Gender Equality in India

India rape statistics from 2012. Only 2.02% of the registered rape cases led to conviction! 

And here I was terrified of swimming in the ocean.  

Not india specific, but couldn’t help sharing. 

Every girl/woman in India experiences some level of violence at some point in their life, whether it's something that people generally consider "trivial," or something that's life threatening and taken more seriously.

The list of what girls in India should and should not do only becomes longer and longer the older we become. Many of us have heard some version of this growing up – “Who asked you to talk? Don’t speak so loudly. Don’t laugh so loudly. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Sit like a girl. Dress like a girl. Behave like a girl."

When we’re born, we’re either unwanted or a disappointment because we are seen as a burden to our families. Since we’re young, we’re taught to serve the men food first and then sit down to eat when they have finished, to speak only when spoken to, and to never draw attention to ourselves in any way because we could provoke someone to make a creepy comment or inappropriate gesture towards us. Sometimes we’re told that we don’t need an education like our brothers and we’re married off as children. Even when we are sent to school and taught the value of education, we’re told that our top-priority should be marriage when we’re in our 20s.

We hear people talking about how much we’re worth to this new family we’re marrying into. We’re told that it’s not good for us to live by ourselves and that it’s necessary for a man to be present in our lives to take care of us. We’re sold and bought for a price in the name of “gifts” and tradition, whether it’s in cash, in gold, in cars, in houses, or in land. It’s like we’re being transferred from one house to the next, from one caretaker to the next, from one owner to the next.

We’ve been violated in the most personal ways by strangers and by people who we thought loved us. We fear the groping and the leering eyes that undress us as we walk in public places. And then we’re told that we shouldn’t have been wearing something that outlines the shape of our bodies. We’re taught that in order to prevent incidents like this, we should stay at home after a certain time, that we shouldn’t be in places considered inappropriate for girls and that we shouldn’t put ourselves in a position where something like this could happen to us. We’re also taught that we should never tell anyone about these incidents because it brings shame upon us and our families, ruins our reputation, and no other family will want their sons to marry us.

In marriages, we’re beaten and raped and then asked what we did to make him do it – maybe we didn’t cook well enough; maybe we deserved it because we said something to make him angry; maybe when we were married, our fathers didn’t transfer property titles like the husband and his family had asked. Then we’re told that it’s our duty to salvage this relationship and that we should do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen again. So we try – we try to cook well, keep the house clean at all times, make sure the children don’t stress him out and yet, it happens again and again. Then they tell us that our husbands are under a lot of stress and can’t show it to everyone. As the wife, it is our duty to bear with it for now.