Skip to main content

Rapes, infanticide, harassment - Is there a solution?


Few thoughts:

Heinous crimes like rapes & female foeticide/ infanticide are symptoms of some larger malaise plaguing the society. While handing out exemplary punishment, speedy judiciary, teaching the kids and adolescents to respect everyone is a part of it, I believe it is incomplete. Some systemic issues need to be addressed to minimize these issues in long run. I believe that the most important of this is economic independence of women.


- I don't have any data to support it, but economically independent women are more likely to raise a voice against wrongdoings against her, be it physical or mental abuse, sexual harassment, foeticide or rapes. These issues are often under-reported because of economic reasons & tendency to "live with it", chiefly because of economic reasons. If more and more women are economically independent, more likely would be the protest & it will deter a substantial chunk of people from mistreating women.

- The proportion of females in the work force is increasing, but is it enough? Probably no. Partly, it is due to lack of education, but partly it is due to conservative (rather regressive) mindset prevailing in the society, where other people decide whether "job/ work karwaayenge" or not (As if they are talking about an inanimate object that they have or have acquired). In fact, I know of people who know this is incorrect, but rarely raise voice against this (or at max, raise a shrill token protest, but nothing more).
At the face of it, it is not life threatening or anything for many people, but it does give rise to several systemic issues.

- While kids & teenagers should be taught to be respect people, avoid discrimination and not have false sense of inflated egos or powers, it may not be enough. A part of this "respect" needs to be "demanded" (and this will come majorly from education and economic independence).

- There is often a stigma attached to talking freely about such issues & most important is "What will people think?" A chunk of it can be reduced with economic independence of women, since they are not that dependent upon what others will say as it might not affect her survival, which would have otherwise been the case. Also, an economically independent woman is more likely to be aware of importance of speaking up.

-Even economic independence is not something that will be handed over in a platter. Getting it might entail long struggle, disobeying few peopleand ruffling a few feathers.

Above steps might not wipe off the crime altogether (it will probably be too Utopian to assume!), but I believe  they can certainly reduce certain kinds of crime drastically.

What do you people think?




Comments

  1. Well written..Along with economic independence of women..a sense of respect and equality should be taught to coming generation which I believe is lacking a lot so that they do not even think of committing such crimes

    ReplyDelete
  2. Setiap orang yang melakukan kebaikan tentu akan mendapatkan kebaikan, dan setiap orang yang berbuat buruk maka Tuhan akan membalasnya dengan hal yang buruk. Tulisan yang menarik, salam kenal dari Indonesia.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I completely accept with ur thinking.But the grassroot cause for this is our mindset.Different rapists have different ways of thinking, they are all sexist. At the least, they believe they have more right to a woman’s body than a woman does, herself.
    We most probably belong to the bloodline of DURYODHANA, who first taught us how to rape in broad daylight. Now that we have discovered our heritage we really don’t give it a damn whether it’s a bus or a car.
    Starting from lord rama who questioned sita,duryodhana who sexually harrased to the modern time harish chandra who selled his wife.We think we have authority over women more than themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "it might entail long struggle, disobeying few people and ruffling a few feathers." Both men and women need to step up and fight injustice done to them, only then the collective voice / opinion will become stronger. For most women, having no financial independence makes doing that impossible in 95% cases. So we are stuck in a vicious circle.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Shop @ Amazon

Popular posts from this blog

8 Things ...

Tagged by Sheetal Here goes my various '8 things list' 8 Things I’m passionate about: 1. Movies [Watching, analyzing, related trivia, boring people with all useless related gyaan, movie trailers etc.] 2. Reading [Newspapers (especially editorials), fiction, nonfiction etc.] 3. Religion [Rather lack of it] 4. Food [I proudly proclaim that I live to eat] 5. Freedom 6. Bakar [ This includes cracking PJs] 7. Geography [as a child I used to read and analyze maps. I can still boast about being ‘awesome’ in this. In fact, some people have been surprised by the fact that I know lot about the places which might otherwise be relatively unheard of outside the region] 8. Staying connected [Includes chatting, blogging, random time pass on internet etc. I now access internet even while travelling in a bus, through my cellphone, something unthinkable few years ago!] 8 Things I want to do before I die: 1. Travel extensively across the world. 2. Write 2 books – 1 fiction and ...

Somewhere @ Nowhere - The Book

FINALLY .... After a tryst with so-called-creativity, I have come up with a book -  Somewhere @ Nowhere. You can have a sneak peek at the story & a few pages from the publisher's website and order the same & get it home delivered anywhere in India/ Abroad. Details as mentioned below- - Preview and get the book home delivered from HERE Also, you can join the following groups - - Orkut Community - Facebook Page Hope you like the work. Would appreciate a feedback. Till then ... Happy Reading!!! And yeah, please spread the word (relying on word of mouth & word of blog publicity) :-) ___ Update (18/02/2010) - Thanks for the initial response to the book :) Update2 (25/ 02/ 2010) - Thanks for the feedbacks on the book those who have read it. (hope to get a feedback by others soon). Encourages me to overcome inertia and write more! Meanwhile, those who ask for why is it currently not available in traditional retail outlets - well, I hope it wil...

We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented

(Disclaimer: I am NOT justifying any action or behavior. I am just speculating why people usually act so) _________________________________________________________ “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented” – The Truman Show (a 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey) The above line explains a great deal about why we hold on to some beliefs as gospel truths, and form our judgment about things and act in a specific pattern. This movie (which I feel is still quite under-rated!) had Jim Carrey, a person whose entire life had been a live, non-stop, unedited television show. He lived in a world which was completely artificial; everything, everyone knew that everything were fake. But the person was real. His emotions were real. He was conditioned to a certain realities of world, and believed in it. The makers of the show did not want to show him what the ‘actual’ world was. He was made not to want to explore the outside world, made to fear things that could have led him ...

Art of watching a movie

Everyone has some idiosyncrasies when it comes to watching a movie. I tried to list some of mine in this post -- Some random movie watching habits, that belong exclusively to me (Idea for this write up has been blatantly stolen from other blogs!) --> There are few movies I get extremely excited about (e.g. TZP, Jodha Akbar, RDB), and there have been few I have always been excited about ever since I saw them ... and people have been bored of hearing me recommend that movie to others (e.g. TZP, RDB, The Truman show, Forrest Gump, ... even Aaap ka surror!) While watching movies (esp. angrezi ones!) on my lappy, I often use Wikipedia and IMDB as reference (esp. to know where the story is headed for) ... Even with such references, I could understand only half the movie Memento! I love reading movie reviews. Few of the ones I follow are Taran Adarsh ke crappy reviews, Rajeev Masand (who is somewhat reliable) ... and few reviews occasionally in TOI, HT, Rediff, and other random websites. ...

Some random movie reviews

1 holiday, 6 movies! 8 movies in a span of last 32 hours! Huh … That was too much … A mixture of good cinema and utter crap … of hardcore realism to escapism … of typical and offbeat … of some popular to some watched by a handful … a mixture of many differents actually! Just writing a purposeless random review of all of these – 1. 1. City of god – Excellent! Brazilian movie, at best understood with help of subtitles and visuals. An excellent depiction of a Brazilian slum, where kids having guns is not an uncommon site; where crime is a way of life. 2. 2. Love actually – Beautiful! A mushy love story … rather many mushy love stories …Karan Johar types, if some parallel has to be drawn to our desi phillum industry … with everyone from a school kid to Britain’s prime minister is falling in love. A good watch nevertheless! 3. 3. Jhom Barabar Jhoom – Crap Only good things are nice songs … but not that interesting with random jhoom baraabar...