Delhi is the Nation Capitol of
India and is the second most populous and largest city in India. With a population
of 16.3 million, 8 million being men and 7 million of them being women, the issue
of rape and the sexual harassment of women has become a major social problem.
According to the article “India Tragedy seen as Transitional Moment” by Holly
Kearl, Delhi has a high rate of street harassment and rape. Delhi is considered
“Rape Capitol” with rapes being reported every eighteen hours and in the year 2011,
there were 24,000 reported rape cases. On January 10, 2013 “WMC Features” published
the article “India Tragedy Seen as a Trasitional Moment”, written by journalist Holly Kearl. Holly talks about
the death of a 23-year old Indian women who was gang raped by six men who assaulted
her with a pipe and then later killed while she was on her way home from the
movies after watching “Life of Pi” with her male friend . Although accounts of
public rapes and sexual harassment are very common for Delhi, this particular case
surged an up roar amongst its people. Thousands of people gathered together to
protest and to express their fury and rage over the incident. After news, her
death on December 8, 2012 the issue went global and people around the world
were furious. This puzzled journalist Holly Kearl, why were the people of Delhi
just now responding to this ongoing issue. As I read and did research on this article,
I too wandered why the people of Delhi are now reacting to this issue, more
importantly the women of Dehli. Why have they been quiet for so long until now?
To get the answers to her questions Holly Kearl talked to some of the women at
the protests to get some of their opinions. She stated that she had gotten the answer
that she needed when she spoke to Ambitabh Kumar, a learder of the campaign “I
Stand for Safe Delhi” these were her thoughts, “young India is sick of the
hypocritical approach of blaming the victim…This time we were not going to let
this happen.” He continued, referring to the spontaneous nature of the
demonstrations, “Also, there was no ‘leader,' hence the common girls and boys felt
empowered to speak out loud, to stand against this injustice.”
Ambitah Kumar’s comments on the
rape issue were very interesting to me but what stood out the most was her
comment about how “Young India is sick of the hypocritical approach of blaming
the victim. As a sociologist in the making, my studies have taught me to
analyze this situation from a macro perspective this is a matter of Conflict Theory
in the division of gender in which produces the Feminist Theory. In this case,
it would be gender inequality. As I was doing some research on the excessive
amounts of rape and sexual harassment cases, I came across a link that
discussed a term called “Eve Teasing”. “Eve Teasing” is a term that justifies
the deviant act of men being able to publically sexually, and verbally harass women.
This term uses the word “Eve” in reference to the biblical Eve, the first woman.
This implies that woman in most cases act in very provocative manners to pursue
men, almost had Eve did in order to get Adam to eat the forbidden fruits. Men
think that this justifies there inappropriate behavior. With terms like “Eve Teasing”
that view women as sexual, provocative, immoral creatures how are we to change
this concurring event. But, Delhi is not alone the Unites States as made an
attempt to assist women in the what seems almost impossible act of fighting for
women’s rights. In the years 2000 and
2001 the U.S and Delhi came together to create a program called(CREA) “Creating
Resources for Empowerment and Action”. The program focuses on the promotion of
women’s human and sexual rights. They focus in increasing accesses to
information and resources providing leadership and training and advocating for
social and policy changes in the Global South. However, it is now the year 2013,
the program was created 12 years ago, and yet we still see an increase for
sexual assaults on women and no results in the advocacy in women’s rights. How
many more gang rape cases like the 23-year old young Indian woman will it take
before the world opens their eyes and does something about this issue? Or was
this the case?
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