India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

Thank you Gauri for sharing! Few days before I was telling my friend that women in India didnt realize that was we are going through abuse. This sometimes scares me if I think of relocating to India. All the issues that keep coming up to me are I cant travel after 8pm alone, even if I go to a mall I will be preyed by zillion eyes, unknowingly photographed, I cant dress the way I want to etc. I have to be dependent.

 

There was no way to prepare for the eyes, the eyes that every day stared with such entitlement at my body

There it is... that is exactly the issue... the way our men (and some women) are conditioned to think that they are entitled to a woman, her body, her feelings, her thought, her mind, her very being. Men in India think they can get away with anything and sadly, a lot of women believe it too and unfortunately, with the kind of intertwining we have of the society, politics and judiciary, that is the truth as well.

 

How can we explain this ,Gauri?We just cannot explain this.Like peatree said, the way our men have been conditioned to think and act is the root cause of all these atrocities.Even today I saw a movie (yes , 19/08/"2013") where the girl gets pregnant and the boy's father&mother says "my son is a male and he can do whatever he wants.Your daughter should be a ***** to sleep with my son".Whatever a male does is okay and he thinks it is his "right".
A lady dresses comfortably , the man thinks it is his right to stare.
Even when she dresses conservatively , she is not spared.
If she goes out late in the night , it is her mistake because she is not cautious and she can be taken for granted.
And what not .......

I pity the author.These men just put us down in front of the whole world.And would they ever realize how it feels when you are stared at or groped.And would they ever realize how yuck it feels when someone touches without permission.

I read a post where one ILite had equated rape to theft.The person was answering to the thread on whether dressing leads to rape.He/she goes on to say dressing liberally and not expecting to rape is equivalent to leaving the door open and not expecting a robbery.How cheap.So does the robber becomes noble here?Or he man who rapes becomes a saint?

I can leave my door unlocked here in Qatar and go to office without tension.Will the same apply in India?If your are caught of robbery here you get HARSH punishment.Same goes with sexual harassment.

Punishment should be harsher in India.Yeah , and all parents should bring up their kids with responsibility not like some *******.

 

A lot of my friends posted this on Facebook today and I have conflicted feelings to. To read this girl's experience was heart-breaking, sort of did feel like been there. But at the same time I feel that had it been an Indian woman that had written this there would people be so interested in it. A lot of my male friends (who may have stared down so many women) say that they are ashamed to be Indians after reading her experience. I wonder where that shame goes when the victim is an Indian girl? More so if she is a girl from a poor family. I remember once when our maid's daughter had applied lipstick, my neighbor commented "Now she will come back and complain that someone teased her."

Race and class is an important part of this discourse and makes a lot of difference.

Last year, I had a classmate - a white girl, who told me that she went hiking in India alone. She went to Delhi, Jaipur, Dharamsala, Himalayas and Simla. The moment she began the conversation I was already thinking of an exit strategy because I was sure she hated it and the conversation about sexual assault would come up. But to my pleasant surprise she said that she had lost her hotel reservation and was stranded in Delhi at midnight, but two autorickshaw drivers helped her. She stayed at the guy's home, with his family. When I asked her was she not scared? She says now it occurs to her that what she did could have landed her in trouble, but she sensed that the guys were good.
She said that friends had warned her that India was not safe for women but in her own words she had felt safer in "Delhi" than in "New York City."

Yes, there are good and bad people everywhere. If I have to write my experience in New York, it would read what this girl experienced in India. Taking a train from Bronx, Harlem or Brooklyn after 5 in the evening, in winters, still scares me. Whereas I took the last train from Bombay VT at 12 to my home in the suburbs (2 hour train ride) every single day for four-years and not once did I have to look over my shoulder. I don't know if it is the comfort of knowing the neighborhood, that makes the difference.

In fact sometime ago I even wrote a snippet about it http://www.indusladies.com/forums/s...194446-my-day-as-a-bodyguard.html#post2492899 (At the cost of shameless promotion of my snippet)

Can go on and on, more later.

 

Misogyny will never end. It manifests itself in different forms, but it never ends. In a patriarchal society it takes the form of placing the burden of honor solely upon women. In the west it takes the form objectification of women.

For example, the rape case of Steubenville, Ohio. The rape did not surprise me at all. What surprised me the most was the local community’s indifference, compared to the Delhi incident. There was pressure on witnesses by community members not to testify against the boys, since they had promising careers in sports prior to that. Goes to prove that misogyny exists as a result of objectification of women even in the “civilized” west.

