Abuse, Dependence, and the Illusion of Safety in Indian Homes

In India, a country with little to no social security, families become informal networks of resource-sharing and caregiving. How does this affect child survivors of sexual abuse?

All things considered, I was the perfect survivor—quiet, considerate, and burdened by the needs of everyone but myself.

In the sense that he was my mother’s sister’s husband, the family was poor and economically reliant on my parents. The aunt in question raised me through the formative years of my life when my mom was out making money. They had an intellectually (kinda) challenged daughter.

These were the reasons I counted out to myself to keep my mouth shut about the abuse that was happening to me from age thirteen to age seventeen.

Now that I look back at these things, I feel sad for the teenager I was. I can see how early on in life I started making excuses for abusive adults around me.

But more than that, I can now identify how India’s collectivistic nature, where informal networks for financial support and caregiving exist throughout extended families while offering community, effectively incapacitates a victim from seeking justice.

Because let’s face it, a survivor who is actively hurting shouldn’t mentally count down the ways her revelation can hurt her abuser and his family. Still, something tells me this is how many survivors in India think.

I mean, if I had been a European kid abused by an uncle I only met at Christmas and Thanksgiving, I think this whole ordeal would’ve been a lot easier. Being the daughter of the sibling who did financially well and is now responsible for the social security of all the other siblings who didn’t do well really cost me.

See the whole discourse about how silence enables abusers and how the shame is not mine to bear, but his, and I should go ahead and speak my truth to heal? I believe in all that. But in Indian families, you cannot imagine the complexity this entails.

For one, the gentleman in question acted casually normal towards me for years until I confronted him one day. He was about to visit me at my college with his wife and child, and I did not want him in a place I had made my safe space.

“If you come, I will tell your wife and daughter about what you did,” I said. “Okay, I won’t come. But tell me what excuse I should tell your aunt about why I am not coming?” he asked.

This question shocked and baffled me. Why would this man expect me, the person he hurt irreparably, to help him come up with an excuse to tell his wife? Why does he want me to save him from the consequences of his actions?

Reader, I did not realise that this was going to be an ever-recurring pattern: People would repeatedly ask me to save him from the consequences of his own actions.

Take, for example, my aunt. I told her about the abuse eventually, only because I wanted to know whether she knew about it and kept quiet.

This aunt used to put me to sleep as a child by covering me in kisses. She was the person I came to talk to about my stupid childhood dreams. She saved pennies off her allowances to buy me a nail polish that changed colour in sunlight. It cost 65Rs. In 2004, it was a big thing. She bought me Beyblades and Nice sugar biscuits. She made me Dalgona coffee when it was trending.

She was the first person I had ever learnt to love. Somehow, even more than my parents, I would think.

So, one day, I decided I needed to know. Women of that generation who didn’t work did these things, you know? Covered up the evil shit that their breadwinner husbands got up to to ensure they have some social security.

She swore up and down that she didn’t. She confronted him. We had long conversations, and she emotionally supported me. I told her that someday, I might have to talk to my parents about this for my healing. I promised her that I wouldn’t take her by surprise. I would give her a heads up, a few days before telling my parents.

When that day came, however, my aunt freaked out. “Haven’t I been nice to you?” she asked. “Can you not just keep quiet and let things go on as they are?”

By this time, Reader, I must tell you that this uncle of mine tried his hand at different businesses that failed, built and lost a house for which he couldn’t pay EMIs on time to the bank, and was essentially employed under my parents. They were utterly dependent on my parents for their survival needs.

Was it my job, as a victim, to weigh the consequences of truth-telling on my abuser’s bank account? Is there such a thing as a cruel victim?

My aunt’s request that I not reveal, however, finally destroyed my relationship with her. Suddenly, after that, I couldn’t tell whether any of the support she gave me when I told her was real or if it was all damage control. Did she really love me, or did she think that if she could just keep managing my emotions the way she did, I could be prevented from speaking out further and destroying the economic safety options she has?

Was she trying to protect me, or protect her survival options?

And losing this relationship is one of the biggest things that came with the trauma of having gone through this sexual abuse. She was my primary attachment figure at some point. This was the relationship that I tried to protect by systematically allowing my body to be violated and keeping quiet about it. Now it’s gone anyway. Now, what do I do with all this pain?

After I told my mother, my aunt called me one last time. “Your mom is calling me. I know what she wants to talk to me about. Can you call her and say it was all a mistake? Won’t you help me escape from this?” she had asked. ‘Enna Thappichuvidu’ were the exact words she used. Help me escape.

In my opinion, she really needn’t have worried. Three years later, her husband continues to work for my parents.

Whenever I ask my parents, they have excuses. “He has an intellectually challenged daughter, what would happen to her life?” they ask me.

A cousin asked me what would make me feel better or happier. I asked her if my extended family could stop talking to him or invite him to family functions. “Well, if he isn’t invited, he will not let the aunt and her daughter come there either. So none of us will ostracise him for her sake,” she said.

An uncle sent me a voice recording of him asking my abuser about what I said. The guy had no answers. He said, “Don’t ask me about this topic again.” And you know what my relatives did? They never asked him about that topic again.

