My dear blogbuds and readers,
As I was checking my mail today, I came across this forward. No no .. this is not one of those chain forwards or friendship forwards. Here’s an excerpt of what I got –
“An incident took place in Pune – a young girl was raped by a man posing as a plain clothes officer; he asked her to come to the police station when she and her male friend didn’t have a driver’s license to show. He sent the boy off to get his license and asked the girl to accompany him to the police station. Took her instead to an isolated area where the horrendous crime was committed. The law [which most are not aware of] clearly states that between 6 pm and 6 am, a woman has the right to REFUSE to go to the Police Station, even if an arrest warrant has been issued against her. It is a procedural issue that a woman can be arrested between 6 pm and 6 am, ONLY if she is arrested by a woman officer and taken to an ALL WOMEN Police station. ”
Saturday, January 7, 2006 (Noida):
A school girl has reportedly been raped in Delhi’s satellite town of Noida.
The 16-year-old was returning from her aunt’s home when she was allegedly gangraped on January 5 in Sector 24 of the area.
Monday, January 9, 2006 (New Delhi):
A study indicates that up to 10 million female foetuses may have been aborted in India over the past two decades following prenatal gender checks.Fewer daughters have been born to couples who have not yet had a boy, according to the report published in Britain’s leading medical journal Lancet.The journal said researchers studied data on female fertility from a continuing Indian national survey of six million people in 1.1 million households.Analysing information about 133,738 births, the researchers found couples were less likely to have a girl as a second child if their first child was a girl.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006 (New Delhi):
The murder of a call centre employee in Bangalore last month has sparked discussions on improving the safety of women working in late night shifts.
The National Commission for Women is leading the initiative for a safer work place.
The Commission has pointed out that women constitute 40 per cent of the BPO industry’s workforce, making a case for the BPOs to overhaul the way it treats female employees.
“We should sensitise male co-workers and empower the women, and provide them self-defence training,” said Girija Vyas, Chairperson of the Commission.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006 (Jaipur):
The alleged gangrape of an Anganwadi worker in Rajasthan by two government employees of the Woman And Child Welfare Department has shaken the administration. Lacho Devi, a tribal woman from Karauli district, was allegedly raped by senior officials while she was attending a 10-day programme for Anganwadi workers in Karauli on December 30, 2005. But it is only now that a case has been registered after pressure from social activists and women’s groups.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006 (Auraiya):
A sixteen-year-old girl in Uttar Pradesh’s Auraiya district paid a heavy price when she resisted a rape attempt, as the attackers chopped her hands off. Anju Gupta was returning home from a local market in her village when three men forced her into a nearby field and tried to rape her. They cut her hands off when she resisted them violently.But that was not the end of trauma for Anju, as the local police refused to register an FIR against one of the attackers, Viresh, whom she recognised as being from her village.
It was only after the intervention of the DIG in Kanpur that the case was registered.
However, the police claim their investigations revealed that Anju had tried to commit suicide when her affair with Viresh became public, and that is how she lost her hand.
Anju and her family can now only hope that her case doesn’t become another statistic in the worsening law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006 (New Delhi):
A 22-year old woman was allegedly molested inside the secretariat of Delhi government on Monday. Manju, a resident of Ghaziabad, has accused a supervisor in the maintenance department of molesting her. She had gone there looking for a job. Manju claims that when she reached the secretariat, Ranbeer Singh Negi molested her. What is shocking is that her claims that the incident took place very close to the chief minister’s office.
News Courtesy: NDTV.com
Here’s some more information, courtesy : Amnesty
- Every two seconds somewhere in the world, a woman is subjected to violence
- At least one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime.
- In Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua Mexico, over 400 women and girls have been killed or disappeared in the past thirteen years.
- An alarming number of these cases remain unsolved…
- Federal authorities acknowledge that 177 state officials had acted negligently. Not one of them has been brought to justice
So is women’s liberation a far fetched fantasy? Why is everyone so callous and indifferent to the woman? Why is she not respected? Why is she being objectified like this? Is a woman nothing but a toy to a man to satisfy all his needs?
Would you be this indifferent if any of the women mentioned above were anyone you knew or cared for? I always wanted to write on this topic. And thanks to NDTV, I was able to give you a 3 month history of some of the snippets relevant to this issue.
These are some horror stories that actually made it to the news.
God only knows how many are suffering in silence, tolerating all atrocites and taking all kinds of abuse. My silent prayers go to them.
~Spero ergo sum~™ 