Rapes and India

I am a 22 year old girl,

As a teenager I learnt to protect myself. I walked as quicky as I could with my arms across my chest, never stood alone if I could help it, avoided making eyes contacts or even smile, cleaved through crowds shoulders first and avoided leaving the house after dark.

When women in other parts of the world were experimenting with daring new looks I wore clothes that were two sizes too large.

And today I am an adult but things haven’t changed much.

A young girl was raped on a cold December night for 45 minutes in a moving bus in the heart of the nation. We all cried and condemned.

Sadly, today, we all seem to have moved on.

I guess we will need another such heinousness to awaken us from our deep slumber. 

An article in 2002 read ‘In India girl is raped every 54 minutes’. Shockingly and unfortunately today if same article is written title would be ‘In India girl is raped every 20 minutes.

Every time a gruesome rape gets reported, we all are ashamed and angry. That’s one thing; but working out ways and means to eradicate such evil is another thing. We cannot leave it entirely to the police or the judiciary to tackle such heinous acts. For, rape is also a cultural problem; and it is a more serious problem because of the extermination of the victim. We need to treat the malaise from its very roots.

Strange is the contrast between our outrage about rape and our collective response as a society to actually do nothing about it.

The number of incidents of rapes and sexual abuse and cruelty with women in India is staggering… It forces us to actually ask WHY? Lets try to see how values and beliefs are woven in our people which causes them to rape their own mothers and sisters. Daily reports of infants being raped across the length and breadth of a country is a phenomenon unique to India, a society that’s otherwise highly conservative. Clearly, the institutional upbringing, including that in family, needs to undergo change. Our cultural upbringing conditions male minds to behave in a cruel fashion with women. Family upbringing, societal conditioning, religious sagas and political animus, all construct our men and women into being what they are — men as aggressive and women as submissive. Which is why men here, in India, are different from men in other countries.

In our mythology, Lord Krishna stole the clothes of women while they were bathing in the Yamuna river. He did so to tease them and for the pleasure of watching the beauty of their naked bodies. We hang paintings of the same act in our homes proudly. The young men who grow up seeing this, or listening to the story told in an amused tone are bound to not find such an act abhorrent.

There are a few questions  that keep coming to my mind.

Why is it that since childhood I was taught by my parents to dress up modestly and not wear clothes that would attract attention?

Why is it that I don’t remember my parents once, even once teaching my little brother about how to respect  women?

Was putting the dot of shame as our display pictures on facebook all that we could do?

I smoke and I drink. I wear skirts and shorts and go out with my male friends. Does this mean that I want to get raped?

Does this mean that I have no morals and no character?

Does this you the right to make me your sexual muse?

Do you blame a 5 year old girl’s provocative clothing when she is raped and killed?

Confidence needs to be instilled into women since young age. They should be made to grow into educated and brave ladies. Young boys must be handled carefully, its important that they know what is right and wrong.We must educate people, starting at the school level, about respect for women, for personal spaces and for the rule of law. We need to introspect, all of us, on how we contribute to the objectification of women, from the popular culture we consume to the way we bring up our children — from where it’s a slippery slope to a twisted and unjust understanding of sexual assault in legal terms.