Empowerment alone cannot help our women.

Empowerment alone cannot help our women.

Introduction

It is sad that in this modern age there are still crimes committed against women, which is evidenced by the frequent incidents reported from time to time. Empowering Women is a key change agent but this alone is not the solution, first and foremost there needs to be the change in the mind-sets – respect each individual whether male, female or others.

Upbringing – it’s impact

This should have been quite easy for a country like India where everyone boasts about their values and belief, but unfortunately the events evidence just the contrary. It is not going to be easy to change the mind-sets, especially when we consider ourselves to be civilised (are we?). From the initial stage of upbringing itself, parents need to build that value and belief framework. In later years this should be a part of the education system as well. Later, this should also be part of the Human Resource Development in corporate and government employment.

Requirement of legal enforcement

To ensure that no individual can commit crime against women, and live to repeat the offence or let free, there should be effective police and legal action. The law should be flexible enough to choose punishment, which will set examples for others. At present, the judicial system does not punish the minors calling them to be under-aged, in the same way as adults (recollect the December 16th incident, the Nirbhaya case); what if the judicial system was empowered to sentence the offenders with life imprisonment and family planning. When the person is committing the crime so brutally that they can hardly be called humans, then how come the punishment be any less than others?

Amendments required at the level of security forces

As there have been incidents of police personnel repeating the crime with complainant, protecting the criminals and creating a barrier for women to seek justice, it should be required that such complaints should be dealt by female police. Each police station should have at least one senior female police officer. There should be alternate channels to raise complaints and probably one complaint should be shared or raised with different authorities (for instance a copy to district magistrate, district collector, home ministry, police commissioner etc.) in the hope that they will act honest fearing one or more of the others may not co-operate in hiding the crime.

Role of Society

Empowerment of women alone is not sufficient; there is a requirement for all individuals to understand that each human being has a right to live with dignity and to have freedom. As part of a civilised society each individual has expectations from rest of the society about how they should behave, and has expectations from society on how he or she should behave. It is not possible to assign a police constable to each woman in the country, whilst they can be asked to be vigilant and try to patrol as much area as possible. Each individual is responsible to raise his / her voice against crime, if there is an incidence in your awareness then do raise alarm and try to help; tomorrow this may happen to someone you care about and someone else may be present to help with similar mind set.

Self Defence – the supreme power

Gone are the days when women used to look down upon themselves. Society is becoming much aware and conscious now. We have fought well against the female foeticide which was much prevalent during the 80s. This was the time which led to a deep transformation and has greatly disturbed the male : female ratio in the country. Women have gathered much courage to protect their girl child. Our society has also visualised the women overcoming the social and moral torturous and superstitious customs and tradition like sati, child marriage, etc. We have grown up with widow re-marriage, introduced divorce in the society to relieve women of her struggling incompatible life.

Women should visualise their power and stand up with utmost confidence to raise a voice against the crime. The violence with respect to the sexual assault and rape cases has highly subdued the power and confidence of women in the society. Males have been overpowering us with their physical strength, though they understand that they will lose the fight if they can compete the women with her will power and intellect.

Introducing the self defence mechanisms right from the schooling age can help the girls and women to safeguard themselves and those around them from impending danger. To survive in such a cruel flesh eating society, the introduction of compulsory military training to every citizen could do much good. Females would be taught with the self-defence in order to protect themselves from the sadist inhuman evil components roaming in the society and save our motherland from such evil components roaming in the world.

Empowerment and reservation

Creating reservation is definitely not a means of empowerment of the women. Instead, the reservation term itself categorises women as the weaker section of the society. The reservation rules are a silly tactics by the politicians to gather their vote bank. Allocating the reservations for women right from the difference in the tax slab in the income tax deductions, is of no good sign for a developing nation. Women speak out a lot today regarding the equality, but we can hardly find any voice coming up to remove the rule for reservation. Everybody wants to utilize their opportunity to their best, though the race is falsely won. Reservation is again a type of discrimination of gender in the society.

Conclusion

To be precise, the women need to understand their positives and negatives to have a confident outlook in the society. The more they can analyse their true failures, the more they can work upon them and get a resolution to overcome the status. Instead of facing the reality in its face, if we try to search for a back door entry for escaping the scenario in a easy and comforting way, then we cannot resolve the current status and help the Indian women in actuality. It is high time for our women to look within self and nourish themselves with the good traits and fight back the evils in the society, instead of cribbing for the reservation and empowerment for women.