Raise Individuals!!!

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.