Do women even go out?
From PRI’s The World in November 2014:
More than half of women [in Bombay aka Mumbai] don’t have indoor toilets. In a typical Mumbai slum, there are something like six bathrooms for 8,000 women. Sometimes those bathrooms have collapsed, have dogs or rats living in them, or simply have no water.
Sarita, who works as a cook, gets to a bathroom maybe three times a day — if she’s lucky. She wakes up at 5:30 every morning to line up to use the facilities.
“I leave home at seven and I have to wait until I get back home — sometimes it’s nine hours, sometimes 12,” she says. “My stomach hurts when I hold it, but what can I do? Men can go anywhere, but where can a woman go?”
Another thing having to hold it does? It motivates people to drink as little as possible – which is very unhealthy, especially in a hot climate.
According to government figures, Mumbai has 3,536 public restrooms that women share with men, but not a single women’s-only facility — not even in some police stations and courts. Enter the Right To Pee movement, a coalition of NGOs fighting for more — and safer — toilets for women.
There’s a mistake there. If there’s not a single women’s-only facility, then the rest of the sentence should read “not even in police stations and courts” – it can’t be some police stations and courts when you’ve just said there’s not a single one in the whole city.
Deepa Pawar, an activist from a women’s rights organization called Vacha, has collected horror stories over the past three years about how the lack of toilets hurts women in Mumbai.
Some women get bladder and urinary tract infections from holding in their urine, while others simply don’t drink water all day to avoid the bathroom. Many women are raped or assaulted each year when they leave their homes to find a toilet, and those who find toilets safely can face other risks — scorpions, rats, infections.
And there are the larger societal issues as well: “The number one reason that girls drop out of school is because there are no toilets,” Pawar points out.
“We want to be able to take care of our basic needs like men do, and not like animals,” she says. “These are basic, human rights — the right to dignity and the right to mobility.”
Girls drop out of school because there are no toilets. It’s enough to make you despair.
Pawar says the government simply lacks the will to fix the problem. “The government has manpower, resources, strategy, authority,” she says, but no accountability.
And along with apathy comes gender bias: “When we approached the authorities, they asked us, ‘Do women even go out? Where do they have to go?’”
Ah well, good point – women are basically just things that cook and spread their legs, and they need to do that at home. Problem solved.
Sometimes I feel like I have to quit reading your site because it makes me hurt so much. But then, your analysis is so cogent, I have to come back. Besides, it’s easy to ignore a problem by not looking at it, but that way the problems never get fixed. That seems to be the response of the authorities here – just ignore it. It doesn’t actually affect any real people, only women.
That’s one reason I post a lot of frivolous stuff and jokey stuff too. (Another reason is just that I like frivolous and jokey stuff.) But I think there’s value in collecting a lot of it, in order to indicate how much of it there is (and you clearly do too or you wouldn’t be reading). It’s one of the good things about the internet: we can collect examples and share the collections.
I thought single-sex bathrooms were completely passe and unnecessary. At least, I keep being told that. By guys.
The absolute lack of facilities for women, or concern for the safety and privacy of women, is an enormous insult/threat to the women of Bombay.
But as withj so many ‘developing’ cities, there’s a question of how much raw sewage ends up in the streets because of an overall lack of access? How much infectious disease from air born fecal bacteria? How much ground water contaminated by sewage?
This is still cholera country we’re talking about here. Lack of accessible plumbing is an existential threat to the poor. The indifference is thunderous. And the extra, seemingly deliberate, indifference to women…
It’s been a few years, but I have been to Mumbai and there were women-only toilets, at least in tourist-frequented places. Not sure how much they count as public, but they were open to everyone around and free. (Still, I saw several quite well-dressed Indian women choose to squat down outside behind a corner of the toilet building.) Of course, that’s little use to women in the slums.
As for the public toilets for men marked as such, a lot of them were just stall-like divisions on a wall on a major street. No shelter, water or anything, just peeing against the wall. Not sure if a “women only” sign would help a lot.