or necessary to uphold a family’s fortunes. Sons on the other hand are necessary to kindle the funeral pyre of their late parents and to assist in the onward journey of the soul. According to Manu, a man has to be reborn as a man in order to attain moksha (redemption). A man cannot attain moksha unless he has a son to light his funeral pyre. And only sons can till farms.
Indian society, like many societies the world over, is patrilineal, patriarchal, and patrilocal.
In the era of low technology, then, what was done with girls? They were crudely and systematically killed. This led to the much reported missing girls of India phenomenon and the severely skewed sex ratio which worsened over the last six decades.108
The entry of prenatal diagnostic technology in the 1970s changed the mode of killing young girls. Two techniques—amniocentesis and ultrasonography—flourished. Indians took to the latter, a cheaper and non-invasive technology, so much so that companies like General Electric had their heyday when they started selling ultrasound machines to India. No longer was it outright murder, it was now veiled in the womb.
‘Ultrasound technology entered at the very time people wanted to have fewer kids and the fertility rate was on the decline,’ says Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection, a book on how technology is skewing sex ratios and the Asian preference for boys. India’s gender imbalance was exacerbated by technology.
In 1994, the Indian government came down hard with the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act (PCPNDT Act) that made sex determination a criminal offence. But there hasn’t been much of an uptick in the statistics. Instead, Indians are now fleeing abroad to have boys. Sex-selective fertilization is the latest trend. The advent of better technology means no killing, just choosing to have a boy. The number of Indians seeking sex-selective fertility outside the country has ‘increased exponentially in the last ten years,’ Dr Jeffrey Steinberg, one of the world’s most high-profile sex selection doctors, told me a few months ago.
Amongst India’s youngest populations,109 the gender ratio continues to worsen.
‘Everybody wants a son—whether wealthy or not wealthy. The idea is still not gone,’ says a Delhi-based gynaecologist. She told me about disappointment-filled labour rooms every time sh
e delivered a baby girl. Some superstitious patients go as far as to change their hospital for the next child.
The sex ratio is worse in wealthier areas. The more economically prosperous the place, the worse the decline in child sex ratios over the last two decades.110 The economic cost-benefit analysis is no longer about tilling farms but about boys running the hundreds of family businesses that have cropped up during India’s growth spurt. This is testament to India’s access to technology, and the age-old obsession with male children.
The numbers, then, are hardly surprising. India’s total sex ratio—defined as the number of females per 1,000 males—has become better over the past two decades, after dropping for the eighty years before that; but the statistic is still one of the worst in the world, alongside China. As of 2011, there were 940 Indian women for every 1,000 men, up from 933 in 2001.111
So, all told, India has 37 million more men than women, as of 2011 census data, and about 17 million excess men in the age group that commits most crimes, up from 7 million in 1991.112
TOO MANY MEN, TOO MUCH VIOLENCE
Gender imbalance in Asian countries has resulted in higher rates of crime, including rape, committed by young, unmarried men. The situation is worse (both in India and China) than it was ten years ago.113 Violent crime against women increases as the deficit of women increases. This will constrain the life chances of females far into the future, according to social scientists.114
This violence is even proving to be economically perilous. Stories of women being harassed as they drive to work are frequent. One woman was shot dead as she was driving home from work in the evening, another gang-raped. As the International Labour Organisation (ILO) recently put it, the ‘cultural attitudes and social norms about women in the work-place’ in India shut women out. India’s slowed economic growth is also attributed to a fall in female labour force participation.
Sexual harassment in India is an expression of the powerlessness of Indian men, not of their power, Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation recently wrote. The ‘real cause’, as Dalmia put it, ‘is free-floating male libido with no socially acceptable outlet.’115 A broken social infrastructure that has not shown any signs of improvement is a harbinger of where India is headed.
LEFTOVER MEN
Other effects of the skewed sex ratio will be on marriage patterns in India. The probability of each and every man pairing up with a woman obviously drops as the number of men increases.
Christophe Z. Guilmoto noted that by 2025 the number of single men around twenty-five years of age ‘will not only exceed the number of young women of corresponding age, but will also have to compete with a larger than expected number of older men who are still single’. He contended that many of these men will be left partnerless.116
Another consequence of too many men and the increasing deficit of potential female partners is likely to accelerate the trend toward marriage at later age and raise young men’s risk of engaging in commercial sex. Experiences of young men in other parts of the world have proved this.
This has set the foundation for India’s ‘bare branches’:117 unmarried men from age fifteen to their mid-thirties who have limited prospects for employment. With India’s youth unemployment rate hovering around double digits and labour trends showing young people withdrawing from the workforce, bare branches will flourish. Employment plays a pivotal role in shaping gender identities and gender relations. The employment status of a woman’s partner affects her risk of spousal violence.118
These men are usually responsible for the majority of the violence in societies. While a seemingly simplistic and causal allegation, just take look at the ages of all rapists in India, in fact, take a look at crime rates by age: the largest share is committed by men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. In the search for self-validation, they are prone to risky behaviour.
