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Everyday i walk into my college and see a handy chart(with pictures) telling you what to do if you ever get raped. It has helpful tips like “don’t take a bath” “help the police in identifying the rapist”. In fact it has a chart of Dos and Don’ts. I nodded seriously, like all my friends did, when told it was very helpful for protecting women. How would like to be told handy hints on what to do if you get raped? You would be bloody scared. Or you’d laugh. But how many women can’t get hold of this information, and even scarier, how many more of them actually need it? A lot, actually. Three years ago, statistics showed that three girls were raped daily in New Delhi and it has only gotten worse from there. Ok, that’s not fair. What about the fact that there are no women going around asserting sexual dominance with such ease? You very rarely hear about a man getting raped-unless (and here’s a thought to take home with you) they’re in a relationship with another man. Let’s face this fact: the men can’t simply keep it in their pants. And please don’t give me that bizarre reason: woh apne aap koh control nahin kar paateh.
The tragedy of Rape:
The villain: the Rapist
The heroine: The unsuspecting girl
The supporting characters:
Sceptical policeman
Family of heroine
Judge of legal court
Medical examiner-optional
Think. What has changed today? What is changing?
More importantly, who is RESPONSIBLE?
No, it’s not the policemen, not the disinterested government, not the society, not even the scavenging media, it’s the RAPIST.
Rape is the ultimate crime. I will not sympathise with the rapist, and I don’t want to understand him. A woman once raped is never again expected to receive or return to a semblance of normalcy. This heartless, patriarchal, man-is-everything society hasn’t begun to scratch the surface of the destructiveness of this evil. If we had, we wouldn’t have allowed people elected into positions of power with rape and molestation charges against them; we wouldn’t euphemise it by calling it sexual harassment. That is a more cold, detached term, which doesn’t involve all the violent emotions in rape. We wouldn’t embellish it by blaming women or letting culprits go. we wouldn’t admonish women for coming forth and disclosing the havoc wreaked on their bodies.
For starters we need to stop dividing the physical act of rape from the mental and emotional trauma involved. They are practically interchangeable. It’s simple. You have a penis, you don’t get it. The men believe they are accomplishing something by raping-power, dominance, control, thrill of committing a crime. The canvass needs to be widened to take into consideration other possible triggers of this. Say, at a guess, Bollywood. Everywhere in our movies there are evidences which point to factors encouraging crime against women. In this dystopian society where miscreants are unpunished, where is the hope for improvement? The bridge between the victims and the places where they can get justice is constantly being severed by red tape, poverty, social stigma, corruption and downright indifference.
The women in this society are actively discouraged from seeking justice. . The truth is that the problem is deeply seated at many levels. The social customs which imply dominance of men and the mindset of women being to blame is one of these problems. Our culture pictures an ideal woman as self sacrificing, docile, quiet and unassuming person. This vision often either encourages offenders or conditions women not to fight. Bollywood has a long history of men teasing and stalking women. Automatically, stalking gains a “cool” factor. Men think it’s okay to treat women as they please. Furthermore, men even at the personal, domestic circle behave around women as they please, namely their wives and sisters. Their sons grow up thinking they can treat their mothers and wives however they want, and further pass this mantle to their own impressionable sons.
Rape, being a mindless evil act is soon to be hardened in our minds by the latest move of turning this act into a virtual game, by a strangely sadistic and misogynistic move. This game, called “Rapelay” involves stalking and raping virtual women. While some people have to say that it would encourage performing the act for real, everyone knows that the very idea is sick and ethically insensitive. Maybe girls should buy that game and rape men with it…or do it for real. If you think what i just said was shocking, you know it must be equally shocking for me to talk about raping women. Right? Wrong?
The anger towards culprits, the fear of it happening to them, the dread that it will happen again to someone else and the insecurity that the people who can do something will do nothing; all this gives way to a constant frustration, an emotional itch, that nothing will change, that everything is augmenting.
If our men are actively stalking and raping women like Nirbhaya on the streets, where the heck is the world coming to? To add insult to injury, top notch politicians are giving helpful hints out: women are asking for it; by going to bars late, by dressing skimpily by taking foolish risks. Mostly this is untrue. Where it’s true: so? Women have every right to dress as they please. If men don’t have the common courtesy or basic morality to keep it In Their Pants, I’m sorry but it ain’t our fault. Everyone however is ready to point fingers, and one of them is right at law enforcement. That’s a very dicey area. By the time it gets around to doing something useful, the issue has escalated and become pending for at least a year. Many people want a stricter hand on this but all of these “many people” are of no real consequence. Corruption permeates through the entire system