routinely is a very strong word imo, but more than women in the west, I agree - only for the North, specially Delhi-NCR. And if you take minimal precautionary steps, then it almost takes away 90% of the problem. That doesn’t mean we don’t need a major improvement as a society.
I will interview the girls (dressed in western clothing, goes without saying) in my typical middle class delhi locality if i get a chance…
hehehe
This statement belies your position.
Well, at least you admit to using a broad brush. I’ll let other people decide for themselves whether your arguments have any strength to them or not. As for the equal rights argument and what women have done with them, women in the US have had equal rights since 1920. It took the world wars to push women’s participation in the workforce, and even then it wasn’t until 1987 that the proportion of young women who went to college was the same as the proportion of young men who went to college. Cite. 67 years of equal rights, almost 300 years of nationhood, and a world war in which most of the male population was otherwise occupied for years. Women’s rights and women’s equality are not easy things to get even in the most advanced nations. To write off India and what we’ve achieved in this respect the way you have done is ridiculous.
in the sense that one wouldn’t have to face the problem.
I’ve had those conversations with my female friends. Every single one of them routinely gets stared at if they’re just walking on the streets. They’ve learned to zone it out. Every single one of them has been touched or grabbed at least once. Some of them just kept quiet because they didn’t know what to do. Others, and I love them for it, either grabbed the guy and made a scene, or immediately told nearby police, and got support. This doesn’t mean these girls don’t live great, fulfilling lives. Far from it. But the ugliness stuff like this brings is there too. Many of my friends are from Delhi, which may skew the sample, but probably the only city in India where women feel as safe as in the west is Bombay. The south isn’t too bad either. But all my friends from Bangalore have had bad experiences too.
I encourage you to have these same conversations with your female friends though. Nothing makes people angry about this stuff until it is personal. And we do need people to be angry about it.
In my experience, ending up in dangerous situations abroad rarely comes out of actual stupidity, idiotic naivety, or willful ignorance. I’ve seen a lot of people get in trouble in some dangerous places, and it usually happens when they are quite familiar with a place and become a little more comfortable.
When you are on a week long vacation to an unfamiliar place, it’s normal to be on high alert the whole time, as you are constantly experiencing new things. But cognitively, we just aren’t designed to maintain that for long periods of time. Eventually, you start feeling comfortable, you make local friends, and you start feeling like you have a handle on the small risks you see people around you taking on a daily basis. A place also becomes a bit more like your "real life’, and you become less likely to take extraordinary measures to avoid what you perceive as a manageable risk.
To give an example, my friend Anna, an American in the rural Cameroonian town where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer, took an overnight train up from the capital after a long and exhausting trip. From the nearest train station, it was a ten hour journey on hot, overcrowded, unreliable minibuses to get back to our town. To make things worse, every time you’d change busses would require a one to four hour wait while the next bus waited to fill up, so the trip would have to be spread between two long, unpleasant days with an expensive hotel stay in between.
Our local bus service, however, had just started offering a direct bus, using a spacious new vehicle that went straight from the train station to our doors. This service avoided the long uncertain waits, allowed you to make the trip in one day, and didn’t require you to sit smashed up against a sweaty stranger for hours. Since the bus left directly as the train arrived, you’d buy your non-refundable tickets on the train. Anna, of course, bought one.
Well, the train was a little late, and Anna realized to get home, she’d be on the bus for a few hours after dark. After fourteen hours on a third world train, she really, really just wanted to get home and be done with it, and she was looking forward to using the comfortable bus. Furthermore, buying another ticket and staying in a hotel would cost something like $50, which is a chunk when your living allowance is $120 and you’ve just spend a lot of money traveling. Broke and exhausted, Anna had just decided to risk it-- after all dozens of people she knew were getting on that bus without a second thought. Just then a friend from our town spotted her and begged to buy her ticket, as he had pressing business and absolutely needed to be home that night. So Anna sold him her ticket and took the long journey on local busses.
Long story short, the bus Anna had a ticket for was robbed by bandits that night. Nobody was killed, but it was the bandits were armed and dangerous.
Anna wasn’t being stupid and she wasn’t ignorant. We all knew that road was unsafe, especially at night. I am sure you would probably say “Well, I wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place, and if I was I’d just put a private car on my credit card or stay in a nice safe hotel until I found a reasonable form a transit!”, but the reality is that Anna was there, she had taken the same journey dozens of times, and it didn’t even occur to her to take extraordinary measures to deal with what was, to her, a fairly ordinary situation. What looks like an extreme risk from the outside can, when you are broke and exhausted and in a familiar place, look like a manageable one.
