Yesterday there was an incident in Bengaluru where a police
officer from Madurai beat up his adult daughter brutally in broad daylight for
allegedly having an affair with a person who the parents didn’t deem fit for
the daughter. Bystanders, among who was the girl’s mother, a school teacher
herself, looked on. The girl was finally saved by two women who were passing by
and the incident reported to the police. Today the papers reported that the
police let the father go because the girl did not file a complaint against her
father. The fact that there were so many witnesses to the incident doesn’t
matter, I guess.
A few days ago, a woman in one of the groups on a popular
social networking site mentioned that whenever she comes to India (she lives in
the US), she is pitied on by all her relatives & neighbours because she has
two daughters. Recently one of her mom’s friends, a school Principal, told her
that since she had her child in the US & there you get to know the sex of
the foetus in advance, she should’ve aborted the second child when she came to
know that it was a girl.
These are just two incidents that show that India’s
daughters are indeed not safe !!!
It is not just the poverty stricken, uneducated, angry youth
whom she should be scared of. She should be very scared of her own parents and
neighbours too, both men and women, who see her as nothing but a liability.
All the furore on the documentary by Leslee Udwin titled
India’s daughter got me thinking. All those who condemned the documentary were
saying things like, “why name it as India’s daughter ? Rape is not a problem
unique to India. It is a global phenomenon” or “this documentary is a ploy to
shame India” or “not all men in India are like these men who were accused of
the rape”.
I agree, rape is not a phenomenon unique to India, it
happens all over the World. But in which other civilized society have we heard
politicians and general public find fault with the victim because of the way
she dressed or because she was alone at a nightclub? One may not approve of a
way a woman/girl has dressed or the way she behaves but that DOES NOT give
anyone the right to physically violate her. Rape is RAPE. PERIOD.
I got online to see if it (blaming the victim) happens in
the Western world too. Yes, it sometimes does especially by the lawyers who are
defending the accused. But I also found that in the US and Canada there are “rape
shield laws” that prohibit cross-examination of the accuser (alleged victim)
with respect to certain issues, such as his or her prior sexual history, or the
manner in which he or she was dressed at the time of the rape.
It is also true that all men in India are not brutal pigs
but as the incident with which I begin here is anything to go by, many men are.
I’m sure some will say, but there are such men in the Western world too. I
agree, there must be but would he be spared by the authorities after beating up
his daughter in public?
It is so unfortunate that instead of self-introspection, we
turn to pointing fingers. Even when my 5 year old tells me, after doing
something naughty, “s/he told me to do, so I did it” or “s/he did it too”…I
tell him, that’s not an acceptable excuse for his bad behavior. So why does a country
get away with saying, “they do too”?
It is with anguish that I say that more, a lot more needs to
be done by Indians, by the people in power to make India a safer place for her
daughters.
