Distress (Page 19)

Rina Gonoi had two dreams. To be a soldier, and to compete in the Olympics as a judo player.

She started judo when she was four years old, trained by her brother, and was 11 when she first saw soldiers in action.

The armed forces, known in Japan as the Self-Defence Forces (SDF), had helped Ms Gonoi and her family in an evacuation centre after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster. The 23-year-old is from Higashi-Matsushima in Miyagi Prefecture – the area worst hit by that catastrophe.

Female soldiers were part of the aid effort. “They gave us food and ran a soup kitchen,” Ms Gonoi says.

“They were back and forth bringing hot water for us so we could have a bath. I looked at them and thought ‘What a wonderful job.’ I thought I would like to work for society – for the people.”

Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault

Both her dreams were within reach when she joined Japan’s army, the Ground Self-Defence Force (GSDF).

Both were shattered by sexual harassment which she experienced “on a daily basis” when she joined her unit after training.

“My breasts were rubbed. I was kissed on the cheek, groped, or grabbed from behind in the hallway – colleagues or superiors would rub themselves against me with people watching,” she said.

“Often, I was told things like, ‘Give me a blow job’.”

Colleagues made remarks about her body, she says: about her breasts being big or small or that her body was large.

August 2021 was a dark turning point.

During a training exercise in the mountains, three of Ms Gonio’s male colleagues called her into a tent, where they’d been drinking.

“They were talking about a martial arts technique which involved choking someone and putting them to the ground. They said, ‘Gonoi try it’ – they pinned me to the bed and choked me.”

Ms Gonoi said the three men forcibly spread her legs open and alternately and repeatedly pressed their crotches against her.

Around a dozen colleagues were around she said, adding that no-one stopped the three men: “Many were laughing.”

“I was filled with despair. I thought, ‘How could I live after my body and soul have been tainted?'”

She reported the incident to her superiors but was unable to obtain any witness testimony, and her complaint was dismissed.

Later, the three men were referred to prosecutors on suspicion of indecent assault by the GSDF police unit, but the case was dropped for lack of evidence.

In the end Ms Gonoi felt she had no choice but to quit and go back home.

“I was exhausted mentally and physically and isolated myself in my house,” she said.

When she decided to go public with her story, Ms Gonoi’s family and those around her were against it.

In Japan’s male-dominated society most sexual violence victims are shamed into silence. And those who speak out face a fierce backlash.

A recent survey showed that more than 70% of sexual assaults in Japan go unreported.

When Ms Gonoi decided to speak out, she knew it wasn’t going to be easy. She was taking on a Japanese military institution.

She shared what happened to her on YouTube. Her story was a rare case that captured the nation’s and the media’s attention.

Ms Gonoi says that other women and men shared their stories of sexual violence with her, both in the military and elsewhere. She also collected more than 100,000 signatures for a petition calling on the defence ministry to investigate her case.

But she also faced a backlash.

“Some would say ‘You are ugly’ – others would comment on my cauliflower ears, because I’d been doing Judo. Some would say ‘Are you actually a man?'” she said.

“When I was collecting signatures for the petition, I got a threatening email saying, ‘I’ll kill you if you go any further.'”

The last case that garnered this much attention was in 2019, when Japanese journalist Shiori Ito filed and won her civil lawsuit seeking damages from a prominent reporter who she said had raped her.

It was also the same year that the Flower Demo movement started. On the 11th day of every month since April 2019, groups of sexual violence victims and their supporters have gathered throughout Japan in public spaces to protest unjust acquittals of sexual crimes, and call for changes to the country’s sexual violence law.

Problems with the existing law were highlighted by not guilty verdicts in four cases in 2019. In one of the trials, a father accused of raping his 19-year-old daughter was acquitted even though the court acknowledged that he had had sex with her against her will. The prosecution’s case, that the man took advantage of the daughter’s inability to resist the sexual attack, was rejected.

“I started the Flower Demo because I was angry,” Minori Kitahara told the BBC after one of the gatherings in Tokyo. “I also felt many other women’s anger. But there’s no place to speak out.”

The gathering in central Tokyo was small, but significant, and quite moving. Some people were carrying placards: one said “Sexual abuse is unforgivable” in Japanese, while another written in English said, “Consent is everything”.

