Tag: rape

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Guest writer

Why should I keep a constant vigil?

The conclusion to yesterday’s ‘rape calculator’ story comes with a question to ponder on: is constant vigilance a viable option?
by Adithi Muralidhar

Part II  (Read Part I)

There are a few things that run in my mind, on a daily basis 24/7. It is something that I tend to keep myself aware of, at all times. And then I think, there might be so many like me…we sex pests in Mumbaihave these thoughts constantly guiding our every move while we take on our daily duties, be it at work, college, home or anywhere. We make important decisions at work, we are creative, we calculate and do other math, we manage households, we are caregivers, we love, we run businesses, we teach kids, we treat patients, we sing and dance, we manage accounts and finances, we travel and study, write and act…and then we deal with male chauvinism and family matters, and all this we do when something apart from our body functions (like breathing) is continuously working inside of us.

All the points listed in my previous post – these are things that most girls come to learn either on their own or are taught. It, of course, very subjective and depends on the individual girl and how violated she feels if something happens to her. Some women are the kind who would probably do everything opposite to what is listed, either because they are much more brave, or just to prove a point to society that it is not her problem to tackle such issues, which is as valid a stance that can be! While others can be the non-confrontational kind; and they will go to any lengths to avoid or prevent such incidences from happening. In fact, they may do so to such an extent that it would lead to putting themselves in a permanent state of discomfort. Similar efforts are also made by women who are maybe under peer pressure and worry constantly about society and “log kya sochenge”, and tend to just go with what is considered ‘good Indian girl’ behaviour.

unsafe mumbaiAnd then I think of those unfortunate incidences where the terrible act of rape occurs and I cannot help but think – ‘Oh, was it because she let down her guard for one moment? Was it because for five minutes, she was carefree and forgot to do her calculations correctly, or worse, was she so preoccupied with some other ‘really important’ work, that she let the calculator’s battery run low for a while…and what a terrible consequence she had to face! Imagine, carrying that weight around your head the whole time.’ What does a mother go through? She not only has that calculator set for herself, but she also has it set for her daughter(s). Every time she says – “Yes, you can go to the party, but be careful. Yes, but please be back home by midnight. Yes, but please get dropped home by a guy. Call me when you reach there…” she is doing all those calculations in her mind.

Why does a woman even have to be worried about these things in the first place? Isn’t it enough that they already have to deal with other kinds of inequalities and oppression in society? The worse thing is that most people think, ‘What can you do, this is how it is. This is normal.’

Well, it is not. No one deserves to live a life like this. Constant vigilance can drive a person insane. Previously, the scientific community viewed vigilance as something that is mentally undemanding. But recent studies in psychology tell us otherwise.

“… physiological and subjective reports confirm that vigilance tasks reduce task engagement and increase distress and that these changes rise with increased task difficulty”.

(Warm, Parasuraman & Matthews, 2008, p. 433)

The authors of the above paper of course extend their conclusion to occupations that involved being constantly vigilant, like being involved in military surveillance, air traffic mumbai by nightcontrol, cockpit monitoring, seaboard navigation, quality control, long-distance driving, and agricultural inspection tasks, etc. But having to constantly worry about what you do requires a high amount of energy, even though it seems that women have been and are doing this effortlessly (and unfortunately, innately) for ages.

Also, many psychologists are of the opinion that the impact of chronic stressors are usually ignored and are in reality much more insidious than even the extreme (non-chronic) stress symptoms. There have been studies on gender differences in stress and many studies report that women have been found to have more chronic stress than men. In fact, there are studies that even explore gender specific stressors for women – like violence, sexist discrimination, etc. – all of which can be detrimental to their physical and mental health.

Coming back to the real question – why should we even be doing this? I have to admit that it would be idealistic to think that I can keep my guard down in today’s society (be it in Mumbai, or be it any town in India or even in the world). Personally, I am not willing to take the risk. So what would I prefer? Keeping all those antennae alive and ticking seems like the only option right now. Is it okay? No. It is not OKAY. I just have my hopes set on the fact that education and more awareness among people will help to change the society for better and such crimes against women would eventually stop one day.

Till then, my calculator beeps on.

Adithi Muralidhar currently works in the field of science education research, in Mumbai. Apart from that, she works in areas related to environment and sustainability and also has a keen interest in social issues. 

(Pictures courtesy www.mumbaimirror.com, www.indiatvnews.com. Sketch courtesy Manoj Nair. Adithi has referenced ‘Matud, M.P. (2004). Gender differences in stress and coping styles. Personality and Individual Differences Vol 37(7), pp 1401–1415’ and ‘Warm, J.S., Parasuraman, R., and Matthews, G. (2008). Vigilance Requires Hard Mental Work and Is Stressful. Human Factors, Vol. 50, No. 3, June 2008, pp. 433–441’ for the writing of this story)

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Soft Coroner

Women’s Day in a man’s world

Prashant Shankarnarayan wonders if Women’s Day is to be celebrated or observed, and either way, seriously, what’s the fuss about?
prashant@themetrognome.in

The situation – An email regarding Women’s Day sent by my office’s HR department.

The observation: Two days ago, I heard a woman in my office shriek in excitement. Then a few more women followed in unison. Our HR team had sent a ‘Women’s day special’ email, mentioning that all the female employees can shop till they drop on Women’s Day and can buy stuff equivalent to their respective net salaries.

