Silence is killing

I m not writing these words just to narrate something…….. What I want is I want to make you think. It's us who can bring out the change to the prevailing situation.
It has been a male dominated world all along the ages. Women have been relegated to a secondary place of marginal importance. She has been reduced to a thing, not a human being. They constitute half of the humanity even then they are just considered to be an object of gratifying sexual lust and physical desire of men. You can read every day in your newspaper of incident related to sexual harassment.

What is right way to encapsulate sexual harassment? Is it where the human being endangered, where the sex is pushed in to a state of denial, where the femininity of women is objectified, Where the self proclaimed patriarchs of the society guard their own in securities in the face of the depth and resilience of a woman’s character?

When you touch without touching me,
Ravishing my body, you rape my soul,
Reducing me to a hole,
Reminding me I’ m the weaker sex…..

Sexual harassment defies all boundaries. Can one look at it as a violation of one’s sense of self worth? Working women are expected to deal with such pressure if they’ve stepped out of the house. Are they supposed to accept a pat on the bottom as a casual, friendly overture, a joke with a sexual innuendo as office rapport, a leering smile as if it is the most normal response, a brush of the hand as an oft – repeated accident? The list is endless………………. I am not touching issue like rape or molestation.

For a women, sexual harassment encompasses the emotional trauma, an assault on the dignity, self – respect, a betrayal of trust, and the lowliest form of humiliation. It is a mutilation of the spirit, a struggle that defeats most who buckle under pressure.

"First of all, let me say that being sexually harassedsince 5th grade has gone beyond the damage of affecting the way I feel.... Now...I have no pride, no self-confidence, and still no way out of the [misery] I am put through in my school."— A Female College Student

Men and women have been declared equalize in the eye of law. I could reel off the various Articles of the constitution that ensure such equality but the valid changes have to come from within the social structure, of which the family unit is the microcosmic unit. A revolution in the mindset of men and women has to take seed right from the beginning of an upbringing of a child. A beginning where mothers teach their daughters to assert themselves as individuals and not suppress their life’s desires to meet the expectations of the father, brother, husband and in laws and the boss.
Why are we reducing ourselves to looking at cases of sexual harassment, rape and kidnappings as mere numbers? Is that all we can do - conduct survey, arrive at statistical answers and issue reports which make the headlines in newspapers like – “ 11000 rape cases and 12000 kidnappings reported in..? one out of every three women has experienced the horrors of living with sexual harassment. It’s so strange that only cases to do with people in power or the most recent Shiney Ahuja case came to light amidst glorification by the media.

Did anyone even give a thought to the implications of what a woman goes through under similar circumstances? What happens to all those countless women who live it as a part of their life every day?
“Kudos to the nurse who told the Delhi Court – ‘ I will not marry him, hang him.’ She had been raped by a ward boy, who is his lost desperate bid to save himself, came up with this ploy of offering marriage. But how many women possess the gumption to react like this? The shame, the social stigma attached to bringing their own plight to light keeps most women silent, alone and lonely in their predicament.
Silence is killing here,…

A lady with her grown up sons at the city mall was given a look- over by a passing group of young boys, a whistle was heard. The sons noticed it, the lady did too; she turned around and told her boys, ’let it go, don’t even think of saying anything.’ The two sons would have loved to collar the offenders but obeyed the mother, why?
Another mother tutors her teenage daughter ever so often, ‘don’t react to the passing lewd remarks on the roads, just ignore them, no point in speaking up..’ why? Fundamental Rights, Democracy, Freedom, that’s why..

friends ..wake up now... it's high time . if we still remain silent, one day it may happen to our family also.