BlankNoise

This post is mostly inspired by BlankNoise project which is against eve teasing. The blog-a-thon is over and I could get a lot of views to digest and produce some of my own (not as bad as things produced after digestion).

I see it as two things which are majorly responsible for eve-teasing/molestation etc :

First its lack of respect for the women. Those that are do this stuff are totally oblivion to the value of women to the society. For them they are the weakest beings who are to be exploited and cannot revolt at any of their indecencies. One of the major reasons for their flourishing trade is the submission on the girls part and before I blame them, its the bad law enforcement which is the second reason I would be coming to. Societies where women share an equal place its hard for the society to tolerate such acts by some crack pots. The data given by Anshul would be correct in telling that India would be standing in high ranks among the most unsafe places for women.

The second thing is the bad law enforcement. There are innumerable cases which are famous and have caught limelight. Those were courageous women who could say "I was molested" and face the world. My guessestimate would be that there would be some 100 to 1000 times such women who would not have mentioned about this to their husbands/brothers/mothers/fathers. Why do they fear that? Reason is that if they come out and talk about that we all know how bright chances they have in getting him pinned down and what better if the person is a rich asshole.

To sum the above two points. The countries that treat women much better off than in India in terms of respect and have a good law enforcement, the cases are dead low. Just as a case mentioned here by Gaurav Sabnis' blog ,I witnessed a scene in Zurich where I was returning at around 1 am in the morning. A group of girls were also returning from a party and were drunk, kind of girls who would be labeled what not as soon as we see them at such times and state. And after some time a big group of drunk guys also came. As my instincts said and would have happened in India with 200% probability, it did happen there also. A guy from the group could not control and went and started misbehaving and touching one of the girl in the group. At the first sign that he was not going to do some "Hello my name is this and can we be friends" talk (because I don't think they would have got scared at that), she started shouting at him. The guy immediately retreated and in fact all guys left the platform. What I noticed is that the other girls did not even have to say a word, forget unity etc as one itself was enough. On the other side, none of the guys were forming a group behind this one guy as would have happened here. They all caught hold of him on hearing the girl shout and took him out. The respect as an equal other sex and the empowerment of women make them safe and comfortable.

People may shrugg off a million such incidents saying that those are possible there but not here. Its time such people look inwards. I think paying due respect is something anyone can do. Here I would like that its not an slumber from which only men have wake up from, its also the women who have to rise up and stop being submissive. Things will change.

We all live in a conservative mould and while I utter these words I would like to put disclaimers that there can be a zillion definitions of words like conservatism, modernity, freedom etc. What I feel is that conservatism with respect, modernity with thoughts and understanding are some of the very positive ingredients of a change or cultural fusion which make a culture rich and eradicate the follies of the past.