That said Indian society’s morals are fast deteriorating. And that, I believe is because of an unnatural, unusual marriage of a shame culture and a guilt culture. The way we Indian Orientals became Occidentals and in the process discarded the good in both(ideas of honor and social justice) and adopted the bad in both (shaming of women and objectification of women) has the most to do with our present situation.

I wrote something based on what I’ve read, seen and experienced. It’s going to be long and also could be incorrect at certain parts, since there are certain assumptions I’ve made (which will be in a blue font). Read and opine. Do feel free to criticize. Here goes:-

How a person's conscience will react to a certain transgression that he commits is very much a function of his own culture. There are two different ideas about social control - Guilt culture vs Shame culture.

In the Indian context, we have for long been a Shame culture. We do not believe much in the concept of hell. Karma at the worst will affect your next generation or at the best will affect you in your next life. So there is no great fear of Karmic consequences. In fact, in no Asian culture (Indian/Chinese/Japanese), religious beliefs were of any use for social control. On the other hand, people were imbibed with ideas of honor, shame, conformity to traditions, etc. to shape them into good humans. I believe this is more visible among societies which have some well-defined sub-groups, since the idea of honor is stronger when a person identifies himself with a particular group (team-spirit).

Comparing the Indian society with the West makes no sense because we should actually be comparing our society with our Eastern counterparts. If we analyze the Chinese and Japanese cultures in the modern context, they have still retained elements of shame culture. I cannot speak about the Chinese society since the only Chinese I’ve known are professional acquaintances. But I can certainly speak about the Japanese since I’ve known a few of them very closely and I will say despite all that outward appearances of westernization, the concept of honor is HUGE in Japanese society.

Even the Chinese have long had these Confucian ideals which are still valued highly in their society. Confucian morals are mostly about honor, community, filial piety, etc.

Yet we as Indians have a very convoluted sense of honor, where honor means chastity of women but not chastity of men. It started with the Arabization of India, followed by the Westernization.

Pre-Islamic Arabia was a tribal society and as a result a shame culture. But with the advent of Islam, the shame culture had to be superseded by the guilt culture. At the same time, no tribe was ready to give up on their long-held ideas of honor. So they did the easiest thing possible. Impose the code of honor upon the weak members of the society – women. When Islamic empires came into existence in India, along with them came the idea of making women entirely accountable for the honor of the society. For example, the women of North India started wearing veils only after this. The act of ascending funeral pyres which was voluntary for both spouses had become reserved for women alone and also became a forced practice.

A guilt culture is naturally hypocritical. It will only work as long as you have a firm belief in divine retribution. Often people lose faith in God and they start to question their strict adherence to social norms. We have known about the many Muslim kings of India who were drunkards, who had large harems, who were drug addicts and extreme psychopaths. Their courtiers and officers were no different. The native courtiers too adopted the same and became extremely corrupt moral vacuums. Effectively, our shame culture had become the cross of women to bear and the men had no misgivings at all about being immoral. Completion of Phase I aka "Making women custodians of society's honor"

Then came the Victorian era. When the British came, along with them came the idea of Victorian morals. Very close minded sexual morals. And Indians once again eager to adapt to their colonial master’s “civilized culture”, were ready to accept the Victorian morals. But remember what I wrote about whose cross was it to bear? Of course, women.
The social liberalization of the West only happened after WWII, even though the ideas were sown before that. Women in the workforce gave rise to feminism. Trade unionists extolled socialism. And African Americans will not take segregation anymore. By then we were already independent. Indians were impervious to whatever social changes that were made by laws there.

Social liberalism, also brought with it asocial individualism in the West. Although independent, Indians still looked at the West as a source of idea for a proper civilization. We saw what we liked and we took that. Rather than taking from them the ideas of social justice and equality of citizens, we took what we felt was gratifying to us individually. Drunkenness, materialism and objectifying women became "modern" to us, since they were from the west. That was the completion of Phase II aka "Making women objects of sexual gratification".

What should have remained a shame culture has become a confluence of cultures of false-honor and hedonism. Neither the idea of making women the sole custodians of honor nor the idea of making women as objects for sexual gratification, were Indian. The former was Arab. The latter was Western.

