In a bid to educate the masses to move away from victim shaming, Sonam recently showed us the courageous side of hers on a chat show by recounting her own traumatic situation where she was molested at the age of 13.  “Everybody goes through some sort of sexual abuse in their childhood. I know I have been molested when I was younger and it was traumatizing. I didn’t speak about it for two years or three years. I remember the incident so clearly – I was going to watch a film with Raveena Tandon and Akshay Kumar and I went with my friends to Gaiety Galaxy theatre. We were about 13-14 years old… We’d wanted to get these samosas from outside and it was a gang of girls and you know, we used to hold each other’s shoulders and walk. I was last because I was the tallest obviously and I was holding on… it was my friend Ekta’s birthday… I remember very clearly. We walked in. There was a man who came from behind and just held my breasts like that. And obviously, I didn’t have breasts at that time. I started shaking and shivering and I didn’t know what was going on and I started crying right there. I didn’t speak about it. I just sat there and I finished watching the film because I felt that I’d done something wrong for the longest time.”

With growing concern over how children are often in-equipped to deal with molestation at such a young age, it is indeed amazing to see how Bollywood’s other leading female stars like Anushka Sharma, Vidya Balan, Alia Bhatt and Radhika Apte, who were also a part of the show, actively spoke about the issue.

Here’s what the ladies had to say about what they feel about the child abuse issue: