Samar Halarnkar: Dark, silent night
...What we do not speak of is the issue that is at the crux of our dysfunction — the Indian family’s moral decline. Deep hypocrisies lie under this family’s mask; terrible secrets hide behind its culture of religiosity and community spirit. Self-loathing, shame and the fear of being blamed and forever stigmatised prevent millions of girls from speaking out against the sexual abuse they face from predators among friends and family. This is India’s real war against women, its dark, silent night, which perpetuates private atrocities and primes men for their public outrages.
As this column has pointed out before, National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data for 2011 tells us that 94.2% of all rapists are known to the victim, meaning they are friends, family or neighbours. That trend continues. In 2012, only 25 of Delhi’s 662 reported rapes were inflicted by strangers, according to police data quoted by The Indian Express. Of 45,600 alleged rapists currently facing trial across India, more than 80% were known to the victim.. That men try to force themselves on the most vulnerable is evident if you slice the Delhi data: Nearly 60% of females raped were between two and 18 years old.
The Indian male is granted primacy since birth (sorry, make that before birth, given that more than 1,000 girls are aborted every day). He rarely cooks or cleans, believes a woman’s place is in the kitchen and that he is entitled to beat or otherwise abuse her. It is no surprise then that 57% of Indian teenage boys between 15 and 19 — and 53% of girls — believe it is alright for a man to beat his wife, according to the Unicef’s ‘Global Report Card on Adolescents 2012’. It follows that boys brought up in a culture of impunity and male entitlement, when it comes to having their way with women, are emboldened to practice their perversions in public.
The Indian family’s loss of moral moorings is only rarely discussed. I refer you to a 2010 court judgement I have quoted from before. After the trial of a mother — herself a child bride — who strangled her daughter in a Delhi hospital, Justices Pradeep Nandrajog and Suresh Kair said, “The moral regression of the people of India, ie Bharat, has not been crippled by the (sic) penal laws.”
Those laws do not operate in families where women are so oppressed that they themselves turn oppressors. The vast majority of Indian women are brought up in subservience, and they in turn ensure their daughters remain subservient and aware of their secondary role in life. When their own men turn sexual predators, many mothers tend to ignore or somehow justify such predation. Religious leaders perpetuate attitudes to women and even justify sexual violence, using as spiritual backing everything from the Ramayana to the Koran. Popular culture would rather not talk about it... Read more:
