Real change needed

At exactly the same time five men were sexually assaulting a 22yearold photojournalist in the abandoned 10acre Shakti Mills Compound in Mahalaxmi a sixyearold girl from a lower middleclass Tardeo locality went to meet her father a grocer The shop was hardly a few metres from the girlrsquos house On the way an unidentified person saw the girl picked her up under the pretext of offering a bar of chocolate took her to a secluded spot stripped her stopped short of raping her in the legal sense but molested her for 30 minutes by touching her genitals and other parts of the body and then dropped her to the same spot where he picked her up Sobbing the girl described the pain to her parents They rushed her to BYL Nair Hospital for a medical checkup where their worst fears were confirmed The perpetrator is absconding while the family is still in shock In Mumbai sexual assaults on women are so common that sadly unless the event is extraordinary like the gangrape of a photojournalist inside an abandoned mill neither the police nor the media and nor the society as a whole takes notice This is a real tragedy Last year Mumbai Police registered only 200 cases of rape and 298 cases of what the Indian Penal Code calls lsquooutraging the modesty of a womanrsquo For a city with a population of close to 16 crore the figure is not only unrealistic it is heartbreaking It points to the fear women have about Indiarsquos criminal justice system in fact the sheer act of entering a police station is traumatic as policemen want to keep crime reporting low to show their jurisdiction as the one with minimum crime Rapists therefore get away on two counts they know their victims would most likely not report it and second the police will not take the victim seriously And even if they do they wonrsquot be serious about catching the perpetrator Rape is thus not only a sociopsychological problem it is a law and order issue that needs to be tackled swiftly Governments win over their constituents by not only ensuring governance but also by meting out quick justice be seen as an efficient government that provides security to each and every citizen In all these departments the law and order machinery has proved a dismal failure Admittedly the world over rape is the most underreported crime in Canada for instance a nationwide survey concluded that only six per cent of rapes are reported to the police In India not only is there underreporting of rape by a large percentage it is also among the least convicted crimes As per a report by Praja a governance NGO Indiarsquos conviction rate for crimes against women is three per cent Even fasttrack courts are not fasttrack The muchpublicised trial in the Delhi gangrape of Dec 2012 ndash which united the country over crimes against women and shamed the country internationally is still not concluded nine months after the incident It is not surprising therefore that between 1990 and 2008 the number of rapes has more than doubled With the confidence that he wonrsquot be convicted a perpetrator commits the crime with impunity There is no magic pill to end rape There cannot be Yet we know where the problems lie a society that promotes and practices misogyny a law enforcement system that thrives on corruption and that incentivises artificially low crime rates and a judicial system that victimises the victim rather than shame and punish the rapist The real challenge is to build society that looks at women as equal citizens not above men or below them but just equal The real challenge is to make change inside our homes The real challenge is to promote police and judicial reforms to ensure speedy investigation and justice The real challenge is to give confidence to a citizen to enter a police station and file a First Information Report But thatrsquos the problem these are challenges and we want to take the easy way out We will outrage send tweets light candles join a protest rally create online petitions and then promptly forget about it till the next shocking rape We did that didnrsquot we for nine months after the Delhi gangrapeu00a0