Rape in India
“Rape has been defined as a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person’s consent.” The incidents of Rape is not unknown to the society, it has been prominent from the time Lucretia committed suicide as a result of rape that led to the overthrowing of the Roman Empire. But that was an era before, when rape was occasional and considered as one of those severe crimes that most people did not dare to commit. Time changed and today we are in a phase where rape is just another every day event. Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t intend to minimize the intensity of its impact, the point here is, today rape is a common word that has manifested to become the deepest darkest fears of most women in today’s time.
Rape in India, has reached a different magnitude all together. For the past decade, the country has seen more than a hundred reported cases and innumerable ones that slip through the pages of the law. The most shocking part is the ways adopted and the women targeted. Children between the ages of five to ten have been raped by neighbors, distant relatives, and strangers, have been subjected to brutal inhuman ways of sexual assault and rape. It does not stop there; they are often murdered following this, or even worse left to die. The most recent prominent being the Delhi rape case where a young girl was raped and an iron rod was used to tear her private part apart to an extent that her intestines had to be clinically removed before she passed away thirteen days after the crime.
Rape used to be the dark underside to society that is just now coming to light in the mainstream. Accordingly rape is ‘slut shaming’ in which woman and girls who wears certain kind of clothes or makeup is considered to be responsible for being raped. Even though all the evidences and reports are present in the hand of law, still the myth continues to take its position that it’s not the fault of the man who rapes a woman; it is the fault of the woman who gets raped. People in the society are just not ashamed of not helping the victim rather they proudly says that the woman was asking for it and she shouldn’t have gone out looking like that. My question is that why the attire of a woman is responsible for such cases and not the intention of the man?
If a person can think practically, he will say that the world is not climbing the staircase to rise high, rather it is using the staircase called ‘sexual assault’ to go down. So instead of crying and allowing the media to make profitable stories, we should proudly introduce the logic of EQUALITY between man and woman so that light shined into the dark corners of the society and few revealed truths does not get buried in the pages of history. The government of India has not made chemical castration or ‘hangs till death’ a suitable punishment yet and thus a brief tenure of six to seven years continues to remain the ‘punishment’ for a drastic crime called Rape. Hence we will say that there is a long road to go before it is said RAPE HAS BEEN ABOLISHED.
Biswajit Mondal-SCIT MBA(ITBM)2013-2015
