I write these words two Sundays before they are to be published, on what is known (but infrequently noticed) as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which falls on November 25 every year, but tends to receive less press attention than World Anti-Obesity Day the next day. When this column appears, only two days will remain of a worldwide campaign for “16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence”, an international campaign organised by women’s NGOs since 1991. But it doesn’t really matter how many days of activism remain — two days will not be enough, nor will 365. It is one of the most shameful aspects of human civilisation that we have entered the 21st century having failed to end a practice that has already blighted the other 20 — the practice of using violence against women.
And the practice remains widespread. Men are, of course, physically stronger than women, so the one thing they can usually do is to impose themselves violently on the weaker sex. Wife-beating may not be as common as it used to be, but it persists nonetheless: many a bruise that a woman, out of pride, tries to pass off as the result of a household accident has in fact been caused by a man. But that is not the only form of violence perpetrated against women: the widespread use of female genital mutilation, especially in conservative Islamic communities in Africa, with young girls forced by a combination of culture and coercion into having their clitoris amputated, often with lasting pain as a result, is another example.
Widely prevalent
Worse still is the persistence, in parts of Latin America and much of the Islamic world, of what is euphemistically called “honour killing”. This is the ultimate retribution imposed by men on women whose actions are deemed to have besmirched the family’s honour — the exaction of capital punishment, often for “crimes” like choosing to marry a man from another community. Not a single year has gone by in our century without several reports of such killings, and God knows how many unreported ones. Strikingly, honour killings have even occurred this year in England and Italy, committed by Muslim immigrants from Pakistan and Turkey, respectively, who killed their own daughters and sisters for having too readily adopted the sexual mores of the countries into which their parents had chosen to immigrate.
But this does not mean that Indians, including non-Muslims, have anything to be complacent about. We may not conduct forced amputations of clitorises in our country, but in parts of India we still worship women who have, often under intolerable pressure, cast themselves on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. We have the uniquely Indian practice of burning brides whose parents have not paid as much dowry as expected. And our more prosperous northern States have so extensively developed the practice of aborting female foetuses, once identified in the womb, that we have an odd statistical disparity in both Punjab and Haryana, of more than 11 men for every 10 women. The missing women are those who have faced the ultimate act of gender violence — pre-emptive murder for the mere fact of having been conceived female.
No exceptions
If Punjab and Haryana demonstrate that prosperity is no guarantor of enlightenment — that it is possible for a medieval mindset to flourish amidst post-modern shopping malls — Kerala, sadly, has begun to prove that even education does not necessarily breed decency toward women. I write this with deep regret, having often, in these columns, celebrated the empowerment of Kerala’s women (and been put right on the subject by Keralite women who know better.) But it is now widely reported that violence against women is rising in Kerala — some figures show a 300 per cent increase. Kerala’s women are educated, and so are their men, but women still do not escape the iron law of social conformism, and many have driven up the State’s suicide rates to record levels. The large number of Keralite men working in West Asia, separated from their families and imbibing from their new surroundings a traditionalist attitude towards women, does not help; they often return home unprepared to deal with the expectations of the educated women they have left behind, and when clashes occur, the resort to violence is all too common. If violence against women is on the rise in educated Kerala, then we have a national problem that policy-makers cannot afford to ignore. Every time a woman is the victim of violence anywhere in our country, each Indian is diminished.
Raising awareness