If we check the UNODC reports on prevalence of rapes just taking the data for the year 2010, the number of rapes per 100,000 people in the India stands at 1.8. NCW recently said under-reporting is at 90%. Also, there are many cases of “consensual sex based on false promises of marriages” being registered as rapes. But I will not consider that. The actual number considering under-reporting also, should stand at 18 per 100,000 people

For US, the UN report puts the number at 23.7 in 2010. The rate of under-reporting is between 75% to 80%. Marital rape accounts for 26% of the cases in the US (US Dept. of Justice data). I will keep under-reporting at the lower 75% and also discount marital rape (not because it’s not bad, but because I do not have any data to compare it with in India)…So for US, the number is 70.15 per 100,000 people. That seems disproportionately higher compared to India, so I will altogether neglect under-reporting (that data for underreporting was from the mid 90’s anyway). So we can say in the US the rape is at 17.54.

I know misogyny is not a quantifiable phenomenon. But, if we choose to see rape as a symptom of misogyny, then the rape stats can be one way of quantifying misogyny. I think I can say, the Americans are just as misogynistic as Indians. Of course, no one leers at or catcalls or gropes a woman in crowded places in the US. But that is not because they do not see women as sexual objects. Just that, because of the expectations of proper social behavior as mandated by an affluent society that they have, they very well conceal their misogyny. In fact, like I mentioned above, the very idea of seeing women as sexual objects had started in west.


Let’s see how our eastern counterparts fared shall we? Japan is the best comparison, since that is a democracy just as India and the US. The UN report that I cited above puts the rate at 1 victim per 100,000 people in 2010. I do not have data for under-reporting for Japan. So it is a bit difficult to compare. So, I am resorting to anecdotal evidence here. A very pretty Japanese woman friend of mine who has spent months in LA and has also been to India feels that Japan is the safest.

Part of it is because of the high conviction rates in Japan and an efficient law enforcement system. But I will also attribute it mainly to the shame culture there. A proper shame culture where men are expected to conform to the expectations of the society just as women are. Where men go to the extent of killing themselves for things they consider an affront to their honor. Something that we had too. Something that does not exist anymore.

What happened to us? Why did we become so? Can we reverse the trend? Nope. No society that has tasted the fruits of a hedonistic, materialistic lifestyle will ever want to go back. We can never become a real shame culture. But are we headed in the right direction? Can we become fully western? And if we did will that somehow make us any better? I certainly do not think so. I do not think the west will become a better society ever (various reasons that can't be listed here). Neither will we. If we keep moving towards the western ideas of hedonism, while also preserving the ugly attitude of making women alone accountable for honor, we will end up becoming worse than what we are now. Never better.

 

That will change nothing ma'am. It is not the fear of severe punishment that makes one become a law abiding citizen. It is actually the fear of getting caught. There are many countries which have less harsher punishments for similar crimes. They instead have very good policing and very good conviction rates. The crime levels are much lower there too (in fact lower than Qatar).

I have been to Bahrain and the Emirates, but never to Qatar. From what I hear, Qatar is much similar to these countries. If that was true, the low crime rates there is because you live in a virtual police state. In every street corner there are policemen. Random checking often. In such a situation when there is a constant sense of being watched over one would think twice before committing a crime.

Agreed. But more than that kids should take pride in being honorable, law-abiding citizens. Kids should be taught that stalking a girl is not heroic. But who teaches you that? Parents? Nope. My parents never told me what kind of a person I am supposed to be.

On the other hand, I never watched many movies or the TV. The TV was only for news. I read books instead of watching our wonderful movies where our ideal hero is often the college rogue who asserts his manliness by "taming the shrew". I grew up well (I believe), because I was not fed this ugly notion that being a hoodlum is macho.

 

I asked this to a friend of mine once. "Where will you feel the safest? In a ghetto neighborhood of NY or in a posh neighborhood of Chennai?"

 

very well said archana..as you said they are good and bad in every part of the world..!i know US is much safer place for women but as you said they are people of that sort anywhere..i don't go much out alone..gym was just 2 streets away from my place..whites often mock at indian women coming close by and say namsthe..I don't what fun they have,they make sure to do it till u revert..i had many bad experiences in US too where bunch of teenagers all around or less than 14 yrs..they came close to me and their hands close to my body and face..i couldnt do anything but was panic and stopped going out for rest of the days..i feel safer in india may be bcoz of known neighborhood and I feel comfortable here..!