The story of 2020 is just beginning to be told.

The story of 2020 is to be narrated and renarrated through myriad eyes before a comprehensive picture can begin to emerge. Even as, in small and cautious and at times reckless ways, individuals, communities, and institutions, begin to reimagine “normal” post lockdown, the future will require as sincere a narrativisation of the past as can be mustered if it is truly to provide restoration and healing. Toward this end, Mahila Jan Adhikar Samiti (MJAS) and HAQ: Centre for Child Rights has attempted to contribute the documentation and recording of lives of children in lockdown. Specifically, we have attempted to amplify the voices of adolescent girls in the hope that their experiences and realities too are woven into the tapestry of 2020 in India.

MJAS and HAQ surveyed 184 adolescents and youth between the ages of 10 to 25 years living in 10 villages in District Ajmer, Rajasthan, focussing on their perceptions and experiences of violence during the lockdown. As the COVID-19 pandemic overcame the world with its contagion, the United Nations was swift to point out the underbelly of a shadow pandemic of gender/ sexual violence intensifying within the cover of global lockdowns. The vulnerabilities of women trapped and devoid of resources marked headlines advocating for attention and efforts at correction. Within the adult women focussed media uproar, unfortunately, the doubly-layered, complex oppression and marginalisation of adolescent girls was often pushed to the margins.

Navigating puberty and adolescence in an intensely patriarchal and misogynistic culture that is quick to sexualise and objectify the girl child, the adolescent girl and her complex struggle requires specific focus and spotlight while narrating the story of the lockdown. Our findings reveal that adolescent girls have had to navigate an overwhelming series of challenges and onslaughts upon their most fundamental psycho-emotional needs, educational rights, sexual growth, and bodily integrity.

The lockdown suddenly deprived adolescent girls of the school environment wherein, along with peers, they had an alternate space for self-exploration, growth, and discovery – a process that involved navigating friendships as well as romantic attachments. Unfortunately, closed within homes, various adolescents, especially girls, discovered a violent demonisation of their friendships and/ or attractions to male peers by their parents and other adults in the home. Various such parents/ adult caregivers exercised abuse of power in cutting adolescent girls off of their means of communication with friends/ peers thereby binding them in isolation, inhibiting their necessary processes of growth and self-expression, and subjecting them to severe states of loneliness which, in the case of some adolescents led to anxiety and depression.

As children of all ages grappled with the confusions, uncertainties, and stresses of online education – at times with support at home and often without – it is noteworthy that adolescent girls have been far more deprived of internet and gadget access than adolescent boys. Additionally, government schools were a key zone where adolescent girls would receive sanitary pads that they could use during menstruation. This supply of pads broke down during the lockdown. In some zones, women and girls contrived to form networks of solidarity for the lending and borrowing of pads. However, more than 90% of the respondents confirmed that the same sanitary pads often had to be used for long durations of time which caused health complications.

The district of Ajmer witnesses a high number of child marriages in Rajasthan. By imposing a lockdown, the state created conditions wherein various households lost employment and sources of income, experienced a shrinkage in their capacities to feed and maintain the upkeep of household members, and the expense of educating children, with the additional needs for gadgets, internet, electricity, became impossible to bear for many. In such a context, adolescent girls were to be the primary victims of a patriarchal gaze. Seen as “burdens” to natal families whose ultimate fate and functional worth was to merge into their respective marital homes, many parents thought it best to speed the process in these difficult times and send their daughters away in marriage. Many adolescent girls were married off and many, who had already been married as children but were permitted to stay in natal families, were dispatched to their marital homes, so as to lower the count of mouths to feed at home. Adolescent girls in both cases would have experienced a high likelihood of sexual violation of their bodily integrity, a sudden suspension of education and aspirations, and the ensuing traumatic impacts of such radical violent life transformations that continue to require mental health interventions.

As we spoke to the adolescent and youth respondents, many narrated incidents of experiencing violence from parents and in-laws and/ or witnessing the same within their homes and neighbourhoods. And some respondents additionally observed an escalation in violence inflicted by local police persons. 85% of the respondents believed that there had been an increase in violence, and 73.5% believed that either due to unawareness or a trust deficit, victims had not been reporting the violence to the police thereby pushing the “shadow pandemic” further into darkness. Tragically, 99% of the respondents concluded that it would be difficult either for themselves or for other girls as well as themselves to return to school.

Sahira’s story, quoted below from the MJAS and HAQ report, poignantly captures the severe cost paid by young girls at the sacrificial alter of political dramatics:

“Sahira was in the middle of her class 10th Board examinations when the lockdown was announced. A first in her family to reach 10th standard, Sahira looked forward to continuing her studies in most adverse circumstances as a result of being married at the early age of 10-years. With her ambitions in sight, Sahira wanted to pass her examinations with flying colours and a major reason for her success till now had been access to proper schools and support of her teachers. Because of the lockdown Sahira’s option of going to school was taken away overnight and the economic conditions of her household made a rapid shift to online education extremely difficult. Whatever little space that Sahira had been able to find for her studies in school-hours was now squeezed out by the added household chores. As the time elapsed between her examinations, whatever she had been able to learn was slowly fading away. Finally, when the examinations were announced, Sahira could only attempt it with the little preparation leading to her scoring 43 marks in two subjects. Barely managing to pass her examinations, the two subjects made a heavy dent on her overall percentages and her aspirations.”

Countering the marginalisation of adolescent girls within the conversation of intensified gender/ sexual violence in 2020 will require a multi-sectoral effort. It will require concerted interventions with adolescent girls to equip them with information, skills, and resources for physical and psychological self-preservation; it will require strategic work with families and communities emphasising the need to prioritise adolescent girls at par with their brothers and male peers; it will require directing even more financial and skilled resource toward the upliftment of adolescent girls; however, at this nascent stage of storytelling, it will perhaps require a beginning in rigorous documenting and recording by researchers, activists, writers, and media committed to ensuring that the lives of adolescent girls are a part of our collective cultural memory of 2020 lockdown.

To read the full report, click: https://www.haqcrc.org/new-at-haq/a-ledger-of-sublimated-hopes