Mental support must for abuse survivors of all genders

This picture has been used for representational purpose

The Thane police have arrested three people for allegedly sodomising a 19-year-old man on the terrace of an abandoned structure in the city and recording the act.
One of the accused had befriended the survivor on social media. The police said the complainant, a model and Gujarat resident, had come to his relative's house to explore work opportunities in Mumbai.

A news report in this paper said that the man was lured to the abandoned terrace. There, the men overpowered him and beat him when he tried to resist.

He was robbed, reports said, as his phone and wallet were taken away. Just like you read in most sexual assault cases, the survivor was told that the recording of the assault will be made viral if he dared to breathe a word about it to anybody.

While the law will take its course, we hope, and justice will be meted out in this shocking and heinous crime, we must now concentrate on the survivor.

He must get psychological help and all the mental support needed in this situation. This shows that any gender can be the target of a sexual assault.

There is a focus on naming and shaming the perpetrators and this time, too, it should be no different. The society largely tends to be dismissive in these kinds of cases, where attitudes swing from a-man-cannot-be-sexually-assaulted to shaming him, for not being able to fight back.

Let us treat every survivor with empathy and recognise that we must look at both men and women survivors the same way. Men, too, are undeniably and very deeply scarred by such incidents. We need to acknowledge this, rather than ridicule the target or trivialise cases where men are assaulted.