There’s a wonderful, stunning image doing the rounds of the internet. It shows 35 women, young and old, each seated on a chair, looking straight ahead at the camera. They fill your computer screen and if you didn’t know better, you’d think that the image was about women’s power. And in some ways it is.
But the image hides another, grim yet familiar, reality. Each of these strong, powerful and confident women who faces you is a victim of sexual assault, some the one time, others over prolonged periods, and most of them have remained silent — either by choice or compulsion — because the man who assaulted them, and it was just the one man, is a famous, powerful television host.
Meet Bill Cosby, comedian extraordinaire, host of the popular
Of course, it didn’t make it any easier to speak because the man is black and race enters the picture in an insidious way: if you’re white, it’s tough to speak out, if you’re black, it almost seems like betrayal, and once again, women are caught in that age-old trap of silence and its dangerous, invisible corollary — unwitting collusion and encouragement.
For years, Cosby drugged these women and assaulted them. No one believed them when they spoke out. For years people around Cosby colluded in his plots, securing women, sending them to him for ‘rehearsals’ and ‘auditions’, and they chose to remain silent too. Culpability is seldom just an individual thing.
Nor is impunity only individual. Everyone around who does not listen, who does not accept the truth of the victim’s testimony, is colluding in building the impunity.
So far, some 46 women have come out and spoken about their assault by Cosby. Some of them were his friends. It is believed that there are many more out there who are still silent. In 2005, when 14 women accused him of rape, no one believed them. And it was not until 2014, when another comedian, Hannibal Buress, called Cosby a rapist on television that people began to take notice.
The New York Magazine , which published photos of the 35 women who had chosen to speak out, with the caption, ‘I’m no longer afraid’, also carried amazing individual testimonies along with a posed, stark photo of each woman. The deliberate, carefully thought out, full front ‘in-your-face-and-proud-to-be-who-I-am’ photos, the moving testimonies, and the power of story upon story turned what could have been a tale about victimhood into one about power: the power of confronting your demons, of speaking out, of showing how the consensus to silence some things is a social, collective silence.
And yet, as the story points out, between the time that the first complaint against Cosby surfaced and today, there is a gap of nearly half a century. For how long, one wonders, can a man continue to do this before it becomes possible to break the silence? There’s no easy answer to this question.
The Cosby saga took place in a country where women’s rights are said to have made considerable progress, where interpersonal relations between men and women are believed to have become more egalitarian, where the number of women entering the workplace is significant, and where there is, presumably, a legal system that is well set up to deal with crimes against women, and yet, the silence was so difficult to break. And the women found it so difficult to be believed.
In the end, no matter how many systems you put in place, unless men and women begin to think of each other differently, little will change. Take this, for example: Delhi’s ex and discredited law minister Somnath Bharti recently said, “I am fully confident that if Delhi is given full freedom [in issues of security] beautiful women will be able to go out even after midnight without any fear.” It’s not only the systems that need cleaning up, it is also the heads of the likes of Cosby and Bharti.