New Delhi: Women subjected to violence in India have to face an inactive support system and dismissive response by law enforcement agencies, says an Indo-Canadian journalist who has brought out a book on the global menace.
Ajit Jain’s “Violence against Women – All Pervading”, brought out by Toronto-based Elspeth Heyworth Centre for Women, features views of top academicians, social activists and political leaders on the issue. It is a follow-up of a symposium held in Toronto in the aftermath of the December 16, 2012 gangrape in Delhi.
The book is dedicated to the victim of this incident. The author says violence against women is a global menace. “The Delhi gangrape incident of December 16, 2012 was very disturbing. But then I started studying as to what’s happening elsewhere. Is this violence against women India-specific as the impression people widely developed because of the headlines in the international media? Then I discovered no violence against women is India-specific,” he told PTI.
UN studies show one in 3 women are at least once in their lifetime raped, brutalised, assaulted. Citing some statistical information, he says on an average, every six days a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner.
“In 2009, 67 women were murdered by a current or former spouse or boyfriend,” he says. The author suggests if a woman is violated, there should be an active support system that should help her, induce her to report to the police. “The sad part is that in countries like India, police are corrupt to the core. Police won’t easily take down women’s complaints against men (father, brother, husband, boy friend or a neighbour). They laugh at them and invariably gives them run around,” he says.
Jain feels it is because they (women) have that perception that their complaints won’t be taken seriously, they don’t go to the police to lodge a complaint.
Apart from Jain, the book has articles from chair of Toronto Police Services Board Alok Mukherjee; Executive Director of Elspeth Heyworth Centre for Women Sunder Singh; journalists S Nihal Singh and Rami Chhabra; and Prabhat Jha, director of the Center for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto among others.
According to Jain, women in India are considered inferior to men – in rural and urban areas, in small towns, in educated and not so educated families. “You celebrate the birth of a son and not birth of a daughter. We still abort female fetuses and so this ultrasound technology has terribly impacted the society,” he says.
Writes Alok Mukherjee in his article, “The world over, a woman’s body is a conflict zone where domestic, social, cultural, religious, communal, ethnic, political or economic scores are settled.
“These conflicts may be waged on the home front involving two individuals, in a dark bus involving groups of otherwise ordinary men or battlefront involving forces of the state arrayed against those of another state or against any group that has run afoul of the state… “Rape in its various forms and degrees is the most acute weapon deployed in these wars. The woman’s body is literally laid bare, symbolically stabbed and subjected to the vilest indignity. The ‘enemy’ is destroyed in body, mind and spirit, in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense.”
According to Sunder Singh, “Abuse against women is happening everywhere in the world today, because society is accepting it. This can change when we begin to say it is not acceptable.” (PTI)
