Respect women

Shaveta Sharma
The Delhi rape case has finally waked up the entire country from the deep state of slumber. We cannot even imagine the level of pain, agony and disgrace she had experienced all those days, just one thought of that sends shivers to the body. There are thousands of such cases noticed every year in our country but, this time, when the culprits crossed all the heights of brutality, only then we awakened to the impact of this menace. Isn’t it a shame for all of us and blot on the social fabric of our country? Why before that, we never showed consideration so seriously regarding the occurrence of such heinous crime against women? If we had done that earlier, this tragedy could have been avoided.
It is unfortunate that one strata of our society still support the insane thinking patterns and tends to further victimitize the victims and justify the culprits. Whenever such incidents come to notice, the fingers are always pointed towards the dressing sense of the girls and questions are always raised on their character. The victim is always taunted, teased, segregated in the society and seen as if she has done some blunder and it was her fault. This reflects the sick, rotten and double-mindset of the people.
Although our constitution makers left no stone unturned to grant equal rights, liberty, justice, equality to males and females but long- flourishing patriarchical structure of our society blocked the females from enjoying these rights at par with the male community. The women were never accorded and accepted anywhere as co-equal identities with the men. They are mostly treated as robots which have are expected to obey all the commands of her family and society without any right to express freely. Throughout the centuries women have been treated as a commodity and an object of submission, manipulation and exploitation but the blame for their deplorable condition doesn’t go squarely on men but women also. The women have themselves accepted and still accept ‘inferior’ status in the society. The women in our society have learned to live in an invisible web of constant gaze and most unfortunate is that they have internalized this fact. And even after their submission on every front, they have neither been accorded respect nor due place in the society, which is pitiable.
The need of the time is not to arrest the freedom of women but to make stringent laws for the law-breakers of the society so that they think 100 times before practicing these immoral and illegal acts. The time has come that the women should stop begging their rights They need to be strong and determined only then they would be able to break the shackles of their slavery, which has been also partly created by their own submissive toleration.
Complaints have been made time and again, that there is no stringent laws in our country to punish the rapists but one can see the reason quite clearly as a considerable section of public representatives, on whom the responsibility of framing the laws against these menace has been reposited, are themselves charged of such and related cases of violence and molestation against women. The solution is that whosoever is charged of these kinds of cases, his membership must be suspended or cancelled in state and central legislatures and executive wings, as the need demands.
The need is to make strong laws so as to stop such heinous and disgraceful acts in future and to punish the culprits as soon as possible. Besides, all the rape cases should be taken up by the Fast-Track courts so as to dispose them as soon as possible in order to give justice to the victims and to streamline the justice mechanism of the country. There is a big difference in the ratio of rape cases reported and the punishment accorded. Decisive and stringent laws should be made and implemented so that they should be punished for being rapists and should not be allowed to being ‘escapists’- one more time (as many culprits remained unpunished). Only laws would not change the face of our society until we change our mindsets and inculcate humanistic traits in our personalities. Women should be treated as women and not as ‘humanized beasts’ and it is high time for those sick men to realize that their manhood lies not in raping women but in respecting women.
(The writer is a PhD scholar in the Department of Political Science, Jammu University)

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