#nosgbv "You do such good work!"

“You do such good work!” I hear this comment from time to time when people recall that my work has something to do with gender-based violence. Most people assume my organisation and I do rescue work. We don’t. It is not important enough to them to find out what exactly we do. (We do public education or awareness work.) They are sure it is good work.

The comment makes me uncomfortable. I want to correct them. I want to explain what we do even though I know that most of the time, they are not interested. This much was enough for them.

The thing is, I am not sure what we do, or more important, what I do. After all, one is ultimately only responsible for oneself and one’s choices.

Look at the state of this world. Today we released the 2022Prajnya Gender Violence in India report and every page describes all the things that are wrong with the world. But a compilation of data is probably the happiest place you can read about gender violence, given that numbers are just numbers. Even the NFHS numbers, which tell more of a story than most, are just numbers. When you listen to people’s stories or read their accounts of abuse they have experienced, you realise the full horror of what it means to live with abuse all the time. We feel that horror and in the course of our day, we forget because blunting the edge is what allows us to function.

When people say to me, “You do such good work!” I want to say, no, I don’t. I do the bare minimum. I do what is comfortable for me—reading, writing, teaching, training, mentoring, designing. I do not throw myself in the breach to protect a woman in trouble. I do not fight hard cases in court. I do not set up shelters and make sure they run. I just do the work I can and hope it matters in some way.

To do this should not be a big deal. For all the privilege and good fortune I enjoy in so many ways, spending a little time trying to absorb and make something of these heartbreaking stories, staying up to make posters for a discussion on some new emerging form of brutality or standing before a disinterested group to drive home the point that consent matters—these are small, very small tasks. This is the smallest instalment plan for repaying my debts to this world.

I am uncomfortable with “You do such good work!” because I am just one working ant in a history of millions of billions of ants (and other animals) that have done this work. Our efforts add up slowly if we persist. But I am not the first, not the best, not the most efficient and not the most passionate. I am just doing what I can and what I must. Even a well-intentioned singling out, beyond my family which I know does it solely out of affection, is so patently false that I want to say, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing!”

And also, I do not always do this with perfect passion or grace. Working on gender violence related topics is depressing, it is infuriating but mostly, for me, it is that thing you don’t expect me to say: It is tedious. Tedious, because in order to be able to do persist, I have to become a little unfeeling and because no matter what we do, the world does not change fast enough for us. We are like machines chipping away at a task, endlessly, unable to stop, unsure of what happens beyond our station. Reductions in numbers do not matter because you know and I know that each person matters. For each one, their suffering and their ordeal are the only things that are real and a reduction in reporting or incidence does not really matter. Unsure of what my work is going to achieve, I often do it with irritation or impatience or resentment. So when you tell me, “You do such good work!” I am embarrassed.

And if I do, if all of us in this field do “such good work,” why have we not succeeded in ending the scourge of sexual and gender-based violence? Why does each story we hear top the previous one in viciousness and brutality? Why does human creativity find its true genius in innovations of how to be violent and hurtful? After all these generations of campaigning and crusading, counselling and social work, why is sexual and gender-based violence still pervasive and ubiquitous? We cannot be doing “such good work” when there is still so much work left to do. So much work.

So much work that when someone says, "You do such good work!" I suspect they hope that the compliment will distract me enough that I will not ask them to do something. It's not enough that I do this work or that those billions and millions of other ants have. It will take each and every one of us. 

Each one will have to challenge patriarchy's stereotypes. Each one will have to call out misogynistic speech. Each one will have to make a donation or volunteer those who provide pro bono support services to victims of violence--because we are all complicit in the continuance of a violent world. Each one will have to intervene when we witness abuse. Each of us will have to commit to learning new ways of thinking and speaking. It will take each of us doing this "good work" tirelessly, and together. You may think I do such good work but my work is ineffective without you.