I don’t know the biker’s history, but from the story it seems like they were in a similar situation. They were out longer than they planned, thought they were taking a manageable risk, and ended up getting unlucky.
Exactly, that’s pretty much what I hear. That’s pretty much the reality. Pretty bad, far from ideal, but better than what was mentioned - routinely sexually harassed and people in general not coming out to help.
This is a very good point. I have been in several of those situation, they could’ve been very dangerous. But a problem is also in saying that women should avoid these particular situations in order to avoid rape. The situations may be an added danger, but avoiding them realistically and statistically does not protect women from rape. (It may still be good to avoid the situation, but that is beside the point.) Telling women that by avoiding certain situations they will avoid being raped is a lie.
Despite all the dangerous situations I put myself in, those were not the situations in which I was raped or assaulted. If you were to give me advice to prevent my own rape and sexual assaults it would be: don’t go to the beach at a typical family holiday village, don’t be in your parents’ house, don’t go to the ladies’ and don’t leave the house.
Don’t forget that the news is news for a reason: it doesn’t happen very often.
At the end of the day, victims are simply not the ones who have the magic key that prevents rape. That would be the rapist, and the rapist alone.
And one last thing: truthSeeker2, you are a dude? Then I’m sorry to say you have absolutely nothing of any interest to say about whether or not women are being sexually harassed. You just don’t. Even if you are a nice guy and talk to women about it. Even if you read a lot about it. I’m sorry, but your opinion in this has exactly zero value unless you are a woman. You just do not know, so let it go. I really don’t mean to be mean about this, but it just is that way.
“Embarrassing”? It’s embarrassing? Are you serious? THAT’S how you describe it?
Telling anyone to avoid a lawless, bandit-infested countryside is both common sense and not at all a promise that you’ll avoid anything bad happening in your life. Any bad thing can happen to anyone anywhere at any time. That has nothing to do with whether or not it’s smart for me to try to sneak into the white house with a shotgun or sneak into Iran with a bunch of defaced Qurans and anti-Ayatollah leaflets.
Yeah, it’s so unfair to expect a dude not to put his penis in an unwilling vagina. Life is so hard for rapist bandits.
I am talking based on the experiences of women in my circle and based on my own observations of living in this city most of my life.
the women say they get stared at routinely. Have been touched occasionally - taken unfair advantage of in a crowded bus etc not in the open. they avoid going out alone during the night because they feel its not safe in the dark.
routine sexual harassment - No. If they let people know about getting harassed, people do help. People often vacate their seats for women while commuting. If someone’s not vacating a seat reserved for ladies, people make sure he vacates. People in general talk to women with respect n politeness.
There still is a fundamental problem of how you stop rape. You can tell people not to rape and what rape looks like all their lives. I had it pounded into me from an early age, as did almost everybody who was in my school system. Likewise, everybody knows that murder and drug dealing is wrong. Yet no matter what you do you’re going to get rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. At least some. There are, clearly, changes you can make. But they’re large, slow, sweeping, unpredictable cultural shifts. A new program to teach children won’t take effect until those kids are of an age where they can actually realistically rape, murder, or deal drugs. And even then, you still have to wait 40 years for the older people who didn’t have that cultural training to become to enfeebled to do anything.
This is small comfort to someone worried about getting raped, murdered, or pressured into buying illicit substances/roped into a scandal.
That’s why this turns into two questions: “How do we stop rapes?” And “How do I not get raped?”
The answer to the first is: slow, sweeping, unpredictable cultural shifts that will hopefully prevent your kids from getting raped. This is the question to which “teach people not to rape” is actually useful. It’s not a useful answer to “How can a given person not get raped?”
The second question is much harder, and it seems like you suggest throwing it out the window altogether as offensive and useless. I disagree. No, you can’t prevent it, but you can lower your chances. This includes not going to hotbeds of rape (especially unescorted). And again, it’s not “your fault” if you don’t minimize your risk and something bad happens. You don’t “deserve it” and it shouldn’t happen. The suggestion and analysis isn’t one of judgment, it’s one of good faith – one that hopes it will help. Maybe my thoughts on this stem from the fact that I do AI, but it seems to me to be a classic question of making a rational agent. There are circumstances with bad outcomes for an agent that are mostly outside the agent’s control, but nonetheless happen more frequently in certain scenarios – to make a rational agent*, you essentially have to minimize risk, without needlessly sacrificing value. The second part is important, because otherwise the obvious answer to “how do I never get raped?” is “well, killing yourself should do the trick.” Basically, you’re required to throw out solutions that needlessly impede quality of life like never interacting with other humans in person, never leaving your house, and so on. However, it is fair to suggest what amount to good risk/value tradeoffs, such as not going to rape hotbeds unless it’s really, really important. Even if it only reduced your chances from 72% to 70.15%, it’s a fair suggestion if the value of going to the rape hotbed isn’t that high.
