A 27-year-old woman in Delhi registered a complaint against an auto-rickshaw driver and 3 other men for gang-raping her. The victim originally hails from Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh.
She had taken an auto from the Khajuri Khas area in Northeast Delhi for Kashmere Gate but realized that mid-way the driver had taken her near the ITO area of Delhi, she was later forced into a secluded room where the auto-rickshaw driver and three other men raped her and ultimately dropped her at Kashmere Gate.
The auto-rickshaw driver has confessed to his crimes but he insists that he had only called one other man. Medical examination of the survivor has been conducted by the doctors and an FIR has been registered against the driver and three of the accused men at the IP state police station.
The national capital has become a hub of crimes against women and rape cases have been mounting up in the union territory like a huge, stinking pile of garbage; something which poses a problem for everyone yet no one takes the initiative to get rid of.
A significant number of rape cases in Delhi are linked to public vehicles. In July, a cab driver was charged with raping a woman, who was an employee of a clothing brand in a mall on the Mehrauli Gurugram road. The police said that the driver had asked her to leave the rear seats and sit in the front seat.
In February, a thirty-year-old woman was on her way home to Noida, when she was gang-raped by three men when she boarded a shared auto from Ghaziabad.
As is evident, there is no dearth of these cases even after multiple initiatives by the government,
The introduction of women-only taxi services in the capital, such as Womencabs, Sakha Consulting Wings, etc., was a ray of hope. The reason these were introduced was that women no longer felt safe in vehicles driven by men, especially at night. However, the impact has been little to none.
However, is imposing unreasonably strict restrictions on the movement of the women in the household the way to go? To have to take extra precautions like keeping pepper sprays and learning self-defence is in itself beyond unfair.
Being denied your freedom(s) as a human instils in you the idea that maybe being born as a female is where it went wrong successively internalizing misogyny, by taking part of the blame on yourself and later attributing the same blame to other survivors as well.
No woman should have to curse her existence and womanhood just to meet the gruesome expectations of a cruel society. Is it so hard to support the assaulted victims in your family? Is it impossible to hold men accountable for what they did? The persistent casualization of rape owes a lot to the fact that we dissociate ourselves from every question and discussion concerning sexual exploitation until it happens to us. This casual attitude needs a rebuttal and so does the tendency of waiting till it is too late.
Also Read: Here is five News, You Missed If You Spent the Past Week Under a Rock
