12.12.

12 >>One Billion Rising campaign launched in Rajasthan

One Billion Rising campaign was launched in Rajasthan on December 10, the International Human Rights Day. The campaign is a global movement launched to stop violence against women. Explaining the background of the campaign, Ms. Bhasin said the data released by the United Nations showed that globally one out of every three women was beaten up or raped or both. >>

>>Ageing with dignity

The truth about ageing in India is that we have not yet built an adequate knowledge base to respond to its multifarious challenges. So says the United Nations Population Fund in its recently released Report on the Status of Elderly in Select States of India . Three-fourths of the elderly in India live in rural areas and bear the brunt of poverty, illiteracy, income insecurity and inadequate health care. widowhood is over 50 per cent among women. The survey also reports high levels of substance abuse. On average, there is equal reliance on public and private health care facilities. The economic burden incurred by the elderly to make provision for health care is compounded by the fact that most of them have to work to make ends meet and enjoy no social protection to speak of. the proportion of the segment aged 60 years and above is projected to grow by 360 per cent by 2050, compared with a mere 60 per cent rate of increase in the overall population a product of the decline in fertility rates and the increase in longevity. A rapid rise in the numbers of the elderly would impose additional responsibilities on an ever-shrinking population in the working age and raise fresh social challenges in the context of the ongoing nuclearisation of Indias traditional joint family

20.12.12 >>Time to be ashamed/the delhi gang rape incident

Even nuts-and-bolts measures, like enhanced funding for forensic investigations, upgrading training of police to deal with sexual crimes, and making expert post-trauma support available to victims, are conspicuous by their absence. The hideous gang-rape in Delhi is part of the continuum of violence millions of Indian women face every single day; a continuum that stretches from sexual harassment in public spaces and the workplace to physical abuse that plays itself out in the privacy of our homes far more often than on the street. Third, this is not a problem of policing alone. As Professor Ratna Kapur argues in an op-ed article in this newspaper today, there is something profoundly wrong in the values young men are taught in our society values which bind the parental preference for a male child to the gang of feral youth who carried out Sundays outrage or the hundreds of thousands of husbands who were battering their wives that same night. Finally, Indias society rails against rape, in the main, not out of concern for victims but because of the despicable notion that a womans body is the repository of family honour. It is this honour our society seeks to protect, not individual women. It is time for us as a people to feel the searing shame our society has until now only imposed on its female victims.

>>Rape and the crisis of Indian masculinity

RATNA KAPUR
Rape is not simply about law and order, or about deranged individuals. Nor is the problem going to be solved by more laws, more police on our streets, more CCTV cameras on our buses or stiffer sentences for rapists. The gang rapes that are occurring with alarming regularity must compel us to reflect upon who we are as a society. Just like the killing of young innocents is forcing Americans to address the societal reasons for such violence and not just blame one individual, Indians need to understand that gang rape is not just an aberration committed by inhuman men. As women enter the work place and the public arena, their boldness and confidence seem to trigger a sense of insecurity in a society where men are used to being in charge. Sense of displacement

Is the sight of a young smartly-dressed educated female professional generating a sense of displacement in men?. That they are entering male bastions of power has challenged the sense of superiority and entitlement of the traditional Indian male. Built for bias What is required at this stage is not more protection and security, but education. The grooming of young men to have a feeling of entitlement by Indian parents breeds a sense of masculinity and male privilege. Son preference simultaneously erodes the possibility of respect for women, as girls are seen as unwanted or burdensome. Such inequalities produce the very hatred against women in the public arena that we are witnessing throughout the country. When women do not cower or display their vulnerability thereby inviting the protection of the virile Indian male what follows is a sense of emasculation and aggrievement on the part of these men. More law or calls for the death sentence are not the answer to what is a deeply ingrained societal problem. We need to think about how we can handle womens equality in ways that are not perceived as threatening. That demands greater responsibility on the part of parents as well as society not to raise sons in a way in which they are indoctrinated with a sense of superiority and privilege. There is also a need on the part of young men to be actively involved in their schools and communities in advocating womens equality rights. (Ratna Kapur is Global Professor of Law, Jindal Global Law School, NCR) As women assert their identity and enter his bastions of power, the traditional Indian male is reacting with violence

Other solutions: 1.Speedy justice: to reinforce faith in justice and to act a an effective system of deterrence. 2. Increasesd police/population ratio. 3. Forensics 4.post trauma treatment.

