I‘m a woman and a doctor. I’ve walked carefree through hospital corridors without an ounce of hesitation, rushing from one building to another, responding to codes, be it day or night. I’ve always felt secure in my hospital scrubs and white coat—as if it were some impenetrable shield against any malice. I assumed that my presence in the hospital gave people hope and they, in turn, gave me respect and safety.
The gruesome Kolkata rape case shattered my bubble. As more and more horrific details about the rape and murder of a doctor at RG Kar Hospital surface, I revisit every time we, women doctors, underplayed our grievances at the workplace.
We kept quiet, always. We didn’t want to inconvenience anyone with our otherwise legitimate needs. We kept quiet because of the fear of upsetting our higher-ups, who could fail us in our training exams. We kept quiet because our female seniors had been one lucky moment away from getting raped, and because they too had always kept quiet.
Surviving a system built for men
Everyone around us stressed that the system is built for men; if you flex, you flex like a man. If you’re too scared to work, sit and make round rotis at home. And don’t forget to hang your degrees on the wall for decoration. So, we sealed our lips and persevered, like men, neglecting our basic needs as women.
For example, our security. We kept quiet when my friend complained about working in a state-run hospital where she wasn’t provided with a duty room to rest in between her 36-hour shifts. She was forced to lie on bed number eight in a hospital ward surrounded by patients and their relatives, with makeshift curtains made of worn-out hospital bedsheets to keep her bed area private. She didn’t mind the cacophony of the ward, nor the mosquitoes until one day, a male attendant of one of the patients took the liberty to enter the area and film her “sleeping on duty.”
We kept quiet when another friend of mine expressed the horrors of shifting a patient from the ward to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at 2 am one day. By the time she returned, the ambulance had left, leaving her alone outside the ICU building. She had to walk through dark passages between buildings, in the supposed safety net of security guards snoozing in their dilapidated chairs. The guards are often third-party, contractual workers hired at minimal pay in most hospitals. They don’t care, and even if they did, they’re not armed or even fit to protect anyone.
We kept quiet when women workers weren’t given separate toilets from the men at hospitals. We kept quiet when a medical staff had to quit breastfeeding her infant because there wasn’t any safe space available for her to pump or nurse her baby at work. We kept quiet when a woman miscarried at work and was forced to first provide a “replacement doctor” if she needed leave. A safe space for her emotions—what’s that?
We kept quiet when they said she topped her MBBS final exams because she’s an attractive woman favoured by her male professors. We kept quiet when a middle-aged medical professor harassed a female student. As they said, she wore heels and makeup to college and wanted to smear the hard-earned reputation of a decent man. We kept quiet when a research paper written wholly by a woman trainee was published with her name in the sixth place instead of the first—after the names of five professors who were mostly all men.
We kept quiet when on Women’s Day, an all-male lecturer troop was invited to talk on women’s health issues. Yes, they talk gibberish and science but they’re not women. An educated sexist is still a sexist. An educated rapist is still a rapist. The promotion of rape culture in the garb of protecting women needs to end. We want to work without our mothers worrying about our safety. We want security. We need workplace reforms. But first, we need justice for our Kolkata sister.
Dr Kamna Kakkar, MBBS, MD is an Anaesthesiology Senior Resident at Safdarjung Hospital, New Delhi. Her X handle is @drkamnakakkar. Views are personal and not representative of her place of work.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)