Violence against women in India

Arun Bangotra
Violence against women in India isn’t just a current issue, but rather has deep traditional roots in the culture. The recent gang rape in Delhi has shown the ghastly crime against fair sex. The young paramedical student was gang-raped and brutally tortured in a moving bus on December 16. The rape survivor passed away on December 29 in a Singapore hospital. The government should bring to justice those guilty of the violent rape. The Government should share the country’s anger over the crime. The safety and security of women should be the highest concern of our government. Some lawmakers in India have now suggested that rape should be punished by death. Violence against women must never be accepted, never excused, never tolerated. Every girl and woman has the right to be respected, valued and protected. If women cannot step out in public without the fear of being assaulted for no other reason than their gender, then clearly there is something very wrong. In a country like India, it is difficult to rely on statistics pertaining to rape cases. The data may show that such crimes being committed may be going up or down. But in reality, women are afraid of even lodging FIRs in police stations despite being raped or sexually harassed. The judiciary and the legal system are biased in favor of men. Cases of violence against women are under-reported.
Violence against women feeds off discrimination and serves to reinforce it. When women are abused in custody, when they are raped by armed forces as “spoils of war”, or when they are terrorized by violence in the home, unequal power relations between men and women are both manifested and enforced. Violence against women is compounded by discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, sexual identity, social status, class, and age. Such multiple forms of discrimination further restrict women’s choices, increase their vulnerability to violence and make it even harder for women to obtain justice. There is an unbroken spectrum of violence that women face at the hands of people who exert control over them. States have a responsibility to uphold standards of due diligence and take steps to fulfill their responsibility to protect individuals from human rights abuses. In India, the problem of violence against women is a result of a long standing power imbalance between men and women. Men have control over access to property and resources. There is also a sexual division of labor in India that results in female exploitation-physically, mentally, and commercially. Women in India are subject to all forms of violence. Female infanticide is quite common in Haryana and Punjab because there is a preference for sons because male children carry on the family lineage. The education of sons is also considered much more important. In these two states, the sex ratio is lower than the national average. Within the household, there exists gender discrimination.
Honor killings are quite common in some states like Haryana when young girls marry somebody outside their caste and clan against her family’s wishes. In some societies, women are often looked upon as representatives of the honor of the family. When women are suspected of extra-marital sexual relations, even if in the case of rape, they can be subjected to the cruelest forms of indignity and violence, often by their own fathers or brothers. Women who are raped are unable to provide explicit evidence.
The other problem faced by women is Dowry. Newly married women become subject to verbal and physical abuse. In many cases, young brides are burnt to death by her in-laws if the parents fail to meet the requisite dowry demanded. Domestic violence is a violation of a woman’s right to physical integrity, to liberty, and all too often, to her right to life itself. When states fail to take the basic steps needed to protect women from domestic violence or allow these crimes to be committed with impunity, states are failing in their obligation to protect women from torture.
The violence against women is a universal problem that must be universally condemned. Around the world at least one woman in every three has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Every year, violence in the home and the community devastates the lives of millions of women. Gender-based violence kills and disables as many women between the ages of 15 and 44 as cancer, and its toll on women’s health surpasses that of traffic accidents and malaria combined. Violence against women is rooted in a global culture of discrimination which denies women equal rights with men and which legitimizes the appropriation of women’s bodies for individual gratification or political ends.
The United Nations has termed violence against women as a gross violation of human rights. In India, a survey showed that for each incidence of violence, women lost an average of 7 working days. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
(The author is Principal, Govt. Polytechnic College, Udhampur.)

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