Most women are taught to be the last to speak, the last to eat, and the first to forgive. She is taught to be patient, to compromise, to adjust. She is expected to create a home, even when that home is slowly dismantling her sense of safety and self.

In India, violence inside homes is not new. But our silence around it is old.

• According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 28.3 percent of ever-married women in India have experienced physical violence by their husbands.
• In Rajasthan, the figure stands at 23.1 percent, meaning nearly one in four women has faced abuse inside her own home.
• A 2023 case study from Churu district revealed that over 90 percent of women who experienced violence never filed a complaint.
• Many said the violence began within the first year of marriage. Some were beaten for speaking to male relatives or for returning late from work.
• In cases of widowhood, the violence becomes cultural. In Barmer, women were denied their right to inherit property, forced to stop wearing coloured clothes, and excluded from rituals.
• Several women said they were treated as unlucky or cursed. One widow said, “The day he died, they made it clear I had no right to live like other women anymore.”

This is not a breakdown of society. This is how society has been structured. Anita Soni came from this silence. She lived the violence, the gaslighting, the exile. When she walked away from her abusive marriage, her in-laws spread rumours, her community shut her out, and her only ally was her mother. But what society tried to shame, Anita turned into strength.

She began with blood. In a village where women were told that donating blood would make them weak, she chose to bleed so others could live. Her first act was a blood donation drive, not as a gesture of charity, but as a challenge to fear and misinformation.

Then came colour. In regions where widows were told to wear only dull saris and shrink into silence, Anita started Chunri Pratha. The chunri, once taken from women as if their identity had died with their husbands, was returned. Not as a mark of marriage, but as a sign that they still mattered.

She understood that violence was not always in bruises. Sometimes it lived in silence. In how widows were spoken about. In how they were made to feel like shame. So she built Pakka Saheli. It was not a shelter. It was a sisterhood. It began with five women who had no one else. Today, there are more than 8,000. They speak, they file cases, they refuse to stay invisible.

The pain she went through is not rare. But the way she rose from it has changed the lives of many women.

So ask yourself:
When did we decide this was normal?
When did pain become tradition?
And how many more Anita Sonis will it take before we call this what it is; a failure, not of culture, but of collective conscience?

Be their voice and strength. Be their cape.