Some women reacted as if they had been crowned Miss Universe. The men started complaining even as some of their female colleagues rejoiced; and then there were many like us who knew this just can’t be true. It took a while for them to realise that it was a prank. Few women, who were literally dancing in bliss moments ago, were seething in rage even as the HR head (a woman) tried to explain that it was ‘just a joke’. Well, I feel that’s what Women’s Day has been reduced to – just a joke!

To start with, are we supposed to celebrate Women’s Day or observe it? If we are supposed to celebrate it, then we in India have been celebrating womanhood for thousands of years. So what’s the big fuss about? If it is supposed to be observed as a day where we contemplate and resolve to better the status of women, then why haven’t we succeeded in simply making life better for women despite celebrating womanhood for thousands of years?

Yes, it is easy to say that present-day women have it better than the ones who existed in the past. But is it enough? Is it enough that they go to work and parties? That they can choose their careers and partners? That they can enter traditionally male domains like defense and airlines? That they have access to contraception and can choose the number of children they want to bear? Is that why we earmark a particular day on the calendar as Women’s Day?

Then why is it that even today any random guy can rape an innocent girl without an iota of fear in his heart? Simple, because in the deepest patriarchal recesses of our hearts, many of us still don’t treat them as equals.

How else does one justify the rape of a foreign national at her own home in Bandra by a small-time crook? How could one rape a girl in a moving bus? How does one explain the rape of a woman in India every 20 minutes? And where does a Woman’s Day stand in response to this barbarism?

We are hypocrites. Our age-old adage starts with ‘Mata’, then proceeds to ‘Pita, Guru and Deivam’; incidentally our favourite expletive too starts with ‘madar@#$!’ The same race that has worshipped man and woman as equal in the form of Ardhanarishwara have pushed many a woman in her late husband’s funeral pyre. Many of us ogle shamelessly at other woman but believe in covering up our wife in a burqa or a ghoonghat. The Indian woman is the Goddess who needs to be appeased and at the same time the sacrificial lamb that gets  butchered. Similarly many men pay lip service to Women’s Day only because they know that the remaining 364 days belong to them.

I wait for the day when we won’t need a particular day to celebrate womanhood because that is the true measure of equality. Till then we have nothing to be proud of because it is just a Women’s Day in a Man’s World.

Prashant Shankarnarayan is a mediaperson who is constantly on the lookout for content and auto rickshaws in Mumbai. The Soft Coroner attempts to dissect situations that look innocuous at the surface but reveal uncomfortable complexities after a thorough post mortem.

(Picture courtesy charteredbanker.com)

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Enough said

Death is not the answer

Humra Quraishi writes on why the death penalty could be a dangerous tool in the hands of the guilty powerful.

Even as I write this column, news reports are coming in of a 17-year-old raped by her friend in South Delhi’s posh Safdarjung Enclave. And just a day ago, there were more reports of women molested and burnt and killed. Yes, we ushered in the new year amidst tremendous hopelessness and simmering anger. As each single day passes, more women are being violated and killed, yet our politicians come up with more stale assurances and do little else.

And in the midst of this, we sit raping the very issue of rape. Politics has taken complete charge – not just between the Congress and the Right Wing, but also between the civilians and the military.

I don’t want to waste this space in battling either. For the basic crux is this – none of the tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, rich men, poor men, beggars, thieves, mantris or their attached santris, has any business or legal right, officially or unofficially, to condone or try to explain why rapes happen and how it could be the woman’s fault. No sarkari ploys or camouflages can shield them when they do this.

It’s even more bizarre to hear these politicians pass those statements that were probably last heard in medieval times: they speak freely of chemical castrations or hangings-to-death. Some Right wing politicians are currently behaving like the kings and queens of a bygone era; but where the latter said, ‘Off with his head1’, these politicians are ‘Off with his pen*s!’

As I have been writing all along, the death penalty or castration orders are not the solution to the problem. In fact, it will lead to absolute anarchy as hundreds of innocents could potentially be hanged or their vital organs harmed forever. With corruption seeping into every single sphere of the government machinery, it’s a well-known fact that even in cases involving thefts, the actual culprits have been seen hobnobbing with the high chairs of power, whilst ordinary citizens are detained and sit languishing as undertrials in the jails and prisons of the country.

So there’s little guarantee that innocents would not be charged with rape and hanged to death to shield the culprits who may be close to powerful persons who can protect them. And we would realise this only years later. In my opinion, it is not just the actual perpetrators who are the offenders in a crime, it is the bunch of communal politicians who help protect such offenders and who wield complete power over the police machinery that are the more dangerous.

This could be just the very tip of the never-melting iceberg. Seeing our track record of the sheer misuse of power and all that it drags along with it, meting out the death penalty to all and sundry could have serious, dangerous offshoots which could rip off whatever remains of our ‘modern, developed society’.

At the cost of sounding repetitive, I want to emphasise that it’s the mind, the psyche of the rapist which ought to be set right before we do anything else to him. But first, we need to set right the minds of all those Bollywood producers and film directors who go about making third rate films complete with cheap item numbers and horribly vulgar dance movements. It’s about time we focus our attention on the very cause of what is turning men into beasts when it comes to women.

Whilst Bollywood flourishes along with the political ruling class, there seems to be no attempt made  to book the film industry under charges of spreading vulgarity or provoking hundreds of impressionable minds to think that women are ‘easy’ in real life as well, that all they are good for is to entertain men in whichever way they desire, and that if a woman says ‘no’, she actually means ‘yes’.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

 

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