When Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan was asked his views on rape, he responded: “Even discussing this issue feels disgusting, don’t bring up this issue. It is terrible to even talk about it.” Such refined sensibilities, so cultivated, so urbane. But we don’t buy it. Squeamishness covers a multitude of evasions. Women & children have been silenced for generations out of shame, as if something they did brought on sexual assaults. One of the most important, if still incomplete, accomplishments of the feminist movement has been to drag sexual assault, particularly against children, out of the darkness into the full light of day so that the shame of this crime adheres entirely to the perpetrators & not to the victims. Squeamishness will no longer be used to silence & shame.