Thursday, September 12, 2013

India and Violence against women


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/07/gang-rape-fear-anger-delhi-slums

This article touches 2 issues:

1. Violence against women 
2. Is that violence against women a direct correlation to the growing economy?

There has always been an issue of violence against women--that has not changed. What has changed is that people are now more freely open to discuss women's rights which makes this issue more apparent. In the article, it states that:

The wave of public revulsion and anger in India prompted by the incident has had some effect, campaigners said. "There is certainly more debate. There's a change in the vocabulary used and police are much more alert. And younger women today are not going to go back to the previous time when they would just stay silent," said Vrinda Grover, a lawyer and human rights activist.
The women today have more of a voice as these human rights activists empower them to speak out against violence. According to Jason Temasfieldt:

Jason Temasfieldt, who launched a campaign against harassment of women in India's commercial capital of Mumbai after his cousin was stabbed to death after intervening to try to protect a female friend, said he had seen a "drastic change" in terms of awareness.
These "drastic changes" will hopefully lead to a decline in violence against women over time.

 Another question is whether that growing gang violence against women a direct correlation to the growing economy? I think yes--but not just to women in particular, but to the overall increase in crime and violence. A growing economy means a larger urban population, a larger working class, and a government struggling to keep up with all of this. What I mean by "struggling" is its inability to properly take care of every single person within its large cities by means of sanitation, public  rights, public safety, public infrastructure, and the list goes on. A growing economy means a large number of people would be migrating to the cities for work, which increases the demand for housing. Overpopulation in the cities is a huge problem in India and the police force is not large enough to cover every corner of the city which makes it inefficient to stop crimes and violence.

1 comment:

  1. Check this out: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-10/one-in-four-men-surveyed-in-asian-study-say-they-raped.html.

    One thing to consider though is that violence is actually lower in cities than in rural settings and world-wide is in decline. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

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