Comment

On March 24, activist-writer Harini Calamur wrote an opinion piece for DNA titled ‘Is Delhi unsafe because of family and society?’, in which she argued that the spate of crimes against women in the capital could be put down to the way many Indians bring up children — especially male children.

Calamur said, mincing no words, that “the first and most important reason” for violence against women being so prevalent in India was “bad parenting of the male child.” “Utterly spoilt, not knowing that the word ‘no’ exists, not doing an iota of work within the house, and not brought up to respect either their sisters or their mothers, they grow up parroting their childhood behaviour,” she wrote.

I found myself thinking of this column quite often these past few weeks. Can it be argued that some of the most insidious problems our country faces — from disrespect towards women to flavour of the month corruption — can be put down to bad parenting? After all, a large part of parenting has to do with giving your children values by which they live the rest of their lives.

There’s so much that is wrong with Indian society — can’t it be correlated to the fact that many Indian parents don’t bother to teach their children the right principles? It might be too simplistic to link ills such as corruption to bad parenting; after all, corrupt people don’t necessarily make bad parents and they probably don’t see being corrupt as a ‘wrong’ they must shield their children from.

But I am agree with Calamur’s views on the way boys are treated in many Indian households, and I believe this can have very harmful long-term effects on their future families and on society. When a boy on a Delhi street harasses a girl, he does not see anything wrong with this because he has never seen women in his own family being treated with respect. You don’t even have to go that far: take the way boys and men are treated with just that little extra privilege in many households — the best food kept aside for them, their clothes taken care of... And this happens in many families that would be aghast to be told they were being unfair to the girls in any way — aren’t they being sent to school and college and encouraged to take up careers?

True, not all boys treated like household VIPs turn out to be stalkers or murderers, but they probably do live their lives with a super-sized sense of entitlement. The moment this is challenged, many of them respond with anger, disrespect and, sometimes, violence.

To create a society of strong women we need to know how to bring up our little girls the right way, but it can’t be denied that parents of little boys have an equally important role to play. Do they recognise it?