IT’S STILL TWO CENTURIES AGO FOR MANY WOMEN

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Peel Police regularly sends out advisories about seeking public assistance in a wide range of cases in Peel, a region within the Greater Toronto Area.

Everything from break-and-enter, scams and hit-and-run to missing persons, voyeurism and sexual assault.

There was one about a young girl being victimized while receiving driving lessons during an in-car lesson.

Around the time, my husband was reading Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal (Some People, Sometimes), a Sahitya Academy Award-winning Tamil novel by Jayakanthan which starts with a woman reminiscing about being touched inappropriately on a bus. 

How are the two connected?

I was telling a friend in India about both, disheartened by how nothing has changed. He expressed surprise at such things happening in “safe, polite” Canada. Then added, almost as an afterthought, “But in this case, nothing really happened, right?”

In a culture where ‘saali aadhi gharwali’ (a wife’s sister is as good as half a wife) is considered funny and macho, an inappropriate touch, a remark, a look...they can all hide under the guise of good old-fashioned fun.

Harmless, just kidding around, you know?

But anything that makes a woman feel unsafe is an assault.

A woman shouldn’t have to be raped brutally for it to be deemed an assault. The “Nirbhaya” (or Fearless, so named to protect the identity of the victim of gang rape) case in India shocked everyone into action in 2012. Tougher legislation was passed to deal with sexual assaults.

But paradoxically, it also became something people compared other incidents to. Was it as brutal/less brutal?

Some months ago, Indian media was full of one horrific rape case after another. A young girl in Hathras, another in Balrampur. Raped, mutilated, broken, burnt.

But, as someone I know said, there was no acknowledgement from otherwise very vocal women who are very active on social media. Powerful women, who have an opinion on everything and a tweet for every occasion, were conspicuous in their silence.

The shocking thing is that these reports cause a media storm and then fade away when the story of the next brutal attack breaks – as it does without fail.

A report in  Hindustan Times last month details the horrific gang rape of a minor by nine men in Madhya Pradesh.

Eight were arrested on charges of abducting and gang-raping a 13-year-old girl for three days. Two men first took her to a forest where they raped her. They then held her hostage at a dhaba (roadside restaurant) where the eatery owner and four others raped her. Sent home in a truck, she shared her trauma with the truck driver. Instead of informing the police, he raped her as well and left her on the highway. The poor child flagged down another truck, but that driver, too, raped her. 

According to statistics presented in an article titled No Country For Women in India Today, India reported 88 rape cases every day in 2019, a total of 32,033. And remember, these are the reported cases. A huge number still goes unreported for fear of stigma and/or reprisals.

According to another report, India is the most dangerous country in the world to be a woman because of the high risk of sexual violence and slave labour.

A survey of 550 experts on women’s issues, found India to be the most dangerous nation for sexual violence against women, as well as human trafficking for domestic work, forced labour, forced marriage and sexual slavery, among other reasons.

It was also the most dangerous country in the world for cultural traditions that impact women, the survey found, citing acid attacks, female genital mutilation, child marriage and physical abuse. India was the fourth most dangerous country for women in the same survey seven years ago.

At number 10 was the United States, the only Western country to be included. The Thomson Reuters Foundation said this was directly related to the #MeToo movement.

Here’s the full list of the world’s most dangerous places for women.

1. India

2. Afghanistan

3. Syria

4. Somalia

5. Saudi Arabia

6. Pakistan

7. Democratic Republic of Congo

8. Yemen

9. Nigeria

10. United States

Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal was first published in 1970. What has changed, really, half-a-century later as yet another International Women’s Day rolls around?