>>Castration is not the right legal response

ANUP SURENDRANATH

There is a fascinating urban legend that Apples logo is dedicated to Alan Turing, who committed suicide by biting into a cyanide injected apple. A few years after he was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code in World War II, Alan Turing was convicted in 1952 for homosexual acts in England. He agreed to the administration of female hormones when faced with incarceration. The intuitive appeal chemical castration has as a method of drastically reducing the incidence of rape, I argue, is largely misplaced because it misunderstands the nature of rape as a crime. Rape is not about sex. Rape is about power, violence, intimidation and humiliation. Attempts to reduce the incidence of rape by controlling the sexual urge of men are bound to be ineffective because they invoke a very shallow and inadequate understanding of rape. Surgical castration does not mean removal of the penis, but is instead the irreversible surgical removal of the testosterone producing testes. Chemical castration involves injecting anti-androgen drugs that suppress the production of testosterone as long as the drugs are administered. The limited role that sex has to play in understanding rape is further borne out by the fact that not all sex offenders are the same. In essence, an understanding that requires us to look at rapists merely as individuals engaging in deviant sexual behaviour is inaccurate.Rapists fall into different categories including those who deny the commission of the crime or the criminal nature of the act; blame the crime on factors like stress, alcohol, drugs or other non-sexual factors; rape for reasons related to anger, shaming, violence, etc; rape for reasons connected to sexual arousal and specific sexual fantasies, etc. Administering anti-androgens to rapists outside the last category will not be an effective response to check the incidence of rape. Mapping the long standing demand in India to reform the definition of rape (beyond penile-vaginal penetration) to include object/finger-vaginal/anal penetration on to the different categories of sexual offenders shows that a sexual intercourse-based understanding of rape is extremely narrow. It is difficult not to succumb to the intuitive appeal of chemical castration as a response to rape. But it is an intuitive appeal that fades away on intense scrutiny. Any meaningful attempt to protect women against rape must engage with gendered notions of power entrenched in our families, our marriages, our workplaces, our educational institutions, our religions, our laws, our political parties and, perhaps, worst of all, in our minds. There are many violent manifestations of these entrenched patterns of power in our society and while rape is certainly one of them, it would be a great disservice to empowerment of women in this

country to not attach the same kind of urgency and significance to gender violence beyond rape. The view that it will deter rape is misplaced and based on a narrow, sexual intercourse-definition of the crime

>>The rape case episode

The decline in rape in the U.S. has mainly come about not because policing has become god-like in its deterrent value, but because of hard political and cultural battles to teach men that when a woman says no, she means no though we might condemn rape, our culture shares the rapists values. Indias mass culture is replete with misogyny. This mass culture accurately reflects the values of a son-worshipping society in which large-scale violence against women is seen as entirely legitimate running the gamut from street harassment on Holi to female foeticide. Policing cant change a culture that produces and legitimises violence against women. From the western experience, it also becomes clear that even the best-resourced policing can have only a limited impact on deterring and punishing rapists. In the US, just 3 of every 100 rapists ever see the inside of a prison cell due to low reporting of cases and low conviction rates. The point here isnt that Indias less-than-luminous conviction rates 26.5 per cent nationally, similar to the U.S. average; 41 per cent in Delhi are less grim than they seem. improved policing can mitigate the problem. More officers, particularly women officers(policemen to people ratio) on the streets, will deter street sexual harassment and stalking. Capacity building for investigation and prosecution will lead to a more effective punishment of perpetrators. Even better lighting in public spaces has been shown to yield results. Legal reform, another centrepiece of the ongoing campaign, is also needed but will achieve nothing unless it is backed by investigative and prosecutorial capacity. Even as public anger on rape mounts, it is important to understand that policing is a small part of the problem and can only be a small part of the solution

31.12.12 >>No kidding with parents: China

China, whose national legislature has amended its law on the elderly to require that adult children visit their aged parents often or risk being sued by them. State media say the clause will allow elderly parents who feel neglected by their children to take them to court. The move comes as reports abound of elderly parents being abandoned or ignored by their children. A rapidly developing China is facing increasing difficulty in caring for its aging population. Three decades of market reforms have accelerated the breakup of the traditional extended family, and there are few affordable alternatives, such as retirement or care homes, for the elderly or others unable to live on their own.

>>No candlelight protest for Lalli Devi

BADRI NARAYAN
Who will listen to the voices of the margins? Margins mean those who are not in the capital, those who are not part of the urban middle-class, and those who are not in the gaze of the TV camera. Margins mean those who are silent because they have no one to tell their stories to. Delhi citizens rightly raised their voices against the brutal gang-rape of the 23 year-old woman who tragically died on Saturday morning. But what about the other statistically established truth? That rape and assault are daily occurrences in the lives of Dalit women? Most crimes committed against Dalits remain unrecorded because the police, the village councils, and government officials reflect the biases of the Hindu caste system. Crimes against them also go unreported because of fears of reprisals, intimidation by the police and their inability to pay bribes. A report released by the Amnesty International in 2001 found an extremely high number of sexual assaults on Dalit women perpetrated by the powerful combine of landlords, upper-caste villagers, and police officers. The study estimates that only about 5 per cent of the attacks are registered, with 30 per cent of the rape complaints dismissed as false. The study also found that the police routinely demand bribes, intimidate witnesses, cover up evidence, and beat up the women's husbands. Even where rape victims are murdered, the culprits go unpunished. Worst victims Dalit women are the worst victims of sexual violence because they face oppression at three levels caste, class and gender.

Dalit women undergo sexual oppression, economic exploitation and socio-cultural subjugation. But the judicial system routinely fails them. Dalit women are invisible not just for the media and the police but also seemingly for the judiciary, considering the glaring lack of genuine efforts to resolve their cases. For the public outrage against the Delhi gang rape to have real significance, it must also lead to the victimised Dalit women also getting justice. (Badri Narayan teaches political science at Allahabad University)