Lulling women into false sense of security

Open any newspaper and you will see small news items on burglaries. Break-ins and robberies are on the rise. Youngsters are taking to burglary to fund a lavish lifestyle. They rob from the upwardly mobile, the rich and fence the goods that they have stolen to earn cash that they use to buy more. They want a quick and easy way of earning money. Most burglaries are not violent and are opportunistic crimes. If you looked at the root cause of the crime it is that there are people in the world who have more than the robbers. And it is that ‘more’ that becomes an object of attraction. If people didn’t earn money, become rich and have wealth there would be no one who would want to rob them.

Robbery, as a crime, therefore is not caused by people who want to get rich quick, but by excessive wealth. Rather than criminalise robbery we should seek to get to the root causes of burglary and that is prosperity. People rob from those who have more. So, if everyone had less there would be no robbery. The solution for robbery is not better policing but to ban wealth.

Dowry deaths are not caused by excessively greedy people but by the institution of marriage. If people cohabited instead of getting married, then possibly there would be no question of dowry and therefore no dowry deaths. If parents stopped getting their children, especially their daughters, married, then the issue of dowry would cease to matter. So, if marriage is the cause of dowry, then rather than criminalising dowry would it not be more effective to ban marriages? After all, in cultures where marriages are no longer relevant you don’t hear of dowry deaths. So, the solution for dowry deaths is to ban marriages.

India has the highest number of traffic accidents in the world. Causes of death include speeding, poor safety, drunk driving, lack of helmets, lack of seat belts, jaywalking and the like. But, if you dig deeper and look at the root cause of road accidents, you will conclude that it is the presence of motorised vehicles. A vehicle weighing a ton, even travelling at a speed 20 kilometres per hour can do serious damage to life and limb. Obviously the solution to solving the terrible problem caused by road traffic is to ensure that vehicles don’t ever leave the parking bay. So, it will be within the law to buy a vehicle but not to take it out. No traffic, no traffic accidents. It is actually that simple.

If the logic in the above paragraphs seems a bit wonky, it is because it is. Throwing away the baby with the bathwater is no way of reducing a problem. If anything, it exacerbates it. But, the paragraphs above were in the same vein as those who, in the recent past, called for women to be more circumspect in their attire to prevent sexual assaults. If these people were members of far right religious organisations one wouldn’t have paid any heed to them. However, the people who called for women to be ‘better’ dressed included the Andhra Pradesh DGP Dinesh Reddy who linked flimsy  fashionable clothing to rape; and KK Seethamma, the head of the committee against sexual harassment in Bangalore University, who believes that women wearing ‘obscene clothes’ invite rape. Her definition of modest includes full-sleeved blouses with saris and long kurtas with jeans.   Neither Reddy nor Seethamma were speaking as private citizens. They were both speaking as authorities occupying positions funded by the taxpayer. One is a policeman who is supposed to make the world safer for all, the other is a teacher who is supposed to inculcate values, not dogma.

Telling women that dressing ‘properly’ will reduce chances of their being victims of sexual assault is lulling women into a false sense of security. In the National Crime Records Bureau report on all types of crimes that take place in India, among the more chilling statistics are rape figures. Every hour, two women somewhere in India are raped. Every third day, an elderly woman is sexually assaulted. About two girls aged under 10 are raped every day. Most of these are outside metros and cities in regions where women are dressed in a traditional manner. Fully covered. It wasn’t their clothes that caused the crime. It was their gender.

The problem is not with what women wear, it is with society that allows men to get away with rape and blames the woman for inviting it.

Harini Calamur is a media entrepreneur, writer, blogger, teacher,
& the main slave to an imperious hound. She blogs at calamur.org/gargi and @calamur on Twitter