This is a question more people need to talk about and not be satisfied with clichés or the usual solutions.
Another horror; another rape. This time in a moving bus;
at a time of the night when people are still on the roads in Delhi; in a
populated area and not some remote jungle. Each time you read news like
that of the bestial gang rape of a 23-year-old para-medical student in
Delhi earlier this week, your senses are numbed. What is happening to
us? What is this brutality we witness all so frequently now? Can it ever
stop?
I doubt if we will find a satisfactory answer
in the short run. But it is a question that more people need to talk
about and debate and not be satisfied with the clichés, the usual
solutions or even some unusual ones.
I spent last
weekend in my old school, a place where I had five happy years before
completing my schooling. It is an all-girls residential school with a
substantial proportion of day students. Our memories of our school days,
when some of us met again after many decades, were those of the fun
times, the carefree years, of a place where we felt safe and were not
inhibited from expressing our views. Of course, the very fact of a
compulsory school uniform imposed a level of conformism but even within
that girls found ways to assert individual personalities — a tuck here, a
stitch there. And hair always remained the ultimate expression of
rebelliousness — refusing to be neat was the preferred statement of
individualism.
All these years later, the girls in
that school still wear the same school uniform but they have changed, as
has the world around them. They exude the same confidence some of us
did. I want to be a Cordon Bleu chef, one girl told me. Another said she
wants to be a lawyer — but with the army. Another became really excited
when I mentioned I was a journalist. Clearly, for these girls no career
is out of reach.
Yet, reading about the Delhi
incident, I thought about these young women who are on the verge of
stepping out into another world, away from the relatively safe
environment of an all-girls school. With modern communication and social
networking, they are not as secluded as perhaps we were in our days
when even contact with the boys in the school across the boundary wall
was frowned upon. Today, girls have Facebook friends and are daring
enough to meet them even if all they know about them is what these young
men choose to put on their “profile”. I am told that often it is girls
from the most conservative homes who take such bold chances and end up
in all kinds of trouble.
Yet, whether it was our
generation jumping the boundary wall to meet boys or this lot setting up
meetings through social networking sites, the compulsions are the same.
But is the world a more dangerous place today for young women than it
was in our days? If so, how does one prepare them for it?
The
predictable formula is to urge them always to be vigilant, to be
careful, not to take unnecessary chances. Against the background of the
recent spate of sexual crimes against women in Mumbai, the Joint
Commissioner of Police (Crime) in Mumbai, Himanshu Roy, had this to say:
“The most obvious method of preventing such crimes is that women should
be aware of their environment. This does not mean that they should be
suspicious of all their male relatives, friends or colleagues, but it
would be wrong to assume that none of these will ever harm them.” In
effect, he was suggesting that the onus of preventing the crimes is
really on women. Roy needs to be reminded that the job of the police and
law enforcement is not to tell women what they should do, but to do
their own job more effectively.
At the same time,
many believe the problem will be tackled if the government, law
enforcement and society at large figure out how to “protect” these girls
from violence. The courts have suggested more policing, asking for
plainclothes women police in malls, cinema halls and public places, with
closed circuit cameras. But are women safer in a police state? Can we
really “protect” women in a society where they can experience the worst
forms of sexual violence inside their homes?
Furthermore,
even if there are men who genuinely try and “protect” women and
intervene, they do not succeed. In the Delhi incident, the girl’s male
companion was mercilessly beaten and thrown out of the bus. In Mumbai,
men who tried to intervene were murdered. So who will “protect” the
protectors?
A male reader of these columns suggested
that we should not focus exclusively on women and instead we needed to
make more of an effort to understand men and what drives them to such
violence. Without justifying the violence, he felt it was a combination
of repression and suppression that drove Indian men to such levels of
violence. He might have a point. We have not looked at Indian men, at
what is happening to them, what is turning some of them into people who
would be better off caged.
These are troubling
questions. There are no easy answers. We can begin by debating and
discussing this issue much more than we do, in our schools and colleges,
in the columns of our newspapers, and in our families.
Kalpana Sharma- The Hindu
