Why Women Go to the Toilet in Groups

By Joanna Sugden, blogs.wsj.com   November 19th, 2013

Women like these in Bhalswa often go to the bathroom in groups to stay safe. Photo by: WaterAid

The women of Bhalswa, a swamp-riddled neighborhood of poorly-built brick homes in northwest Delhi, employ a number of tactics when they need to use the bathroom.

If it’s early morning and they have enough money, they spend one rupee (1.6 cents) on a visit to one of two community toilet blocks in the area, which together cater to about 1,000 households, locals say.

Here, the 20 cubicles housing ceramic squat-style toilets don’t all have doors, and a broom cupboard in the corner is piled with used sanitary towels. But when it’s busy, women say, they’re less likely to be attacked by local men looking for a woman who’ll be easy to grab.

A number of young girls have been kidnapped while using these bathrooms by themselves, say neighborhood women, who estimate there is at least one such incident a month.

“They are taken away and molested by construction workers. A lot of times mothers don’t say that things have happened to their daughters because it will lead to difficulties when they get married,” says Herma, a female resident who uses only one name, the norm in the area.

In the afternoon, when the toilet blocks, which were introduced and managed by the Municipal Council of Delhi, are closed for five hours for cleaning and to give the attendant a break, the women either hold on until they reopen at 4 p.m. or go in an open square of scrub land, with houses nearby and roads on two sides.

Women’s safety has been a hot-button issue in this city since December, when a young woman was raped on a moving bus. But without improvements in the bathroom situation, women here say they’re not going to be safe. There isn’t a single day that goes by when some girl isn’t teased while she’s at the open-air toilet area, Bhalswa’s women say.

Puja, a 21-year-old with an ironing business, says the worst is when she has to go at night, when the community restrooms are closed until the morning. “In the daytime I go and sit behind a bush, but in the night, sometimes you’re not aware that behind a bush there is a man who keeps staring,” she said on a recent morning.

Her hair worn in a plait over one shoulder and a sheer white scarf draped modestly over her thin, loose blouse and pale pink polka-dot pants, Puja is one of the youngest members of a neighborhood water-and-sanitation group formed in 2012 with the support of Action India, a Delhi-based nonprofit. The committee is supposed to help residents get local leaders to address problems such as women’s safety when they’re going to the bathroom.

Often local men as well as those from outside the area wait nearby on their motorcycles until a girl comes by. “They know that this is the route that women are going to come and they sit there in advance and throw stones and say lewd words,” said Rajkumari, 22, another member of the group, which holds meetings twice a month with the local municipal councilor.

Talking about toilets in any context can be embarrassing but in conservative India it is often painfully so. At first the women are reluctant to spell out what men say to them when they’re answering the call of nature.

Rajkumari and her mother Noorvan at one of the community bathrooms near their home in Bhalswa. Photo by: WaterAid

But Puja gathers the courage. “They put a flashlight on and then they say ‘What have you come to do? Stand up and show me,’” she says. Sometimes these men expose themselves to the women.

All of this makes going to the bathroom an ordeal to be put off as long as possible. Puja said, “I feel extremely bad and I don’t feel like going to the toilet.”

An April 2012 survey of the area conducted by Action India found that a little under a third of the households here had their own in-house toilets.

Another 40% used public toilets and the rest, 29%, practiced open defecation, more than twice the rate typical in Indian cities on average.

Bhalswa, around an hour outside the heart of the capital city by car, is an example of the blurring of urban-rural living that characterizes much of rapidly urbanizing India as cities envelop farmland on their edges.

Nationally, two-thirds of households in rural areas go to the bathroom outdoors. A large chunk of the Indian population – some 70% — still lives in the countryside.