Why care?
As I wait for my flight to India, I feel compelled to answer this question: Why care? Why care about prevention of violence against women and girls in India when there are so many other pressing causes. Time and again, as I have spoken to NGO professionals in India who are working in this field, they re-iterate this sentiment: “There is not much funding coming for this work.” “We cannot prove results in the same way as a school where you can get a headcount of students.” “There is always a shortage of funds for GBV.”
Where education and health based initiatives can translate over into numbers easily, prevention of violence results in a lack of numbers. Funding organizations and individual donors seldom appreciate this contradictory appearance of success.
However, this does not take into consideration the scale of the problem as it currently exists in India where one rape is reported every 16 minutes (as of 2019). According to the report complied for the year 2021 by the National Crime Records Bureau (a government body) crime against women rose by 15.3 per cent in 2021 from the previous year, with 4,28,278 cases registered last year following 3,71,503 cases in 2020. (NCRB's report on Crime Against Women. JournalsOfIndia. (2022, August 30). Retrieved March 8, 2023, from https://journalsofindia.com/ncrbs-report-on-crime-against-women/)
The nature of the crimes varies and only the most outrageous ones are brought to the notice of the law, albiet hesitatingly in most cases. Many families/individuals are too ashamed to bring these acts into the public sphere and the current count of even these heinous crimes like rape, kidnapping, dowry deaths, domestic violence is a gross under-representation.
A great deterrent towards reporting cases also comes from the long history of the delay and often infamous outright denial of justice as happened in the case of Bilkis Bano. The 11 men who raped her and murdered her family members (in 2002), including her 3-year old daughter, were released by the Courts in August 2022, on account of their ‘good behaviour.’
While I agree that rape is perhaps one of the more horrible manifestations of violence; the truth is that, in India, a low-level of violence persists against females in public/private/work spaces on a constant basis ,… like a hum in the background which then regularly explodes into the limelight with a shocking case like the rape, murder and hanging from a tree of two low-caste Dalit Hindu sisters in Uttar Pradesh in September 2022. (Rahman, S. A. (2022, September 16). Two teenage dalit sisters raped and murdered in India. VOA. Retrieved March 8, 2023, from https://www.voanews.com/a/two-teenage-dalit-sisters-raped-and-murdered-in-india/6750136.html#:~:text=A%20crime%20scene%20tape%20cordons,15%2C%202022.)
There is a general sense of a lack of safety for women in India and it is important to heed this sense to ensure one’s safety and survival while here. While Indian women are outspoken and visible in the public sphere nationally and globally, those of us who grew up in India and those who continue to live here know the reality on the ground.
However, despite all this, violence against girls and women in India, is not a cause that attracts a lot of attention from donors - neither Indian, nor foreign. Sadly, there is not even a lot of awareness about this problem outside of India. Working towards an end that is not a quick fix solution requires patience and perservence as well as a vision of what can be, of what a more equitable society would look like in the Indian context.
Within India, there is an existing patriarchal setup that does not care to be questioned or disturbed. It is deeply rooted not just in the structure of society but in the psyches of both men and women. It is deeply rooted in our traditional practices and beliefs, in our mythologies and out-moded readings of religious texts and customs.
The Ahimsa Pilot Inititiative is a step towards supporting voices for change in a hostile environment where the work is all uphill and the goal is yet distant.
