Who’s to blame?

By | March 4, 2015

blame

Let’s begin the blame game by listing 5 famous quotes of the week. Can you guess who made them?

A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy

Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20% of girls are good.

When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after ‘doing her’, and only hit the boy

In our society, we never allow our girls to come out from the house after 6:30 or 7:30 or 8:30 in the evening with any unknown person

If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight

If your answer is that all of these were made by the Delhi rapist, you are wrong. A couple of those were made by lawyers defending the rapists.  These, and several other equally offensive quotes have been revealed in a preview of a yet-to-be-aired documentary made by BBC.

These comments spark outrage. Interestingly, a lot of the outrage is about the comments being aired out in public. Delhi police has even taken legal steps to stop the documentary from being shown on TV, even to stop publication of the interview. Home ministry in all its wisdom has opened an investigation of how these filmmakers got access to these rapists in the first place. And while this noise about “” is growing by the minute, the real questions remain: Why? Why do people have such a twisted opinion of reality? Why are there millions of men in India with opinions like those above?

Surely everyone who thinks along the lines of these opinions is not a rapist, but that exactly is the reason why I believe this documentary should be aired. Not only should it be aired on BBC that is only seen in the metros, but it should also be aired in our villages where people see what such thinking leads to. There is no, and I will repeat this to be clear, NO justification whatsoever for rape. And if you are someone who believes in any one of the above quotes, then you need to feel ashamed of yourself. Don’t be outraged at the guy making these comments, be outraged that in your mind, you believe in the same ideals as a rapist who clearly lacks any conscience or morality. You are him! And he is you! 

It is important for our mindset to change. As a nation, it is time for us to move past outrage and introspection. They haven’t been of any good. We need to shock ourselves into looking at a reality where such thinking can still foster. Hell, when even well-educated lawyers can have such a mentality, what chance does your average 10th pass villager have?

We don’t need to be outraged by these comments, we need to be deeply ashamed of ourselves. We don’t need to ban this documentary from airing, specially when the producers have also included extensive interview’s with the girl’s parents and family, and their perspective of loss. Lets be clear, the intent is not to glorify the perpetrator here, the intent is to expose the sick mentality that is deeply ingrained in our society. If we are ashamed to admit this problem even exists, how will we ever fix it?

All we will do is blame someone who is trying to show us our real faces, someone who dares to show us a mirror! For once, lets not shoot the messenger here.

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