Reasons Why India Is Unsafe For Women


 A rape is reported every 15 minutes in India. In the last two months more than 25 rapes made headlines, of this some were reported as heinous acts of violence and gang rapes, mostly from the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the girl was strangled, her tongue was cut, or she was raped and her body was thrown away. 

The Hathras gang rape case has left the nation shocked, not just by the brutality of it but with the grim reminder how deep rooted and rampant caste based violence is in the country. Women are asking, why does India fail its daughters every single day? Women are neither safe at home (India has no laws against marital rape and domestic violence cases are on the rise), nor on the streets.

  • A Thomson Reuters Poll 2018 called India the most unsafe country in the world. Women reported nearly 34,000 rapes in 2018 (these were reported, every day many go unreported). Of these, over 85 per cent led to charges, and 27 per cent to convictions, according to the National Crime Bureau (NCRB) report released by the Ministry of Home Affairs. It shows that while cases are registered, most stay inconclusive giving no justice for long periods of time.
  • The National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) ‘Crime in India’ 2019 report showed how common crimes against women witnessed a steep rise across the country. A total of 4,05,861 cases of crime against women were registered during 2019, showing an increase of 7.3% over 2018
  • “The majority of cases under crime against women under IPC were registered under ‘Cruelty by Husband or His Relatives’ (30.9%) followed by ‘Assault on Women with Intent to Outrage her Modesty’ (21.8%), ‘Kidnapping & Abduction of Women’ (17.9%) and ‘Rape’ (7.9%). The crime rate registered per lakh women population is 62.4 in 2019 in comparison with 58.8 in 2018”, the data shared by NCRB showed.
  • Caste based violence against women is prevalent in India where the society is divided not just by class, gender but also by a very hierarchal caste system putting privilege and power in the hands of some castes, more so in the hands of men of the higher caste.
  • We don’t have laws against marital rape, as a result, an abusive husband gets away and a woman is forced to stay in the marriage without any support from the system.
  • While the minimum age required to get married in India is 18, child marriage and marriage of minor girls is rampant. 27% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday and 7% are married before the age of 15. According to UNCIEF, India has the highest absolute number of child brides in the world – 15,509,000.
  • Female foeticide is widespread in India. This is due to sex-selective abortion, childhood neglect of girls and infanticide. In India sex-selection is banned but despite that rampantly done.
  • Another deep-rooted issue is our mindsets. This further makes India unsafe for women. Women are seen as the lesser sex. Society perpetuates the notion that boys should be put ahead of girls because apparently when they grow up they will ‘earn for the family’ while women will be married off and be ‘given away’.

Recently a young girl, in Lakhimpur Kheri district of UP, was gang raped when she was going to another district to pick up a scholarship form. A 2 day old little girl was stabbed a 100 times reportedly with a screwdriver. Little has changed for women in India since the Nirbhaya rape cases of 2012 which made global headlines. 

There must be some stringent laws put in place so that no one would even try doing such hateful things against women. It's a disgrace that a country like India, who worship women, have failed to provide a place where they can feel safe. Women should not be blamed for the clothes they wear or things that they say, instead the men should start giving them the respect they deserve and stop treating them, solely as an object of sexual desire. 

Follow us on Twitter. Feel free to comment on the blog and give us your valuable feedback.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dalits Suffer The Most From India's Sexual Violence Crisis But Are Given the Least Protection

Image
Barely 24 hours after the remains of the 19-year-old-Dalit woman were consigned to flames by the police in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras without the consent of the family, another sexual assault and death of a 22-year-old Dalit woman has surfaced from Balrampur in the same state. Reflective of widely pervasive casteist mindsets, these brutal sexual assaults against Dalit women are being framed as isolated incidents of crime rather than atrocities which are the outcome of systemic and deep-rooted casteism and misogyny. It is important to acknowledge that there are several intersecting factors such as identities, institutions and hierarchies that result in this kind of structural violence. Women are not a homogenous group and are differentially impacted by forces of caste, class, religion, ethnicity, race, among others. The social location of Dalit women at the lowest rung of caste, class and gender hierarchies results in them facing multiple forms of discrimination and targeted violence. We h...
Read more

Lockdown Has Lead To Increase In Domestic Abuse All Over The World

Image
Around the world, as cities have gone into lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus, the mass efforts to save lives have put one vulnerable group more at risk. Women and children who live with domestic violence have no escape from their abusers during quarantine, and from Brazil to Germany, Italy to China, activists and survivors say they are already seeing an alarming rise in abuse. In Hubei province, the heart of the initial coronavirus outbreak, domestic violence reports to police more than tripled in one county alone during the lockdown in February, from 47 last year to 162 this year, activists told local media. “The epidemic has had a huge impact on domestic violence,” Wan Fei, a retired police officer who founded a charity campaigning against abuse, told Sixth Tone website. “According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.” It is a pattern being repeated globally. In Brazil a state-run drop-in centre has already s...
Read more

UK Universities Are Neglecting The International Students During The Pandemic

Image
  Foreign students in the UK have been plunged into financial hardship as they struggle to pay their tuition fees during the coronavirus pandemic and are blocked from accessing state support, charities warn. Dismissal from part-time jobs and a loss of financial support from family members abroad due to Covid-19 has left some students having to choose between eating meals or paying their course fees, which they are usually required to pay in order to remain in the UK. This is exacerbated by the fact that most overseas students are blocked from accessing state support because of the no recourse to public funds (NRPF) policy, which prevents thousands of migrants from accessing help from the government due to their immigration status. Ministers are being urged to take action to ensure that these individuals are able to access support, and are not suspended from their studies and forced to leave the UK as a result of not being able to pay their tuition fees, which vary between £10,000 a...
Read more