Delhi gang rape and attitudes toward women

Mahatma Gandhi said, "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”

This is often expressed, apocryphally, as his "Be the change..." quote. I think these words are especially appropriate in the context of the furore over the Delhi gang rape.

There is an entire spectrum of dishonourable, diminishing, denigrating behaviour against women in India. It exists within individuals, families, communities, societies, and is even present in discriminatory laws and customs that a lot of people don't seem to notice or mind.

It can be as "mild" as a mother-in-law verbally abusing her daughter-in-law (just because she can) or as terrible as gang rapes. I find the term "eve-teasing" particularly offensive, and a good illustration of the rather relaxed attitude towards the bad treatment of women. Why sugar-coat something as heinous as sexual harrasment by giving it such a playful name?

Horrible events such as these do not arise out of a vacuum. They are the result of firmly entrenched mores and values that reflect a basic belief; women are inferior, and some women are more inferior than others (e.g. women of lower castes, women who have the temerity to be out at 9pm with a male companion, women who have invited trouble by taking a bus at night).

Until this basic belief is banished, none of these evils will be. I find the wild keening and wailing for the death penalty, for the government to do something, for the "incompetent" Delhi police police force to atone for their sins, to be quite ironic, even laughable (not that any humour can be found in this tragic situation).

When you try to solve a problem of this sort with capital punishment, punitive measures, stricter policing, all it teaches criminals is not to get caught, or else. Instead, how about teaching every person, man, woman, and child, to treat women properly? Instead of meeting violence with more violence, how about finding humane solutions that move towards a more morally evolved society, not a lesser one?

So, the next time you find yourself snickering at a woman with dark skin, or tut-tutting in private sympathy when a couple has a daughter instead of a son, or turning a blind eye when a woman is groped on a bus, or teaching your daughter to behave demurely and not to attract too much attention, or encouraging your daughter-in-law to obey her husband without question, or trying to find a husband for your daughter based on his money, good looks, and social status instead of character, or encouraging your sister to stay with her husband, even if he hits her, because of the shame of divorce, ask yourself how this kind of thinking feeds into the general, collective attitude towards women that manifests, in its most brutal form, in the kind of crime that has shocked us all, but really shouldn't, all things considered.

And then be the change that you want to see in the world.

 

Loving, you raise a useful issue below. Thank you for really understanding the point of my post.

This kind of behavior is endemic in Indian communities. I find it especially harmful when it comes to sexual abuse of children by family members. I know of three Indian families who harbor a sexual predator in their midst - male family members who have sexually abused children. It is an open secret, and there is a conspiracy of silence maintained around the whole issue. The girls who have been abused are made to feel like somehow it is their fault. Even more disturbing is the fact that two of these men have gone on to molest girls from the younger generation of the families.

Do you know families like this? Why are the mothers, sisters, aunts, elders not doing anything significant to protect their girls? Why do we not teach our children that sometimes, often, adults are also wrong in their thoughts and behavior? Why do we not equip our children with tools to recognize when someone is taking liberties with them, even if that person is someone they're supposed to respect and obey?

So, as Loving illustrates, failure to act and acknowledge leads to a perpetuation of these crimes against women and children. And these atrocities are not confined to slums and tenements as some of the more smugly class-conscious among us would have us believe.

If anything good comes out of the Delhi gang rape, it will certainly not be the murder of the ingrates who committed this crime. One of India's first orders of business should be to de-stigmatize conversations and attitudes about sex and sexuality. Accept that human beings are animals (in a good, biological way) and will have normal instincts and desires.

Do not put women into two neat categories; either she's the Madonna, or she's the Whore. Stop telling your sons to see all women as his sisters. They are not; it must be incredibly confusing for a young man (and for young women, too) to be made to feel guilty for having normal feelings regarding sex and sexuality. Let young people associate with other young people of both sexes. It's vital for adolescents to learn to relate to the opposite sex as real people, not mysterious forbidden fruit.

We need to move away from an outdated, irrelevant, repressed attitude towards human sexuality and accept it for what it is. Then, people will be able to make better sense of their feelings and urges. This does not mean that we should encourage young people to behave in sexually precocious ways. It means we need to provide healthy discourse and outlets for the energies and feelings that, when perverted through suppression, may manifest as rape, pedophilia, sexual harassment, and all the other evils we've been discussing.

Much sexual violence is not about sex, but about power. So do not discount, also, how related social customs and attitudes like patriarchy and misogyny feed into this downward spiral of crimes against women and children. We dote on the male members of our families, and relegate the females to second-class citizenship, at our peril.

I agree with Loving that these are not issues that some of our elders want to discuss, or even hear. But their hostility to these ideas is irrelevant. As you can see, it is becoming a matter of life and death whether we educate our children well, or only according to traditions. Accept that we live in the 21st century, and accept that the world is changing in ways we cannot fathom. We need to change, too.