New Delhi, December 18: ‘She deserves it’ is the tag which always follows the victim who is raped. Never does one realize that a woman irrespective of what how she dresses and how she looks never wants to be raped.
From time immemorial rape has been used as a weapon to show women their righful place. It has been seen by men to show their manhood.. too show that they are capable to control the weaker sex.
But in spite of the gravity of the act, justice becomes all the more difficult, if the one who commits the act is a man of power.
What can be more appropriate to substantiate, then the recent rape of a Russian girl in Goa.
One politicians rapes and the other steps in to justify the act… a perfect camaraderie between two politicians. And of course a perfect display of age-old attitude towards rape.
Instead of condemning rape, Goa MP Shantaram Naik finds a way of justifying it.
He says that the alleged rape of the victim who has been going around till wee hours at the morning should be dealt in a different footings.
But when he realizes what an uproar his statement has created he comes back and says he was ‘misunderstood’.
By the time the debate turned out into a national issue, the alleged rapist, John Fernandes manages to abscond from Goa.
Well, it should not come as a surprise given the dilly-dallying that has always surrounded rape cases.
It is easier for an accused to be granted bail, but harder to get him convicted.
The perception that a woman is raped only because she has been inviting it by dressing ‘provocatively’ sounds lame if we go by the reported cases of rape.
The ‘Study on Child Abuse: India 2007’ Conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in association with UNICEF, Save the Children and Prayas, has revealed that children between the age group of 5 to 15 years suffers higher sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, the social stigma attached to it makes the incident more painful.
A teenager set herself on fire after she was sexually assaulted for two days because she could not bear the the bleak future that awaits her.
She committed suicide because she thought it was her fault that it happened.
While in another incident, a rape victim in Rajkot committed suicide when she found out that she was pregnant after two months of being rape.
“She was devastated after the incident, pregnancy was more than she could bear”, her distraught father said.
Rape can never be justified. It does not matter whether the girl was dressing provocatively or not.
A rape victim deserves the same justice and cooperation, extended to victims in any other cases.
But most importantly, justice done on time.
——Agencies