There is really no security in the world which can guard
against the ill intentions of human beings.
If a man wants to walk into CST terminal today with a gun in
hand and fury in the heart; then there is little security can do. It may stop
99 such people but all it takes is for one to slip through.
This is even more brutally evident when it comes to the
issue of rape. And more so with the issue of the Delhi rape victim.
Men of significantly lower income and education strata with
no connect or grudge whatsoever against the woman they molested. No motive, no
way of possibly protecting themselves in the court of law. Logically, they had
no reason to indulge in the act they committed.
Except for ill, or rather sick intent. That’s all it took.
And that’s all it’ll take. Because if this one woman wasn’t
protected by the supposedly beefed up security measures that the government
keeps quoting, then there is no guarantee of the act not repeating itself
again. And it did. Within 48 hours, there was news of a teacher raping a
3-year-old kid, a 47-year-old man raping a 62-year-old woman. And many more
such stories over the last few days. It doesn’t stop. And it won’t.
Definitely not by blaming the government. Or the police. Or
the judiciary.
Blame the homes. Our homes. The ones where the rapists were
born to begin with. Where they formed their psyche.
It’s the homes that gave preferential treatment to a son
over the daughter which made the son believe that he was a superior being. And
it’s this belief that has made some of these sons look at women as passive recipients
of sexual advances.
It’s the homes that have chosen to kill the girl child. By
reducing the balance of gender in the country, we’re creating men who are “sex
starved” through their 20s and early 30s. At least some of them get desperate,
desperate enough to commit a heinous crime.
It’s the homes that discourage mingling of the sexes. The”convent”
school enthusiasts. Ones that don’t allow for their children to know the opposite
sex well enough for them to respect it. For bringing up kids who end up looking
at women as objects of desire, even awe, rather than as equals.
It’s the homes that have chosen to keep quiet about sexual
atrocities on women. Of every 10 rapes in India, 1 gets reported. And some 95%
of these take place within homes. By people who know the victim. Whom she
trusts. And when the parents get to know, they choose to put a lid on it, ask
the girl to suppress her anger and move on. It’s been happening everyday in
some part of the country for 60 years. Silence out of the fear of embarrassment
has brought it to this boil.
It’s the office spaces where companies hide the issue of
“sexual abuse” rather than deal with it which have given the men who get away
scott free the license to believe they’ll get away every single time.
So let’s not look at the government. They got to get their
act together. But we need to get ours too.
We live in a society that’s male dominated. And we create
more such generations of a male dominated India, generation after bloody
generation. By fostering homes that aren’t genuinely gender equal.
Let’s rectify the balance first. So that we don’t need
another gruesome crime to remind us about how unsafe a society we’ve created
for women.
For the women who live in our house. Who we love. And
respect. Because it’s just as unsafe for them as it was for that unfortunate
girl in Delhi.
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