Daily Times

If short dresses and skirts cause rape, how does it explain the rape of those in sarees and burqas?

If a rape occurs because of influence from western culture, how does that explain rape in remote rural villages as punishment?

If a rape occurs because girls roam around with guys freely, how does that explain rape by relatives within the family?

If rape occurs because some girls are dressed provocatively, how does that explain the rape of toddlers and old women?

The first task of the guilty is to blame the innocent. It’s an almost perfect inversion of culpability. It is also how nonsense like ‘Not All Men’ starts floating around. They must be the most illogical people on this planet to make an issue of women’s oppression about them. You never molested a woman? Here’s your gold medal.

Society refuses to address the elephant in the room, which is “how do we get our boys and men to respect women?”

Reflection is always important, more than anger or outrage, to arrive at solutions. Why hasn’t anything changed from the last time we read about such an incident? Or the one before that? Or the one before?

I’ll quotethe words of Amitabh Bachchan from his role in the movie PINK, “Till today we all have given our efforts in the wrong direction, we should save our boys, not our girls, because if we save our boys then our girls will be safe”. Society should start working on boys, and parents should stop treating their sons as deserving of more respect than their daughters.

Society always tends to blame women for the reasons stated above, instead why don’t we start raisingour boys properly and teach them to respect women. Every time an incident happens, people are in hurry to blame the girls. When will our society wake up? We need to work on ourselves first. Whether a girl or a boy, our minds need to be cleared of the thought that girls are to be protected and boys are to be controlled. We need to treat them equally from the day they are born. We should teach both our boys and girls equal values. Both need to be caring, both need to be fighters, both need to be career-oriented, both should have the responsibility of family and the list goes on. Boys are not from mars and girls are not from Venus. Let them be from planet earth and let them respect each other. The day that happens, girls will be much safer.