Sunday, July 20, 2014

Crimes against Women in the Indian Society

When I see in the media, these harrowing reports of girls getting tortured and raped, I wonder to myself: "How can so many of these people be cruel enough to do such things? I cannot imagine being that way", and I'm sure there are a lot of people who have similar mindsets as me on this matter. So, what makes some people so different? Can we blame these untoward incidences mostly on lack of education anymore? The truth I strongly feel is that the bulk of crimes reported against women are actually from people who have got themselves some kind of education themselves. So, how can we root out, or atleast massively reduce this sexual harassment and violence against women? I don't believe that stricter punishment for rape on its own is going to change things much. The root cause of the crimes lies in the mindset of these people doing the crimes. Why do people think in such a manner, and how are many of these minds cruel enough to not even back off against heart-wrenching pleas?

My take on this is that, a big share of this fault lies within the type of educational system in India. Before we go to that, I will state an obvious fact, a drawback about the Indian culture- boys and girls are kept at a distance from each other, childhood onwards. The problem with this unnecessary distance is that it leads to boys getting a separate image about girls in their minds right from the teenage. That fact that girls are humans themselves, and are to be considered like sisters- don't really get cultivated in their minds. They start getting relatively uncomfortable in the presence of girls (and vice-versa) from an early age. That being said, we cannot hope to change deep-rooted aspects of the culture overnight. Coming back to the initial point about educational system, the fact is that several of these 'educated people' coming out of these schools and colleges learn little about kindness, love and moral values- no matter how much maths, science or any sophisticated technical stuff they learn. Put this in the backdrop of the aformentioned drawback of Indian culture along with usage of drugs, there needs to be no surprise on the widespread existence of crimes aginst women.

Speaking about education, it is not something that is solely imparted by schools and colleges. Parents and society have together a major responsibility in the moulding up of growing childrens' behaviour. A good method of education should prioritize human values before technical skills. This is sadly, missing from Indian society. Even if only 10% of people are anti-social, it is enough to badly damage the whole community. From being bullies in school, to drug-addicts in college, they go out as potential criminals when they exit from the campus- no matter how good they are (or not) in mathematics, riding motorbikes or at any kind of technical stuff. On a side note, we can never attain a perfect society with no criminals. All we can do is reduce their number. Lets say this 10% is down to 5%, it can never keep us completely safe from violence. For that reason, learning of martial arts has to a part of education as well- not just for women, for everyone. Love and kindness are forgotten in this era of competition and struggle for self-existence, which gives way to lust, abuse, violence and torture. Without tackling this root cause, all we can do is sit here lamenting about rape and harassment all day long. Love is a way of life that has to be inculcated from childhood into each and every individual for the better of the society.

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