In such a fractured society, with a contorted demographic dynamic, the adverse effects of a sexual revolution are magnified. Hundreds of thousands of young people are falling through the cracks.
YOUNG, UNMARRIED AND…PREGNANT
I met Aasimah in a coffee shop in a busy neighbourhood in East Delhi. She stared out at the raucous streets and said dispiritedly: ‘I never thought this was possible.’
A few weeks ago, Aasimah had felt something was off—she missed a menstrual cycle. Although she usually ignored such ‘petty discomfort’, a few days after her missed period she decided to stop by the ‘ladies’ doctor’ or gynaecologist.
An uncomfortable examination and ultrasound later, she discovered she was four months pregnant. When the doctor told her she would have to be in the hospital for at least twenty-four hours, Aasimah insisted the procedure had to be fast—she knew she wouldn’t be able to stay away from her conservative parents’ home overnight.
When she walked out of the clinic, she headed to a cybercafe: she needed an education. She looked up ‘abortions’ and ‘sexual intercourse’ to figure out what had happened to her and what she needed to do.
Aasimah personifies the challenges that are increasingly plaguing India’s young people. They are often sexually uneducated, practise unsafe sex, and then rush out to get unsafe abortions or are left with potentially lethal sexually transmitted diseases.
‘This is the dark side of sexual liberation,’ says Dr Rekha Khandelwal, Aasimah’s gynaecologist. Dr Khandelwal, now in her late fifties, has seen the number of abortions skyrocket in the last decade.
A few years ago, the standard explanation for rising abortions would have been that women were killing off unwanted female foetuses. Today, however, according to Dr Khandelwal, the abortions that are being sought rarely have anything to do with gender. She gets ten to fifteen cases of pregnant, unmarried women between the ages of twenty to twenty-eight who want ‘terminations’ every month. And that’s only half the story.
Women across the economic spectrum come to see Dr Khandelwal: some are young and callous, some are conservative, some are adulterous, some elite, some are on the cusp of urbanization; in other words it is impossible to typecast them.
Dr Khandelwal has evolved with the times as she has seen an increasing number of sexually active people walk through the doors of her clinic. For all the new lives she has brought into the world, for all the lives she has saved, she has also had to terminate a growing number.
She wishes young people would be more responsible, and she doesn’t say this in a moralizing way, but simply wishes they would take better care of themselves. If they were more sexually aware, if they took more precautions, things wouldn’t be as messy. There wouldn’t need to be as many abortions.
The limited research in India attests to this—‘first sex’ is more often than not, ‘unprotected for the majority of young people’.119 Moreover, there is the huge risk of sexually transmitted infections.
A hospital-based study, done over a five-year period and published last year, reported a resurgence of syphilis in India and rising numbers of sexually transmitted diseases. The medical study noted that all the evidence pointed towards a change in the trends of sexual practices.
Aasimah had gotten pregnant out of wedlock; she had had sex with a man her age, in a closet in their college. She still doesn’t understand how it happened, she says. The thought of a condom had presumably not occurred to either of them. Recent research has shown that more knowledge about contraceptives reduces risky sexual behaviour.120
‘More and more young girls are becoming sexually active,’ says Dr Khandelwal. A few years ago, she could tell whether young women who came to see her were married or not. She says the traditional symbols of married women—red sindoor in their parting, the beaded black and gold mangalsutra around their necks and ‘general demeanour’—would be immediate clues about their virginity. Now, she can’t rely on these symbols, signs of India’s inherent transformation. Sometimes they come with men, who, until a few years ago, she could assume were their husbands. But today they are boyfriends, friends, or simply se
xual partners.
There are two categories of unmarried girls, Dr Khandelwal explains, who are increasingly showing up at her clinic. The first is the ‘advanced’ ones who are seemingly liberal and come within the first few weeks, that is, within six to eight weeks of becoming pregnant. They come in, clueless yet unashamed, only knowing that they are possibly pregnant. And then there are those who are from generally conservative households, where sex is not only taboo but condemned as blasphemous and disastrous for the family’s reputation. They are the ones, according to Dr Khandelwal, who arrive at the later stages of pregnancies and want ‘quick’ abortions.
In Aasimah’s case though, a medical procedure to terminate the foetus never took place. The next day, when she turned up asking the doctor to ‘complete the process’,121 Dr Khandelwal found out that she had self-induced an abortion (presumably violently) in the bathroom of her home.
Aborted pregnancies are now, more so than ever, those of young, unmarried women. In some cases, Dr Khandelwal says they attempt taking the morning-after pill but don’t fully understand how to take it, when to take it and what it means for their young bodies.
Abortion has been legal in India for over forty years now. India enacted the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act in 1971 for cases of patients who have parental authorization, rape victims and foetal impairment, yet unsafe abortions persist. By law, women in India have the right to have an abortion if they are over the age of eighteen—they don’t need permission from husbands and family members. Younger women, though, need a guardian’s consent.
When India legalized abortion, it was seen as a pioneering act and lauded by pro-choice activists. Unfortunately, legalizing abortion hasn’t translated into a comprehensive, safe system to take care of all the effects of the sexual revolution taking place in the country today.
