TW: Violence
What if motherhood is not a blessing but a reminder of the violence that was inflicted on you?
Welcome to the third episode of the mothering podcast: Mothering and Violence.
In 2021, in the thick of the global pandemic, domestic violence complaints to the National Commission for women reached a 21 year high. In India, 19% women report experiencing domestic violence.
In todays episode we talk about this intersection of motherhood and violence and explore what that looks like. Our guest today Aarthi Chandrasekhar is a mental health practitioner who works with survivors of gender based violence and one of the most important feminist influences for me early in my twenties.
Aarthi is such an inspiration, a personified lesson on being unapologetic about who you are. In the course of our conversation we talk about first dates as a space to engage on feminism, her childfree by choice lifestyle and how being married interplays with that. Aarthi takes us through what is the feminist thing to do when there has been domestic violence and shares how she tactfully navigates working with government systems while keeping a feminist approach.
I have worked with survivors of violence too and one question that I am often asked is how do you keep working on this difficult issue and Aarthi sums it up beautifully: the survivors haven’t given up, so how can we.
I hope you enjoy this conversation and find as much light in it as I did.
