The molestation of a teenage girl on July 9, 2012 in Guwahati, Assam, which happened in full public view, was taped, recorded and then flashed across news channels, was just the tip of the iceberg of the problem of safety of women in India. Not a day passes without cases of atrocities against women, dominating the news headlines. A recent report by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) revealed that the proportion of IPC crimes committed against women (to the total IPC crimes) has increased from 8.8 per cent in 2007 to 9.4 per cent during the year 2011

Yet the law and the judiciary has been inactive in dealing with the issues—there has been no radical overhaul of laws relating to rape or sexual assault. In fact, there has been a rather steady decline in the conviction rates of rapists with ever-fewer victims getting justice. The issue has become so serious that even the more reticent politicians of the country have started to comment on the phenomenon. During the recent Parliamentary session, Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde remarked, “Serious crimes against women have continuously increased during the period 2009-11. We need to adopt appropriate measures for swift and salutary punishment to the persons found guilty of violence against women.” The Home Minister also added that police chiefs have to increase the number of women personnel in their respective organisations. “The overall representation of women in police forces should be increased through affirmative action. There are only 83,829 women police in our country as on January 2012,” he said. And Shinde stated several reasons for the rising graph of crimes against women. Relaxing of social norms, relaxing of family control, adverse sex ratio and proximity of colonies of the affluent with the underprivileged. Surprisingly, he found no fault with the Police in tackling crimes. However, most single women have some interface with police. Recent trespasses on women’s modesty have been more incriminating and often the perpetrators have been police personnel. There is an euphemism in India regarding harassment of women. It is sugar coated and shrouded in a sweet word called eve teasing. It is about women becoming recipients of hate attacks. It is about men turning into monsters. It is about women damned because she chooses to or has to work late. Because she dresses “wrong”. What is this twisted link that exists between what a woman wears and does and between her safety? What makes an institute such as Vivekananda Vidyavardhaka Sangha issue a mandate asking every female student and staff to wear bindis and bangles to ensure the safety of the people on campus. In India the answers are not clear. To understand the issue, DW spoke to two women— Urvashi Butalia, who runs India’s first feministic publication and to Brinda Bose, Associate Professor at Department of English, University of Delhi, for their take in the matter in our Issue of the month.

URVASHI BUTALIA// I am not sure that the recent spate of attacks that we have been witnessing currently are different from what we have seen in the past. The question is why we are seeing more of it. I believe that there are many reasons behind the rise. One of them is the increasingly sharp difference between the rich and the poor in the semi-urban and urban areas of the cities. Gated communities that are a part of the entire NCR and in several cities across India, create strong levels of distance and difference. They also exacerbate a lot of tensions which are already there, and just get sanctioned by the presence of such islands of prosperity. The fact of new kinds is that the jobs which have opened up as a result of globalisation have led to a lot of women joining the workforce, stepping out to do jobs that they did not do before. Although these (jobs) are not large in number, both the jobs and the women are becoming more and more visible. Women are also accessing spaces and going out more. There is a kind of anger in the society that is already suffering with such a lot of unemployment when they see half of the population successfully landing jobs. It is also a case of women being “those who are not supposed to get out to the field”, they are now taking a share of the limited pie. That and the fact that women perform quite well in the workplace, sometimes better than their male colleagues, and then return home to manage to take care of the household, creates jealousy, tension, anger and resentment of sorts among a lot of men. All that finds an expression in one kind of violence to which women are extremely vulnerable to, which is usually sexual in nature. I believe that there is also the fact that there is a kind of modernisation and modernity coming into India’s cities. A lot of women from the semi-urban and rural sections are stepping out into the cities and leaving their homes behind. These are not the women that we spot in the shopping mall or in the BPO or the IT sector, but are the domestic helps and the daily wage earners from Bihar or Jharkhand. They are the ones who are most vulnerable to exploitation because their earnings do not allow them to live in places which have a modicum of law and order, security or protection. There is a general breakdown of law and order. There is also a general breakdown of public infrastructure. The public spaces and travel vehicles are not equipped to provide that extra protection to the vulnerable people— why only the women, it is not safer for the senior citizens and the children, when the streets are badly lit and when the public transport is in shambles. Then there is a creamy layer of modern, urban, educated women who see no reason as to why they will have to lock themselves down in their houses, who feel that they have the right to be out on the streets—and rightly so. They too become targets and it seems that because they are doing that they are “asking for it”. I believe the collection of all these things leads to the thing that is always talked about—which is because some women dress in a particular way or they move around later in night, they are asking for it. In this of list reasons I would think it is at the bottom of the ladder. But it is a reason that gets most picked up; because it is convenient to state that women are moving out of the boundaries that have been set for them and thereby they are being targetted.

BRINDA BOSE// All of us realise that the problem of safety of women is a pan-Indian one. Because I have not systematically studied reports and tables on cases of violent attacks on women in India, I would not like to comment on the actual numbers. But there certainly appears to be a sense that they have increased, which I think is more to do with the fact that the issue has now become a focus of media interest, as well as the fact that there are more ways for stories to circulate in the media and more people accessing them. All of which is not a bad thing at all, if attention is drawn to the issue and it begins to knock on public consciousness in a much bigger fashion. As I said, it is probably that we know more because of greater reportage of attacks. It may also of course be due to other factors like more women being out and about the cities, more women living alone or driving alone today compared to a decade ago, but obviously the answer does not lie in women being less independent or more prudent and ‘careful’ but in the enhancement of safety measures in cities and the greater policing of crime. It is important that we see freedom for women to live and work and dress as they please as a right rather than as a blight on our society. All cities have always had a mix of different realities, spaces and classes, is that not what makes up a city? I am not comfortable with finding reasons for increased crime against women in the notion that it is bound to happen when rural boors have recourse to ogling sophisticated city women in the NCR—which is the purport of the idea that conflicting spaces are now slowly merging into one another, is it not? I think this is stereotyping the semi-urban and rural people most dangerously, and trying to fix scapegoats for what is a larger malaise. Of course, when there are interfaces between different communities and beliefs there may be clashes in expectation and reaction, but I think this is what makes an urban space exciting and dynamic, and would be true of inner-city neighbourhoods just as much as suburban ones. I am sure ‘citizen communities’ need to step up their efforts to spread greater and more urgent awareness about crimes against women as well as to make the spaces within their control safer for women to move freely in. Many of the crimes against women in latenight car-drops home from work are perpetrated because of the callousness of corporate employers in securing minimum safety for their female workers in particular. I do not know of the statistics in demographic spread of crimes against women, except that it is normal perhaps that some cities emerge as ‘safer’ than others for women, which may also be something to do with how many women go out to work, live alone, are out later at night—in terms of sheer numbers— in those cities comparatively, rather than to do with ‘northern’ or ‘southern’ or ‘western’ character, especially of men. It is quite likely that the number of such women in Delhi and the NCR are many times that of its equivalent in another city of the south or west of India—in which case the number of cases of assault against women will expectedly be higher in the north? I would not like to essentialise the character of any region as more brutish than another, but of course some cities are always far more dangerous to live in for women due to a large number of reasons. Finally, I do not think that the panels and commissions do enough, and yes, sometimes they do more damage because many of those who sit in power on them are incredibly conservative about women’s rights! They consider their function to be that of vigilantes rather than of securing freedom for women to live as they wish. If women, who head bodies set up to investigate and frame policies for controlling crime against women, harbour the deep-seated notion that women must behave according to certain norms set for them failing which they invite assault and violence, then they are policing the women instead of policing the criminals.