Hearing the news of the brutal rape of the 5 year old in
Delhi yet again has shook the nation which has yet not fully come over the
horror of the gangrape victim case in December 2012.
The first case drew the people to the streets demanding
justice .Where the case made the people come in support of the victim, it also
led to certain weird remarks from various people at different levels of
leadership in our country. Some said
that girls should not be allowed outside of the houses without dupattas , the
others said they should dress according to the culture of the nation.People
even went to the conclusions to say that the consumption of western foods like
chowmein incites men.
But the recent case has put a stop to all arguments however
baseless they were in the first place. There is no possible reason on this
earth to violate a 5 year old let alone torture her. She has not even lived
properly and does not even realise the complexities of life. For her she’s just
a kid like the rest of them.Why then in the tender age of 5 , she has been
subjected to violence that will haunt her the rest of life if provided she is
saved after the incident.
The basic problem lies in the mindset of the men and women
of our society. We are too bound in the shackles of the society where the two
genders are not deemed equal. When a boy is born in the family they say that
the heir has come and when a girl is born they either equate her to the
goddesses or out rightly say ‘isse to paraye ghar jaana hain’.Both the
approaches are wrong because from the
moment they are born we associate the kids to their gender and sketch out their
future.
We have to raise them as individuals and not gender biased kids.
We have to teach our sons that they are equal to the girls. Just because they
are born as guys they do not have access to any special privileges. Similarly
the girls have to be taught that they are born as individuals and they have
full right to choose their own lives. They are in no way lesser than the boys.
We have been born as two different genders to keep a balance
in the world. But nowhere does this need to be established that men are the
superior race or women are the delicate darlings. The ladies should be allowed
to do their chores on their own and the men should be taught to respect them
and not treat them as an inferior race and treat them as commodities. Unless this
thinking changes in our existing patriarchal society, such incidents might just
keep happening.
We have to remember that at the end of the day we are all
individuals trying to complete our journey of life in our own ways. And that
journey is way too precious to everyone and we should respect that about each
other. We can’t find all the existing or potential rapists breathing, what we
can do is try and change the thinking of our next generation so that we finally
get a society where people are treated as individuals and not on their genders.
