Violence Against Women- The Indian Gang Rape

"The day a woman can walk freely on the roads, that day we can say that India has achieved independence"- Mahatma Gandhi

I would expand the above quote by saying " The day a woman can walk freely on the roads, that day we can say the world is truly civilized.
While the world's attention has been drawn to the heinous crime of gang rape,  committed against a 23-year-old Indian woman in New Delhi, India's capital this month.
India is a place where over 40% of child marriages take place. Sex-selective abortions (Female feticide) occur at an alarming rate.

Sexual harassment of women- known in India as "Eve teasing" is widespread and includes behaviors ranging from lewd remarks to physical assault. However, this problem is not exclusive to India alone.
  Every day, around the world, acts of violence are meted out to women, in various forms either through rape or other forms of verbal and physical abuse. Sadly most of the culprits go unpunished, either because of a lack of laws or are unreported because of the stigma associated with rape in many developing countries. The victims however suffer for the rest of their lives, if they physically survive the abuse.

I want to share an article by Madhuri Vijay which puts this horrendous act of violence against women in India in a whole new perspective.

“We live alongside tragedy, neglect, suffering”- MADHURI VIJAY

Rage-filled protests continue in India after a rape victim dies. But rage alone won't stop violence against women.

Four days after the 23-year-old woman, who died early this morning, was gang-raped in a Delhi bus, the headlines of the Deccan Herald read, “Minor Raped in City Shop.” A 15-year-old girl in Bangalore (where I live) went to the corner shop (we all have one) and didn’t come home. Her family discovered her there, nearly naked, hands and legs bound with her own dupatta. She reported that the shopkeeper and his two friends had teased her, pushed her inside, closed the shutters and raped her. The Delhi rape also received front-page coverage. The remaining pages of the same issue contained the news of a young boy’s murder, two suicides, a kidnapping hostage found dead in a canal, a five-year-old sexually abused in Bidar, two separate road accidents in which a total of seven people perished, the death of a militant in Kashmir and that of a civilian in Manipur, both during military encounters.

All of this in a single day. And it is only what the Deccan Herald had room to print.

What happened in Delhi has provoked, and continues to provoke, an outcry across India, as it rightly should. There have been protests and slogans. There have been vigils and calls for revenge. There has been, above all, rage. But rage is a peculiar emotion. It is incandescent and gratifying, but it is temporary. It cannot sustain itself, or us. It burns out and leaves us cold and empty. Still, day after day after day, the news continues to pour in, demanding attention, demanding further rage. And, gradually, something terrible starts to happen. Rage is replaced by resignation. We read, but we do not feel. We know, but we cannot bring ourselves to act.

We have developed, in this country, a capacity for living alongside tragedy and neglect and suffering, a way of moving through our cities with a firm clamp on our senses and our hearts and our minds. It is a deadness that creeps into all aspects of our lives. Garbage piles up on our streets, but we have learned not to smell it. The din of traffic is deafening, but we have discovered the trick of blocking it out. We step over feces on the pavement — dog, human, cow — without pausing in our conversations. We avert our eyes from the man urinating against the wall. From the child with rheumy eyes and bloated belly. From the woman curled up in the corner. From the collapsing buildings and factory fires and army encounters in remote forests, from the murders and suicides and rapes. From all that is too much. We draw back into ourselves, into our homes, shrinking and shoring up our lives until they end at our doorsteps. What lies beyond is, to us, a broken world, impossible to comprehend or control, and so each time we step into it we are half-asleep, fully armored, already prepared to ignore what we know we will find.

But now and then, something happens that is so precise and so awful, it cracks the armor wide open. A young woman gets into a bus and is beaten and raped by six men. An iron rod is shoved into her. Her intestines are crushed. She is flung onto the road like a piece of trash. In a Singapore hospital, she dies.

Even the most deadened of us are stirred. Rage begins to quicken and flow in our veins. We cry for the castration of the rapists. We call for their deaths. We spend ourselves in rage. And, spent, I fear we will sink back into the habit of resignation, into our private worlds, waiting for the next thing to come along that is awful enough to crack us open again.

Rage is vital. We cannot do without it. Rage is what makes us spill into the streets, screaming for justice. It is what makes us pressure policymakers and law enforcers to do their jobs better. It is what makes us challenge the vile and damaging remarks we have been hearing from our politicians. But rage will not suffice. We also need compassion. Compassion, from com – “together” and pati – “to suffer.” To suffer together, in other words. In a way that will remain with us long after the headlines move on — and they will — to something else. To suffer, and keep suffering, in a way that envelops and yet extends beyond the young woman whose death we are now mourning, beyond the boundaries of our own lives, to cover the sum of everything we know. In a way that recognizes and participates in the suffering of the people, we will never meet, as well as the suffering of people we see each day.