“A 2-year-old girl raped early in the morning.”
“A class-10 student raped by her classmates.”
“Woman raped, rod inserted in her private parts.”
“Woman sexually assaulted while bouncers watch.”
Rape, molestation, fondle, acid-attacks, accost- we come to terms with these words on a daily basis while reading papers or looking at news channels or while casually flipping through the news apps.
As spine- chilling and saddening as this is, do we really get perturbed by reading them? Do we really sit up and make a conscious and effort to make sure that all the women around us feel safe (not just women related to us by blood, but the entire women community in general)?
For a lot of people, the common reply would be ‘Yes, we do!’. But then the question that looms is why do we get reports that onlookers did nothing to save the “victim”.
A lot of us attribute that the molesters or rapists were uneducated, but by looking at current stats and numbers, a vast majority of those rapists were at least, to the bare minimum school going or school pass-outs.
Casual sexism in offices in the name of flirting and having fun or taking a ‘NO’ for a Yes is something that a lot of people fail to understand and interpret the meaning of.
Case for instance-
The Nirbhaya Rape Case-2012
A 23-year old physiotherapy intern was beaten, gang-raped and assaulted in a private bus in which she was travelling with her male friend. There were six convicts, one of them being the bus driver, who raped the victim and beat her friend.
This incident shocked the nation to the core, with nation-wide protests to hang the rapists. Candle marches were organized and people from all walks of life joined in them to showcase their solidarity with the victim and her family.
Eleven days after the assault, the victim was moved to a Singapore hospital where she breathed her last after fighting for her life.
All the six were accused were arrested with charges of sexual assault and murder. One of them , Ram Singh hung himself possibly on March 11,2013. Out of all the six accused, one of them was a juvenile who was sentenced to a maximum of three years of imprisonment ans was later sent to a reform facility, after the Juvenile Justice Act. On September 10, 2013, the remaining four were found guilty of rape and 3 days later were sentenced to death by hanging.
When today we feel a slight happiness at the fact that the Nirbhaya rape case convicts get hanged, shouldn’t we question as a nation as to what took so long for this decision to come about (the rapists were repeatedly filing their pleas in the hope of getting their hanging date postponed ) or as to why there are thousands of rapists who are roaming freely around the world looking out for their next target to satisfy their “so-called fantasies and desires”?
March is the month that is associated with Women’s Day. All of us around the world pledge to stand with the woman community in all odds but do we really? Countless number of rape cases are still heard of in March, countless go unheard of because of the fear of societal stigma.
Addressing the monster and terror that still looms across the country, the fear when women folks step out of their comfort zones at any point of the day, the rape culture that is still prevalent, we need to tackle the social and political reasons why women are still not safe and why is it that women are considered weaker than men in any aspect of life!
As you read this today, the only request to you from a woman, a girl, an infant would be to stick by your words of standing with solidarity with the women around you. Do not make fake promises of sticking by if you can’t. Try to understand that just as you have your own physical structure, women also have their own. There is a big- big difference between lust and love. Merely terming those innocents as victims or going for candle marches does not solve the problem at the core.
Take out just a minute, Think about it maybe!