Its Time....

It is with sadness and shame that one heard the news of the Delhi gang rape victim succumbing to her injuries. It is a time for mourning and it is a time for condolences. It is also a time of introspection. It is a time to ask ourselves why this happens again and again in our society and what can be done to make sure incidents like this are reduced, if not outright eradicated.

Without question, our laws are outdated and needs change. In a country where life imprisonment is 14 yrs and where rape is generally seen as a lesser crime we need to decide what would be an adequate deterrent to it. The current punishments have proven to be inadequate and ineffective. We need to look at increasing the term of imprisonments and include the death penalty in those rarest of the rare instances. But this is not enough. More importantly, we need to see rape equally no matter who the involved parties are. Instead of the complicated mess of a law we have right now, the crime and its punishment should be made uniform.

Like in the west, we need to have a sexual offender database and make it public. The database should be for those convicted of any sexual crime with the biggest red flags assigned to child sex molesters. In crimes like these and in a society like ours social ostracism can and will be the biggest deterrent of all.

The experiences of victims at police stations have resulted in a majority of rapes going unreported. We need to have a mechanism where the first person to talk to a victim is a qualified rape counselor. That and more women officers in the police station will bring about a dramatic change in this.

More than anything our societal attitude toward women needs to change. In our society rape is the one crime where the victim is seen to be at fault as much as the perpetrators. Women are seen as the repository of familial honor. Due to which often the victim is seen as the one dishonored rather than the perpetrator. This change is the most important and possibly the most difficult to achieve. It probably will require a more communal push than any of the other changes mentioned above.

To stop these crimes from recurring again and again, there is an overwhelming amount of change that needs to happen; in our laws, in our government policies and above all in our communities. But how many more Amanaths and Daminis do we need before we make this change. If not now, then when?