I wanted to pen down my feelings on this subject since long but I couldn’t dare to because I will be unable to fathom its intensity of terror, inhumanity, cruelty and violence. It terrifies every girl, every girl’s parents, family members. I am afraid I won’t be able to express the gravity of disgust I feel towards it.
Once it occurs, it taints the fate of the girl, the self-confidence, and normalcy of behavior; It also changes the perception of society and others towards the girl. Even though she is as pious as before, no one will look with the same eye. Some would be supportive, some would be sympathetic, some would just blame the girls themselves, some would pity the future, some would chuckle and stare condescendingly. This will let people to form their opinion but above all it changes the normal reaction or thoughts that used to be earlier. Day and night in some corner, or in pavement, or at home, many girls are violated, abused and raped. Rape, an extreme violence, sometimes even followed by the murder of the victim, is not only a physical violence, It’s an extreme form of physical, mental and Social violence. Due to which women live their whole life wounded and stigmatized.
When women are raped or abused, we desperately want to prevent their violence, rape and in this attempt we preach girls to prepare for the worst and get ready to defend it. Parents, teachers and societies teach them to be safe always. Don’t walk alone! Don’t walk after certain time frame specifically during the evening and the night! Don’t talk to strangers! Don’t do revealing dress up! However, many rapes are done by relatives and many rapes are just happened due to sudden aggression and temptation of some reckless, psychopath, malicious evil men or others; while it happened even when the girls are properly covered with the hijab and Abaya.
If we just recount the recent cruel gang rapes in India and others in different countries that were followed by murder of the victims. These cases drew immense attention worldwide. And we can see it didn’t happen to only women, who were wearing revealing, supposedly provoking dresses, who were out in the public alone, it happened when they were with their friends, when they were inside their home by their own relatives implying that It can happen to anyone, anywhere. And our preventive approach is focused towards girls while we neglect perpetrators responsible for that situation.
If we make our daughter to be strong physically, emotionally, she would defeat couple of men but, unfortunately, there will be numerous of them to challenge her and to defeat her freedom and the feeling of self.
Probably, we are overlooking the real reasons of this violence, the cause is deeply rooted in the patriarchal social structure, no matter what men do, they are ensured impunity. They are regarded highly in the family, community, and found ways to excuse for any wrongdoings as we can see in some countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, where rapists are acquitted if rapists marry the victim.
Such absurd rules mock the very existence of female as human and uncover blatant male dominance. Sometimes our society protects them by not revealing the truth with the fear of stigma to save family’s honor and even fear of ostracism of victims. This phenomenon, however, reflects underlying gender inequality that is deeply rooted in our culture. Patriarchal society and gender stereotypes that openly support submissive role of female and the notion of masculinity characterized by strong manhood, which needs to be able to control of women.
It may be possible we are failing to teach perpetrators proper values or we are failing to devise some mechanisms to control compulsive desires and sick mentality of the perpetrators and we have also devised some loopholes in the rulebooks still prevalent in some countries though some of the traditional countries have come forward to eliminate such provisions. While evaluating the prevention approaches, we must evaluate how harsh the penalties are and how strong is the implementation. We must also analyze the answers of following questions. Are the penalties for rape severe enough to deter the motives of the perpetrator? Are we teaching them the proper values of manhood and equality of gender? How much is the extent of access to pornography and at what age?
Hopefully, time will bring change over the course as more girls and boys are educated, increased awareness level, more men will develop reverent attitude towards women but waiting would cause violence of many innocent females. Teaching boys, before they become men, about how to respect other women in addition to women at home would be a basic step towards violence free society. This seems very simple step but it is very difficult in a real world, where people with disparate ethics, understanding, awareness level exist in the same society. We don’t exist alone and the same interdependent existence would create difficulty in formation of an attitude of a person. Nevertheless, change should start from a point or by a person, so an educated couple could be that person to show what the gender equality is. The prevention programs should start focusing on attitude and behavior change of the people in community. On top of all a stringent law having a deterrent effect on perpetrator is must have intervention in current situation.
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