Where Are We Going ?
Are we on a libidinal trip? Women are being molested right and left. A month has gone since Ferdousi of Chandpur was allegedly raped and killed by students of a madrassah. The other day Suchitra at Serajganj was gangraped in front of her husband before the group led by her rejected proposer chose the most violent method one can think of to kill the couple. And all this is happening because of the unrequited male advances towards these unfortunate women. No man in love would engineer a gangrape or murder of the lady he is or ever was in love with.
We are alarmed at this wave of terror unleashed upon women in general across the country. Apparently there is only one way left to counter it. We have to instill fear in the minds of all would-be rapists. We believe time has come to declare death sentence as the punishment for physical assault on women. And mere announcement would not do. The government has to make special effort to implement it.
Ours being such an overwhelmingly male dominated society it is likely that the formal and newspaper consciousness about repression against women will never quite percolate the administration. Man has to see through a woman's eyes to be able to do any kind of justice to all sorts of protest against repression against woman - he has to emotionally accommodate the trauma a woman goes through if she at all survives it. Admittedly this will not happen in a day. But the process has to begin here and now. We had suggested earlier and we reiterate it here again that resistance to these criminal inclinations has to evolve from smaller orbits. Parents have to develop a watchdog attitude over the behaviour over their male children. Also a system of effective community consciousness has to be evolved presently in tandem with governmental awareness over the issue.
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