Why we, as a society, must take some blame for such crimes and their effects
You. Yes, you. You blabbering all over Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere on the internet. I want you to stop with your sermons and tirades and humbug tears. I want you to stop thinking of yourselves as experts on crime. I want you to stop thinking that violent retribution - hanging, physical castrations - will stop these crimes.Instead, listen. Shed your hypocrisy please. Look within. Shed this deep-seated, generations-strong, mixed-with-your-blood hypocrisy. Stop baying for blood when your own might not be so clean. Stop screaming for heads when you yourselves award impunity to many rapists.
How are you responsible, you ask? Allow me to hammer some sense into your over-charged social-network-fried brains.Violent sexual assault - indeed, sexual assault of any nature - is gut-shattering. But do you know what is worse than being a victim of such a crime? That feeling of helplessness when you don't know whether you can trust anyone, when you don't know whether there will be anything close to justice delivered, when you don't know whether you will ever be allowed to lead a normal life again. And worst of all, when you think it might be pointless to aggravate your situation by reporting the crime.
There can be no worse thought than to be a victim of a crime - a horrendous crime that messes violently with your body, no less - and to think that you might have brought it on to yourself. It does not matter that such thoughts might be spurious. It does not matter that you are the one who is in tremendous pain - both mental and physical. What strike you, instead, are thoughts that should never have arisen. As you cope with trauma that should be tended to immediately, you hesitate to go to the nearest police station or hospital. You think, instead, of what your family, your neighbours, your relatives, your country, will think of you. You're afraid to become the "star of the day" for an eyeballs-hungry, callous, insensitive media. You are assured of no privacy in your moment of torment. You are afraid that you no longer belong in society. You wonder ceaselessly, to the point of driving yourself mad, why the punishment for this crime, strangely, falls on the victim instead of the perpetrator. But you are a woman in our great, hypocritical country and it is you who have to take the fall for our hypocrisy.
Because while countless women fall prey to such crimes, you, the over-smart, over-zealous social-network addict will outrage for a day and then return to your cat pics. Try your hand at influencing society, for a change, instead of law. Try and rid your families and friends of such innate dogmas against rape victims. It is enough that they have to bear such crimes, without being victims of our narrow-mindedness as well.
It is estimated that many, or even most, rapes in India go unreported. This obviously implies that most rapists are not too bothered by the thought of being hauled up by the law. We, as a society, are responsible for every rape that goes unreported. And we are directly responsible every unreported rape that causes another one. Let us shield our women, not criminals.
If you truly care about a woman's honour, don't deny it to her because she's been violated. Instead, honour her with renewed vigour for bearing such crimes bravely. Re-induct her into society with empathy, not pity.
Rapists can never take away a woman's honour. There is nothing dishonourable about being the victim of a crime and have survived. In fact, it is the opposite. Remember: nothing about a woman changes after she's been raped. She is still the good mother, sister, daughter she was before the crime. What changes is our perception of her. It is not the criminal who deprives a woman of her honour. That job, sadly, has always been undertaken, far too efficiently, by our virgin-obsessed, vagina-maketh-the-woman, female-foetus-killing society. It is time this stopped.
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