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THE PANDEMIC OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN RAGES ON

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 10/24/2020 10:33:33 AM

ARCHANA DATTA
The Hathras incident forced us all to relive the horrific Nirbhaya gang rape. What stands out in public memory is the burning of the Dalit girl’s mortal remains like “trash” in the dead of the night, with policemen standing guard. Official figures confirm that on an average 87 rape cases (ten among them are of Dalit girls/women) are reported daily in India. There has also been a 7.3 per cent rise in all crimes against women, with Uttar Pradesh (UP) registering the highest number of cases, accounting for 14 per cent of the total incidents in the country, says a National Crime Records Bureau, 2019, report. In 2018, a Thomson Reuters Foundation Survey labelled India “as the most dangerous country for women…where rape, marital rape, sexual assault, harassment, female infanticide go on unabated.” Many dismissed the report as being “perceptual rather than based on actual experiences”, while the Government declined to comment on the findings. Sadly, violence against women is globally pervasive, and one in three women (35.6 per cent) has been a victim of physical and/or sexual violence either by intimate partners or non-partners in their lifetime. The prevalence of intimate partner violence was found to be the highest (37.7 per cent) in the South-East Asian region, says a 2017 World Health Organisation study. Many researchers ascribe “toxic masculinity”, which breeds sexual aggression, as the outcome of an unequal power relationship, more common in cultures that foster the notion of male superiority vis a vis the socio-cultural inferiority of women. Kamala Bhasin, a social activist, says that “in deeprooted patriarchy, a boy inherits a sense of entitlement from his upbringing, whereas a girl becomes a victim of stereotyping as the weaker sex. The existing imbalance in gender relations has much to do with violence against women.” Shockingly, in today’s modern, tech-savvy digital India, the caste factor and group identity further accentuate a dominant-submissive gender role culture, especially in the northern States. Ravi Verma, Director, International Center for Research on Women, Asia, says, “A strong sense of impunity among higher caste men, who consider dehumanising women’s bodies as an ultimate expression of control and power, is the reason behind continued violence against women from marginalised and poor communities, including Dalits.” In 2019, among the 3,500 Dalit women raped in India, one third of them were from Rajasthan and UP. But, beyond the socio-cultural structures, studies have also indicated a negative correlation between the sex ratio and the hike in sexual violence cases. Now, India, is a land of “missing women”, contributing one in three to the world’s missing girls due to sex selection, both pre and post-natal, says a United Nations Population Fund, 2020 report. Rape cases in India rose to 32,033 in 2019 from 2,487 in 1971, an astronomical jump of 1,188 per cent, while the sex ratio registered a negative growth of 0.65 per cent, plummeting from 930 girls in 1971 to 924 girls per 1,000 boys this year.