The difficulty, naturally, comes in that this is a complex scenario. It’s not clear cut and obvious. You can’t say “well, clearly going to that area has a value of 3500 LifeUnits, but it has a 90% risk chance of being put in a scenario to lose me 4976 LifeUnits! No way!” And obviously other people can’t tell you that the value of going to is low – you decide for yourself how much you really want/need to go somewhere. Or how important it was to get yourself into a situation where you might get lost, or whatever. Not to mention humans aren’t always perfectly rational, and in an ideal world they shouldn’t be penalized so harshly for some silly natural misjudgment.
But still, I don’t think it’s offensive to suggest, but only if it’s kindly and without judgment that people avoid certain things or places. Yes, it’s really, phenomenally sad that the onus is on somebody to have to try and minimize the chances of bad outcomes in a rational manner, rather than being able to simply expect a perpetrator to behave. It’s really, really crappy. But that’s the unfortunate reality of the world. We simply can’t make everybody stop acting a certain way, at least in the here and now. The best we can do in the here and now is hope we can get every person to have the best life possible, and give what we think is the best advice to facilitate that goal, even though we know that a depressing number will get hurt and stepped on until the problem is fixed (if it even can be).
I am sorry for not condemning it properly. That’s the worst possible crime worthy of the most severe punishment. extremely embarrassing, all Indians should hang their heads in shame even if a single such case happens.
Oh cmon. The guy is expressing himself on a very difficult topic in his second language to people who come from an entirely different cultural context. You should be embarrassed for the behaviour you’re exhibiting here. Get off the fucking high horse already.
truthseeker2, what you are describing - being started at, touched without permission, being taken "unfair advantage of in a crowded bus - that is sexual harassment. In other words, the women in your circle are telling you that they are being sexually harassed. Why are you unable to hear that?
See I don’t disagree with this. You just say: “that place is dangerous” and people make an informed decision about going there. They may really need to be there, or they may, as in this case, just get lost.
You don’t turn around after the fact and say “got raped? ah well, shouldn’t have been there, should ya?” The point is, nobody is really saying that there are no dangerous places in the world. It’s the fact that after a rape has occurred people turn around and condemn the victim for being there. And that is what is is happening here. Give off a warning for certain places, sure. But now she has been raped, there is no use going back and blaming her for being there. And again, in the face of the rapists’ actions, saying “shouldn’t have been there” is simply ridiculous.
I also maintain that advertising certain behaviour as a way of preventing rape is a lie. Are you going to explain with your formulas how it may reduce rape in very rare instances, but if you still need to be in that place you should calculate the risk? As advice to women it just doesn’t work. Rape is not something women have agency over, statistically. This one particular case that was in the news (because it is news) is not representative of the majority of rapes.
Thus the advice for the area should be “don’t go there, it is dangerous”, and shouldn’t come close to “if you don’t want to get raped, don’t go there”, because it implies that it will prevent rape, it implies women have control over whether they are raped.
Anyway, if that advice were any good rape would be vanishingly rare.
[QUOTE=truthSeeker2]
People in general talk to women with respect n politeness.
[/QUOTE]
You do not have the experiences women have. Even in countries where feminism has made bigger steps, men are very surprised if they walk a mile in the shoes of a woman. For example transsexuals who transition from being a man to being a woman.
It is the equivalent of me stating that I know exactly what the experience of black people is like in my country: “it’s fine, most people are respectful of black people”. It is deeply offensive.
I can’t stress this enough: you do not know, saying you do is offensive. It happens here too, men tell me all the time what my experiences as a woman actually are. It’s great that you care enough to take an interest, but you really need to stop thinking that you have any idea of what it is actually like.
(And why on earth would it be a good thing to vacate seats for women?! If anything that would be offensive, I am not some sort of weakling about to fall over because of my chromosomes. I’m sure it is a very friendly gesture, but an example of respect for women it is certainly not.)
Because it’s happening in a different place on earth? Where the cultural context of respect is different?
For a completely different cultural context it sounds remarkably similar to here. People here also often think that being respectful of women means treating certain women as princesses, rather than just treating everyone the same. Feminism is about equality, even in different cultures. If women are being treated differently equality is not getting any nearer, nor is respect.
Men and women ARE different. There’s no getting around that. For instance, men typically are stronger than women. It would be nonsensical to treat all men and all women the same way when it comes to issues of physical strength. Or to assume that men and women are equally likely to face sexual harassment. Equal does not necessarily mean same.