The Flower Demos have become a symbol of defiance against silence.

A woman held a microphone and, through her scarf and mask, you could still see how emotional she was as she told the crowd how her father had sexually abused her as a teenager. Men and women were in tears, including Ms Kitahara.

In February, the Japanese government approved a bill to raise the age of sexual consent from 13 to 16, as part of reforms to the country’s sexual violence penal code.

Under the current law, a victim bears the onus of proving not only that there was no consent, but also that there was “assault or intimidation” or other factors that made it impossible for them to put up resistance.

“I think the law is very discriminatory… Compared to other countries, it still disadvantages female victims. When I think about all those victims who could not speak out, I cannot help but think the law itself was a crime against victims,” Ms Kitahara said.

“I know [the age of consent] is about to change to 16 but… the fact it stayed at 13 for this long is a big problem.”

Ms Kitahara thinks that because the Japanese government is made up mostly of “old men” it makes it very difficult for them to understand what women go through.

The public attention that Rina Gonoi’s case garnered pushed the military to conduct an internal probe. Last December, five servicemen were fired, and the unit commander was suspended for six months. The rare investigation across the defence ministry found more than 100 other complaints of harassment, according to officials.

The ministry also issued an apology to Ms Gonoi.

She said that she wants to prevent this from happening again to anyone and that the government was also responsible “for neglecting the case.”

“I want each [SDF] member to be protected,” she said.

Earlier this year, Ms Gonoi filed a civil lawsuit against the five perpetrators and the Japanese government, seeking 5.5 million yen ($40,000; £32,000) in damages from the men for causing her mental distress, and an additional 2 million yen from the state for its failure to prevent abuse.

I asked her why, having experienced so many attacks since she went public, she was pursuing this lawsuit.

She hesitates. You can tell none of this is easy.

“I love the SDF so much,” she said. “They helped us during the [2011] disaster. This was the last thing I wanted to do.

“I just think this is not right. I still get flashbacks of what happened. It’s cost me so much.”

In March, Fukushima prosecutors indicted three former members of Japan’s GSDF on suspicion of indecent assault in relation to Ms Gonoi’s case.

Tweeting after the indictment, Ms Gonoi said she felt her “work had not been in vain” and that she hopes the three “reflect in full and atone for their crimes”.

“I’ve spent a long time feeling totally unable to accept why none of them were being prosecuted. Every day has been a struggle,” she wrote.

Ms Gonoi says she wants to travel and move on with her life.

“I’m a fun-loving person. I like to make people laugh and I like to smile. I want to show people that I can still live positively and enjoy my life. I want to live as I am – I want to be myself.”

“I just want someone to hear my voice. I’m in pain, and I’m not the only one,” an Afghan university student tells us, blinking back tears.

“Most of the girls in my class have had suicidal thoughts. We are all suffering from depression and anxiety. We have no hope.”

The young woman, in her early twenties, tried to end her own life four months ago, after female students were barred from attending university by the Taliban government in December last year. She is now being treated by a psychologist.

Her words offer an insight into a less visible yet urgent health crisis facing Afghanistan.

“We have a pandemic of suicidal thoughts in Afghanistan. The situation is the worst ever, and the world rarely thinks or talks about it,” says psychologist Dr Amal.

“When you read the news, you read about the hunger crisis, but no-one talks about mental health. It’s like people are being slowly poisoned. Day by day, they’re losing hope.”

Note: The BBC has changed or withheld the names of all interviewees in this piece, to protect them.

Dr Amal tells us she received 170 calls for help within two days of the announcement that women would be banned from universities. Now she gets roughly seven to 10 new calls for help every day. Most of her patients are girls and young women.

In Afghanistan’s deeply patriarchal society, one worn out by four decades of war, the UN estimates that one in two people – most of them women – suffered from psychological distress even before the Taliban takeover in 2021. But experts have told the BBC that things are now worse than ever before because of the Taliban government’s clampdown on women’s freedoms, and the economic crisis in the country.

It’s extremely hard to get people to talk about suicide, but six families have agreed to tell us their stories.

