Women are not even Safe at Home!
While she is being stalked by men turning to beasts on the streets, she is not even safe at home!! The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics clearly indicates the marital home to be most unsafe place for an Indian woman. 43.6% of the crimes against women have their husbands and relatives as the offenders. The numbers are after excluding marital rape as it is still not recognized as a crime!!
Domestic violence is widespread and a serious problem in India than it is perceived to be! According to the National Family Health Survey Report more than one-third of women in the age of 15-49 experience domestic physical and sexual violence of some form. In reality, this number means millions of women suffer because of their own spouses and families!! Not only she is rebuked for cooking the food wrong; slapped for not taking the proper care of ‘his’ children; denied going out somewhere on her own; but even forced to have sex when she doesn’t want to or denied basic amenities as a punishment of not being submissive. All the tactics and activities used by the husbands to control their wives are surely being observed by the children at home. This means both boys and girls; grow up in circumstances where they see oppression of women as the culture. Boys grow up believing their right to behave in the wrong manner, while girls accept it as their destiny. A 23 year old woman was raped, sodomized and even forced to drink urine by her husband during their honeymoon in Thailand last December. On 30th December, 2013, Hazaribagh, Archana Devi was smashed at the police station when she went to file a complaint against her husband along with her brother. While millions of common women suffer from these injustices every day, their voices are suppressed before anyone could hear. The gender biasness has not even spared some of our celebrities. The famous silver screen celebrity Shweta Tiwari, former Miss World Yukta Mookhey has been victimized too. It is such an irony; a country which is called “Bharat Mata”; where married women are considered to be ‘Grih Lakshmi’; girls worshiped as ‘Goddess Durga and Saraswati’ fails to provide them a safe society to live in.
Even when a Domestic Violence Act exists; every nine minutes a woman is assaulted at the hands of her husband or family. When you marry a girl, you do not own her or her body. She is an individual, a human, who has every right to make her own decisions. She has the same fundamental rights that men have. Whatever the reason is, “Real men, don’t hurt women”. While the world says we are independent, all that strikes my mind is double standards! While they say, all the countrymen, all I can taste is misogyny! ———— About the Author: This article has been contributed by Srishti Raj, our intern. Srishti is a student of Computer Science & Engineering at KIIT University at Bhubaneswar. She is an avid reader and a keen observer who yearns to see a change in the society.
