Fair deal a far cry for `fair sex'

 

It is an age-old tradition that considers woman as symbol of power and the creation of this world is incomplete without her.

 

Fair deal a far cry for `fair sex'

CASE 1. Kanpur, Feb 17: In a horrific incident, a 12-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped and murdered by three Railway Police Force jawans and five others in a slum cluster near the Railway colony of the city.   CASE 2, Jaipur, Feb 23: She pleaded 'Papa, Papa'. But it failed to change the minds of her parents as they abandoned their 12-year-old girl at the Lalgarh station in Bikaner. The victim, identified as Sonu, a resident of Khetwali area in Bihar, was happy when her parents told her they were going to visit Rajasthan. First she was taken to Ramdevra shrine near Pokhran in Jaisalmer district for prayers and then brought to a temple in Bikaner. `I got a shock of my life when my parents told me at the railway station that I would have to live here on my own," Sonu said with tears in her eyes.   CASE 3, Ghaziabad, Mar 1: A 30-year-old housewife, a resident of Shaheed Nagar locality of the city, died after she was brutally beaten up by her husband and in-laws demanding more dowry and then given acid to drink instead of water.     CASE 4: Sunita, 20, worked as a maid in a Delhi home - until she was raped by one of the young men in the house. The family prevented her from going to the police; and when Sunita discovered she was pregnant, they gave her Rs 50,000 as 'compensation' and asked her to go back to her village.     These are not isolated cases. In fact, crime against women have become a commonplace in the country which is moving fast on the trajectory of economic growth. The statistics of crimes against women as enumerated in the National Crime Records' Bureau's latest annual report, negates the talk of women's empowerment in the country. The statistics which also contain figures of the crimes against women in Madhya Pradesh, is a testimony to the fact that majority of the `fair sex' in the country - nay Madhya Pradesh, are far away from getting a fair deal in their own house, leave alone the place they are living in.     If the annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) is to be believed, every hour in India, two women are raped, two are kidnapped, four are molested and seven others face violence at the hands of their husbands.     As far as rapes and molestation of women in the country are concerned, Madhya Pradesh has taken the lead for recording the highest number of rapes and molestation cases. Out of a total of 19,348 rape cases reported in the country in 2006, Madhya Pradesh reported the highest number of rape cases, at 2,900. Crimes against women in Madhya Pradesh does not end here. The state also topped the list of molestation incidents in the whole country. Against a total of 36,617 cases of molestation reported from the whole country in the year 2006, as many as 6,243 molestation cases, the highest among various states in the country, were reported from Madhya Pradesh alone. As per the NCRB figure, Madhya Pradesh contributed to 17% of the molestation cases in the whole country.     The state also stands quite low in the country on skewed sex ratio which is 920 per 1000 as against national average of 927/1000. In some districts of Madhya Pradesh like Morena the sex ratio is as low as 822/1000, one of the lowest in the country. According to an study, about 10 million girls have gone `missing' from India's population since 1985 because of the practice of selectively aborting female fetuses and Madhya Pradesh is no exception to this unhealthy trend.     Dr Ratna Sharma, professor, Psychology, IEHE, Bhopal, attributed to growing incidents of crime against women to males and females' unfulfilled desires, male ego and their inherent desires to dominate. She said that since women by and large have been found to be more caring, sincere towards their works, both at the home and offices, it hurts males' `superiority complex' and prompts many of them to establish their `suzerainty, even at the cost of `hurting' and `torturing' women. But these tendencies of crime against women have been found to be more prevalent in the lower rung of the society because of their socio-economic condition, she added.   Noted psychologist, Dr Vinay Mishra said that crime against women are reinforced by several other things happening in the society. It has more to do the way we brought up and socialize ourself in the society. The perception that women are weaker sex, needs to be changed and it should start from the family level. There may be increase in education, awareness level among the women, there may be several schemes for their upliftment but nothing is going to make a bigger difference that what can be done for them at family level, Dr Mishra said adding that a girl child right after her birth need to be encouraged at all-level in the family and make them feel that they are not weaker sex.