WOMEN AND CHILDREN…ENDANGERED SPECIE?

 

The misogynistic rants from the unaffected human race about how women provoke rapes continue unabated.

After a young woman was gang-raped on a Delhi bus on December 16, an amalgamation of grief and anger has triggered a long-overdue discussion on the need for better protection for women, and more effective laws to punish sexual offenders.

The national capital appears to remain as unsafe for women as it has always been, notwithstanding an unprecedented national outrage and angry calls for death penalty to perpetrators of sexual assault against them in the wake the tragic death of a young woman following her brutal gang-rape in the city on December 16.

The statistics of assault in India are alarming. In 17 days since December 17 to January 3, the city police control room received 64 calls to record complaints of sexual assaults, mostly rape, and 501 calls to record complaints of molestation and eve-teasing. That is almost four cases of sexual assaults and about 30 cases of molestation and eve-teasing each day! These, of course, are only the reported cases.

When our television screens are filled with stories of a four year old being raped and killed in Mombasa…and days later, an eight year old is raped, again, by her father…we ask ourselves so many questions; unfortunately with no answers.

There has been an alarming increase in rape cases especially over the holiday season.

As India does some soul searching on how it perceives and treats women, patriarchal and misogynistic comments from politicians and other leaders have exposed how much needs to change.

A Bharatiya Janita Party (BJP) minister said that crimes against women could be the result of a perverse alignment of the stars.  He said he doesn’t have the answers, an astrologer may.

A few days ago, another minister from the BJP government warned that women must “stay within their limits if they don’t want to be attacked.”

It’s not only in India that such statements pop up. A good number of Kenyan men have insisted that women are raped because of how they dress. They provoke the rapists. Someone tell me, how does a four year old girl provoke a rapist?

Women are vulnerable specie…or so the few uncouth men have made them to be.

Violence against women and children has been identified as a critical inhibitor of growth in Kenya, tolerated because of ingrained social norms and a lack of cultural awareness.

The findings from a 2010 National Survey on violence against Children (VAC) indicated that lifetime exposure to childhood violence is exceedingly and unacceptably high in Kenya.

The study, sponsored by Unicef, Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development showed that the perpetrators of violence against children in Kenya, are not strangers: most often, they are the people closest to the children, figures of authority or of trust. Ironically, those who would commit violence against children are the ones to whom children would normally turn to when something bad happens. Report, released

Unfortunately, in most cases, we wake up the next day to see the perpetrators busy roaming the streets, when they are supposed to be in custody.

There’s more work to be done. Anyone could know these victims, not knowing that they’re being harmed. They could be your neighbors’ children, your child’s classmate, or even your own child. Speak out; speak up to stop this insanity.

I’m a woman, I need protection, i need to be respected.

MJ