Nadir is one of them. He tells us his daughter took her own life on the first day of the new school term in March this year.

“Until that day, she had believed that schools would eventually reopen for girls. She had been sure of it. But when that didn’t happen, she couldn’t cope and took her own life,” he says. “She loved school. She was smart, thoughtful and wanted to study and serve our country. When they closed schools, she became extremely distressed and would cry a lot.”

It is evident that Nadir is in pain as he speaks.

“Our life has been destroyed. Nothing means anything to me anymore. I’m at the lowest I’ve ever been. My wife is very disturbed. She can’t bear to be in our home where our daughter died.”

We have connected his family and others quoted in this piece to a mental health professional.

The father of a woman in her early twenties told us what he believes was the reason behind his daughter’s suicide.

“She wanted to become a doctor. When schools were closed, she was distressed and upset,” he says.

“But it was after she wasn’t allowed to sit for the university entrance exam, that’s when she lost all hope. It’s an unbearable loss,” he adds, then pauses abruptly and begins to cry.

The other stories we hear are similar – girls and young women unable to cope with their lives, and futures coming to a grinding halt.

We speak to a teacher, Meher, who tells us she has tried to take her own life twice.

“The Taliban closed universities for women, so I lost my job. I used to be the breadwinner of my family. And now I can’t bear the expenses. That really affected me,” she says. “Because I was forced to stay at home, I was being pressured to get married. All the plans I had for my future were shattered. I felt totally disoriented, with no goals or hope, and that’s why I tried to end my life.”

We started looking into this crisis because we saw multiple articles in local news portals reporting suicides from different parts of the country.

“The situation is catastrophic and critical. But we are not allowed to record or access suicide statistics. I can definitely say though that you can barely find someone who is not suffering from a mental illness,” says Dr Shaan, a psychiatrist who works at a public hospital in Afghanistan.

A study done in Herat province by the Afghanistan Centre for Epidemiological Studies, released in March this year, has shown that two-thirds of Afghan adolescents reported symptoms of depression. The UN has raised an alarm over “widespread mental health issues and escalating accounts of suicides”.

The Taliban say they are not recording suicide numbers, and they didn’t respond to questions about a surge in figures. Because of the stigma attached to it, many families do not report a suicide.

In the absence of data, we’ve tried to assess the scale of the crisis through conversations with dozens of people.

“Staying at home without an education or a future, it makes me feels ridiculous. I feel exhausted and indifferent to everything. It’s like nothing matters anymore,” a teenage girl tells us, tears rolling down her face.

She attempted to take her own life. We meet her in the presence of her doctor, and her mother, who doesn’t let her daughter out of her sight.

We ask them why they want to speak to us.

“Nothing worse than this can happen, that’s why I’m speaking out,” the girl says. “And I thought maybe if I speak out, something will change. If the Taliban are going to stay in power, then I think they should be officially recognised. If that happens, I believe they would reopen schools.”

Psychologist Dr Amal says that while women have been hit harder, men are also affected.

“In Afghanistan, as a man, you are brought up to believe that you should be powerful,” she says. “But right now Afghan men can’t raise their voice. They can’t provide financially for their families. It really affects them.

“And unfortunately, when men have suicidal thoughts, they are more likely to succeed in their attempts than women because of how they plan them.”

In such an environment, we ask, what advice does she give her patients?

“The best way of helping others or yourself is not isolating yourself. You can go and talk to your friends, go and see your neighbours, form a support team for yourself, for instance your mother, father, siblings or friends,” she says.

“I ask them who’s your role model. For instance, if Nelson Mandela is someone you look up to, he spent 26 years in jail, but because of his values, he survived and did something for people. So that’s how I try to give them hope and resilience.”

Additional reporting by Imogen Anderson and Sanjay Ganguly

“Everyone now knows me by my name,” said Usha Devi, sitting in her modest home in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states.

“Identity is not a small thing,” the 38-year-old persisted. “Earlier only men were known by their names, now women are identified by their names too.”

Usha Devi was made to quit school and marry at the age of 15. Forced into repeated pregnancies in the family’s desire for a son, she had little control over anything in her life.

