More than just Ayes: Why India needs to look beyond harsher anti-rape laws

-

16 year old raped, filmed and blackmailed for a year, India Times, August 2016.

The article hyperlinked above starts with the sentence “despite the enactment of the stringent anti-rape law”.
There seems to be a notion that harsher punishments will be an effective deterrent to crime despite innumerable instances where that notion fails. Harsh punishments are absolutely necessary steps to, well, punish the convicts. But what do we really want? Harsher jails or safer streets? (The former doesn’t necessarily lead to the latter). The problem with candle light vigils and week-long street protests is this: they’re consoled by paper legislation.

Tell me, after Nirbhaya did anyone see increased night time patrolling? Did you see more street lights in your gully? Did you stop seeing auto drivers driving autos in which the license on display is not theirs but someone else’s? Did you hear of psychological evaluation and treatment for rowdy sheeters and eve teasers? In short, did you hear of ANY solutions to the problem?

If we don’t stop discussing how to make more legislation and start discussing ideas about how to stop this insanity, cases like this one will continue to shock our collective conscious repeatedly until that one day when it won’t. That one day when these cases will just become numbers without faces.

A media house recently called the UP women’s emergency hotline, 1090, and found that it wasn’t operational due to some technical issues. 1090 has proved to be largely successful in terms of the number of calls it has received and resolved but the problem it faces is a depressingly familiar Indian story- lack of infrastructure and severe understaffing. We, as a nation, forget too often. Otherwise how did the 1000 crore "Nirbhaya fund" go unutilized for as long as it did? It's a childish argument to say that the government shouldn't spend money on the "Statue of Unity" when there are other priorities. But it isn't too much to ask for the same pace and vigour of implementation with the Nirbhaya Fund. The Modi government has both increased the size of the fund and utilized more but with over 60% of the funds still untouched, even the Supreme Court had to step in.

Spending so much time and effort on debating if juveniles should get stricter punishment will not make the streets safer for women. Women’s safety can’t just be passed into law. It requires more effort than just a bunch of “Ayes” in parliament. We need to step our game up and look beyond punishment. Our goal shouldn’t be to punish crime. It should be to curb it.

Source: India Times through India Today


Comments

Post a Comment

constructive criticism welcome !

Popular posts from this blog

The Silent Orator

-
Image
I want to start this post with the following quote:  Everyone is afraid of the consequence of error, but the greatest error is not to move, the greatest error is to be paralyzed by the fear of failure. Mike Ryan, Executive Director, WHO Health Emergencies Program Mike Ryan was one of the key figures involved in the response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Two weeks ago, he made the above statement which has resonated with me to no end especially in the context of the work I, like so many thousands of others, am doing. But it rings especially loudly in the Indian context now. In an earlier article I praised the bravado it took for PM Modi to declare the nationwide curfew in India. And the problems that bravado has now thrown up are slowly turning into a humanitarian crisis in some states. The scenes from Delhi and other parts of the country are heart-wrenching, shameful and belie the notion that PM Modi is some sort of administrative magician who can do no wrong. But once again, let me
click to keep reading>>

Have you seen it rain?

-
Image
Have you seen it rain? I mean really rain. I mean the kind that starts with some grandfatherly clouds with their grey hair and cloudy beard moving overhead at the kind of pace that only grandparents move? They’re not slow, strictly speaking. They look like immovable objects who’d really rather not be moved. Those clouds. The kind that grow bigger and darker by the time you’ve made some tea to enjoy by the window. They’re not bursting at the seams quite yet. They’re biding their time. Just hanging out and watching the baby sparrows learning to fly and the humans below scurrying around to find shelter before the downpour. The only ones who aren’t, are some kids playing football. The sparrows aren’t retreating just yet either. The breeze is now a little more brisk than a moment ago. It’s brought with it that familiar petrichor which makes me want to step outside and raise my face to the clouds, arms outstretched like we used to as kids. Someone in my house is yelling (at me?) to get the
click to keep reading>>

21 days for each other

-
Image
By the time I post this, India would've started day 1 of a 21 day curfew. It's an insane idea which will not just inconvenience a lot of people but also throw lives into disarray. The economics of it is of course terrible but the human costs are much more severe. Lots of people will be out of jobs, out of their homes, hungry and unable to access basic resources. We will hear heartbreaking stories about people who are beaten up by the cops for no real reason. We will hear about the ridiculous lack of capacity at government hospitals. There's no denying that for the foreseeable future, we are going to hurt just as the rest of the world has. There is nothing "right" about this decision to confine people to their homes and, in many cases, to the streets. And now imagine all those exact same consequences for all of those people but with the additional burden of a virus that, as of today, has no cure or vaccine. India is an unenviable situation. But we're at that s
click to keep reading>>