On September 13th, people celebrated outside of Saket District Court in New Delhi, India upon discovering that four men convicted of raping and murdering a 23-year-old woman coming home at night from a movie theater were sentenced to death by hanging. Cases of rape are not uncommon in India; from January to August of this year, there were 1,121 cases of registered rape cases in New Delhi, more than double the number from the same period in 2011 and the highest number since 2000. In a nation where women are expected to keep their heads down and silently surrender to the men looming above them, every bus ride is fearful to a woman, every moment spent outside full of tension and anxiety.
When I first moved to New York from Texas, I remember one of the most daunting experiences was taking the subway for the first time. The coldly alert eyes of the busy New Yorkers looked threatening to me. Yet, kids barely in middle school were casually sitting in the seats, earphones on, bobbing their heads to the music playing in their iPods.
Taking the subway alone for the first time is a pretty daunting task, especially if you're young and everyone around you seems so much bigger and stronger. As Americans, and especially as New Yorkers, we are trained to be independent at a young age, learning to take public transportation and blend in with everyone else on the streets. Men and women, boys and girls, old and young, we all walk briskly to wherever we are headed, getting on and off the trains and getting on and off the buses with no second thoughts.
Other people in the world are not so fortunate. The things we do so casually, so nonchalantly, are luxuries to others. While we complain about waking up early to commute to school, other people would give anything to be able to travel back and forth easily. Women in India must commute back and forth to and from work every day, just like New Yorkers do. However, they live in a society where they are scorned, taunted, and violated for their sex. As reported in The New York Times, a young Indian girl in college who takes the bus every day to work described the bus ride as a very tense, uncomfortable ride where a girl doesn't know when a man will sexually harass or touch her, where a girl is unprotected and left open for men to lay their hands on. In India, girls are expected to keep their heads down and silently obey whatever man is above her--before marriage, this would be her father, and after marriage, it would be her husband. When something bad happens to a girl, she is blamed for having the audacity to set foot outside of her home, where she should be taking care of the house.
These issues have not gone away. We have improved in not discriminating based on gender, but cases of rape, sexual harassment, and all sorts of other issues dealing with sexism still threaten us today. When a woman is violated, she suffers for many, many years, sometimes even her whole life, with the scars that the memories leave behind. In nations like India, where the whole cultural mindset places women far below men and classify them as weak, the entire society's view of females must change if these issues are going to be diminished. To change a whole society, one person is not enough. The community must come together as one, accepting and welcoming females on an equal ground as males. They have no reason to not be able to pursue their dreams. They shouldn't have to walk around the streets shooting 180-degree glances in all directions, wondering who will hunt them down next.
No comments:
Post a Comment