After her husband had to migrate in search of work, the mother to three daughters and a son rose to take charge of the house and their children’s lives. She moved out of her in-laws’ home into a separate house in the same village. She now earns money and takes all decisions for the family and is considered the head of her household.

The United Nations says there is no fixed definition for women-headed households but they are often defined as homes where either no adult men are present or they do not contribute to the household income.

Economists and demographers understand the term head of the household to refer to someone who earns money and has authority to take decisions in the family. In case of married women, when husbands migrate and do not live at home for six months or more, women are counted as the head of household. These are often self declared.

It’s a story repeating itself across villages and small towns of India where distress-related migration by men is leading to an opportunity for women.

Sociologist and demographer Professor Sonalde Desai says this opportunity hinges on the wife’s ability to move out of her husband’s family home where she may remain dependent on other male members like her father-in-law and brothers-in-law.

“In cases where a woman is able to establish an independent household by herself, we see a real change in her ability to make decisions, her likelihood of taking care of some financial responsibilities, even managing and running the farm,” Prof Desai says.

Over the past three decades, the proportion of households headed by women has almost doubled, data from the National Family Health Survey shows.

A big contributor to this change in the patriarchal family set-up is internal migration, which has shown a rising trend.

India’s last census in 2011 counted 450 million internal migrants. This was an increase of 45% over the last decade, a rate much higher than the population growth rate (18%) in the same period.

Faced with Covid-19 induced poverty and shrinking employment opportunities, Prof Desai predicts this trend will only increase in the coming years.

Independent and confident, Usha Devi is now a leader amongst women in her village.

Her job as the head of a self-help group involves enrolling women into a government scheme that gives easy loans to poor women.

The group meets every week, collecting small contributions of 10 rupees ($0.12; £0.09) each to build a small corpus, often visiting the bank to deposit it and make requests for loans, and making financial decisions like lending small sums of money from the corpus for emergencies.

At a meeting I attended, there was disagreement and laughter in equal measure. The bonhomie of an informal support network, independent of their menfolk and families.

“Now we all know each other by name. And with the help of the more literate members, I have learnt to write my name and manage financial transactions,” says Munni Devi.

Shobha Devi is one of those more literate group members. She also had an early marriage but was able to complete her education later and often takes over in Usha’s absence.

“The money my husband sends is often not enough, so we help each other through thick and thin,” she says.

“Since I know how to manage money, I also have a greater say in spending decisions now.”

Shobha Devi is part of a growing tribe of women who are more educated than their husbands.

According to the India Human Development Survey, among couples who got married in the 1980s, only 5% of women were more educated than their husbands. This rose to 20% for those in the 2000s and the 2010s.

“If we understand headship [head of family] not simply as who the biggest earner is but also as someone who is capable of making decisions, I suspect increasing power may be moving towards these more educated women,” Prof Desai explains.

When Usha Devi began earning 11 years ago, she invested in her studies and acquired a college degree. In 2012, she began working with a non-governmental organisation, going door-to-door collecting health data of mothers and infants.

She began running the self-help group in 2016, a decision supported by her husband, Ranjeet who dropped out of school when he was 10. He says he only realised that was a mistake when he saw how “smart” his wife was.

“If my wife hadn’t educated herself, my children would have turned out like me. She is the reason they may have a chance for a better future,” he says.

It’s a rare confession from a man brought up in a country steeped in traditional gender roles. In some ways, migration makes it inevitable that men loosen the control and rely more on their wives.

Ranjeet struggled for work in his village where there were few skilled jobs and none that he was qualified for. So he is proud that he can provide for his family by working in a factory that manufactures ropes in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Despite their increased autonomy at home, Usha Devi, Shobha Devi and the other women I spoke with still saw themselves as second to their husbands.

“I am not great, it’s him. If he hadn’t supported me, I would have never moved ahead,” says Usha Devi.

But for many young women, including her daughter Rashmi, she has become a role model.

“I saw my mother change and thought I could also become like her.”

Rashmi takes tuition classes to supplement the household income and dreams of saving enough to train and become a policewoman.

It’s not just a career goal but an example she wants to set for people, just like her mother.

“Villagers should not feel that only boys can run a household,” she says. “Girls can do it too – if only they are brought up that way and allowed more freedom.

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