Culture-based sexism behind rape cases

Rape is a terrible crime, a case where the victims are overwhelmingly women and the perpetrators overwhelmingly men. It is a global problem, regardless of culture or socio-economic status and not just India’s shame.

Every rape carries with it a personal story of trauma. To use statistics to speak about rape appears to dehumanise it into a number.

The media coverage of rapes in India is more due to the brutality because they are so out of the ordinary. When people are raped in the US, it’s usually during a party. “Date rape” is common. However, the girl is usually not killed. She is not shunned by her family or doused in kerosene and burnt. Probably this is one of the reasons why rapes are normally under reported in India due to the fear of social stigma attached to it.

The truth is that at the root of all the reasons lies a culture built around hierarchies — of gender, faith, colour, caste and region. Above all, it is the perpetrator’s mindset.

Societies that do — or have learnt to — respect women, and consider them as equal, incidents of rape, sexual harassment, molestation are very low, if not absent altogether.

The change will have to come first at home, from the family. It is extremly important to educate the family and the heads of the family. Boys, as they grow up, will have to be taught that their sisters are not there to get what’s left over – the one piece of chocolate that couldn’t be eaten, the tricycle with a broken wheel that couldn’t be driven, the school with lower fees, because expensive fees couldn’t be afforded. GPS systems and Closed-Circuit TV (CCTV) cameras, after all, cannot track what goes on inside homes and the minds of men; they can only make our streets a bit safer.

A lot of how India will be in the future, how one half of the population will treat the other half, will depend on the lessons from parents and teachers.

— The reader is a homemaker based in Abu Dhabi