Reader, India is a culture of honour and therefore of honour killing. I had to relocate geographically, far, far away from my family when I married my muslim husband to protect him and myself. Every day, the newspaper is full of news of parents and relatives harming women and their consensually chosen partners because they chose someone from a different caste or religion. But how are these relatives okay with letting go of a man who is known now to touch children?

What is this fake pretense of love that punishes happiness but rewards the silent bearing of sadness?

“But he told us that he didn’t do much, just put his hands inside your top a couple of times,” said my mother, one of the times I brought this up to her. Reader, this was a lie; he had done much more than that. But even if he had done only that, does he deserve forgiveness, much less financial support?

When I mention this to my husband, he is furious but ultimately sad. “Do you know what this means? The women in your family are so used to being aggravatedly abused that such a horrible thing done to you seems so small to them. This is just a sign that there is a lot of pain completely normalised in your family.”

The other gem I might have heard from my aunt during our discussions is, “Everyone else who did all these things is somehow living a good life. Why do we deserve to be called out like this? To suffer?”

I don’t even know what to say to this.

After cutting my parents off for four or so years, I recently spoke to my mom again. She said, “He is planning on leaving the hospital anyway; he has requested two months.” And all I could think was, how could this man be protected so much that he doesn’t even face an ounce of inconvenience? He is fed, clothed, socially entertained, and loved constantly. And I, the victim, had to move away and build some semblance of a life for myself far, far away, so that I do not spontaneously combust with the weight of carrying this around.

I should live with the PTSD of sexual abuse for life and suffer from all kinds of dysfunction, but God forbid this man has no job for two months.

All my relatives say, “We don’t even speak to him anymore,” and all I think is, “That’s because you are trying to protect yourself from the discomfort of ever having to ask him a question. Don’t pretend you are doing it for me.”

My husband says, “Maybe you should take financial responsibility for his wife and child. Then, could he be punished?” And that’s what my aunt has implied to me countless times. That even though I am a victim, I must remember that she is a victim too and pledge financial security to her.

And all I am thinking here is, "I have spent my entire life processing this trauma, thinking of other people. People tell me to think of different people at every point in this story. What will my poor aunt do? What will my poor cousin do? Do you know who is thinking of me? There must be someone, somewhere, who should think of me, if I am not allowed to think of myself, right? Who is that person? It’s not my parents or extended family, so who?”

My mom says, “Let’s sit down and discuss. Let’s both plan and decide on how to proceed in this matter.” Now this is a woman who has consistently said, “I don’t care what you like, I will choose your career, I will choose your husband, I will choose the trajectory of your life and how it will go,” and now she wants to sit down and discuss and take my inputs and ask me to make a decision which she will then say, we can’t follow?

This is an utter lack of parenting. A real parent, even an average one, would take the burden off their daughter’s shoulders. They would have cut him off even before I could say another word. Good relatives would have done that too; they would have said, “We will not entertain a man who abused a helpless child," and they would have stopped inviting him to their homes and functions.

But they all stand by like cowards as this man lives his life, and you know why?

Because Indian families are evil, nothing can convince me otherwise. Because nowhere in the world have I seen such calculated cruelty meted out to a person as much as it happens within an Indian family. And nothing they cook for you, or none of the chores they take off your plate, or none of the community they offer, can somehow mitigate the darkness brought about this way.

Because in Indian families, resources and labour decide who is protected. If you are rich and can direct resources to your relatives when they need it, you are automatically important and they flock to you like flies to shit. And then their helplessness and dependence and your resources form a loop which ties you to each other in some entanglement that allows for no real accountability for men. And women? Women are completely expendable here because they have never owned capital or property so far, or cannot give large loans or fund anyone’s lifestyle.

Does this make you feel sad, Reader? To hear me say that I could have been protected if I were rich and in control of my own money?

Should a child be expendable because they do not have capital ownership?

But this is the truth. We tolerate completely intolerable people in the name of social security. If we had good universal healthcare, many unnecessary relationships in India would be cut off immediately. I think that in my bones.

Because in India, we romanticise the idea of community; we say people are people’s safety nets, but are we ready to question who exactly pays the price for such a community? For such safety?

And when will it be my turn to avail of this safety?

What I keep circling back to is the sheer absurdity of it all — of asking a victim to protect her abuser’s dignity, to consider his job, his children, his place in the family tree, while bleeding quietly in a corner.

In Indian families, collectivism gets emotionally and financially weaponised — you’re not just told to stay silent for peace, you’re guilted, threatened, and emotionally blackmailed into preserving the whole ecosystem, even if it’s rotting from the inside.

Women before us learned to survive by being good daughters, good sisters, good wives — and that goodness got tangled up with silence, sacrifice, and swallowing pain. Survival became a performance, and we’re expected to keep performing. Victims are left doing the invisible labour of maintaining everyone else’s comfort, carrying the weight of secrets so no one else has to feel discomfort.

And because there is no structural justice, no place to take this grief and rage and ruin, we end up living in private psychological hellscapes, whispering our stories in safe corners of the internet.

It has to stop. We have to stop centring the abuser’s survival — his reputation, his livelihood, his redemption arc — and start building our lives around the survivor’s healing. That’s the only way forward.

I have to grieve that justice is not possible for me in my lifetime, but I have to believe that it will be different for someone else, somewhere. I have to hope, and most days, I try to.