Was Netflix’s India original series “Delhi Crime” that has bagged the International Emmy in the Best Drama Series category an image makeover exercise of Delhi Police? There are debates around the retelling of the Nirbhaya rape case from the Delhi Police’s point of view, but one thing that's settled is that the gang-rape and murder of ‘Nirbhaya’ in 2012 was an inflection point in the women’s rights movement and criminal jurisprudence of India.
Crimes against women, fuelled by entrenched patriarchy is common in India. The 2018 Thomson Reuters Foundation poll found India to be the most dangerous country for women, yet the Nirbhaya incident shocked the country. Both national and international media covered the rape and the subsequent protests extensively. According to researchers Akshay Bhatnagar, Aparna Mathur et al, this constitutes exogenous shock. While women are more likely to report abuse and sexual attacks after the Nirbhaya case, there has been little or no impact on arrests and convictions rates. Some of the increased reportage is because of the de-stigmatisation of victims of rape and violence.
However, the conviction rate for rape crimes has been on a steady decline since 2007 and reached a historic low of 18.9% in 2016 from 27% in 2006, the study illustrates.
One of the major demands of the protests post Nirbhaya rape, was safe public transport and safe public spaces. Because the scene of crime was a private bus, where Nirbhaya was gang-raped and thrown off. One of the major reasons for the abysmal rates of women labour force participation is also lack of safe public transport for women, per leading labour economists. Yet safe public transport and safe public spaces, safe cities are still a far cry.
Major conversations and metrics have been triggered by the Nirbhaya incident. Sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence in public spaces, both in urban and rural settings, are an everyday occurrence for women and girls in every country around the world. Women and girls experience and fear different forms of sexual violence in public spaces, from unwelcome sexual remarks and gestures, to rape and femicide. It happens on streets, in and around public transportation, schools, workplaces, public toilets, water and food distribution sites, and parks. This reality reduces women’s and girls’ freedom of movement. It reduces their ability to participate in school, work, and public life. It limits their access to essential services and their enjoyment of cultural and recreational activities, and negatively impacts their health and well-being. UN Women (the nodal UN agency for women’s rights) also tried to introduce well-lit public places as a safety indicator in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Safe spaces, safe transport and safe cities demand a much more egalitarian world view, where policy makers put money into what truly matters, i.e., making cities and villages safe than locking up women after sun set. The feminist solidarity movement Pinjra Tod exposed this specific irony, that instead of making universities, libraries, campuses, cities safe, education administrators found locking up girls as the go-to option.
Another such initiative, which is spotlighting on the real problems and working in long term manner to address the deeply entrenched gender discrimination and its many intersections, is Breakthrough, a leading women’s rights organisation working on transforming gender norms. Breakthrough’s gender equity curriculum Taron Ki Toli (TKT) runs in five states of India i.e. Haryana, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. It targets adolescent boys and girls in Classes 6 and 7 and stays with them over two years. It engages the schools’ faculty, the parents of the children, the governmental agencies and the society at large.
From taking the children through gender norms as they exist to as they should be in a just society, imparting conceptual clarity on the inalienability and indivisibility of human rights, encouraging critical thinking to encouraging inter-generational dialogues between parents and the children, TKT does it all. “Most importantly TKT goes beyond the text book, into the lived and living realities of the children and ensures the lessons transform into everyday lives of the children”, explains Breakthrough’s CEO Sohini Bhattacharya.
Per the evaluation done of the programme in Haryana by JPAL, the organisation founded by Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, 94.2% children retain their learnings, two years after exit of Breakthrough. 92% boys in Uttar Pradesh, where TKT ran, felt, women and girls, should not be hit under any circumstance.
So how does such intervention play out in real life? That, during the pandemic induced lockdown the burden of unpaid care and domestic work fell on many girls and women, resulting in increased domestic strife and violence. As this New York Times’ article states, there has been national rates of spike in domestic violence by 30%. At the same time many men and boys have also stepped up to share the chores. Predictably, most boys who graduated from TKT programme are among those.
In these times of the pandemic, many adolescent girls are being taken off education and married off too. Yet, in the Breakthrough intervention villages in Bihar, there has been reduction in early marriage of girls by 28% and this has stayed at par during the Covid times.
Engaging with the issue of safe public transport and demanding safe vehicles, safe buses has been one such exceptional outcome. While the girls have done sit-ins and protests and given solidarity to other girls in neighbouring districts for safe public transport, for school upgradation so they can continue education, the boys have been challenging stalking and eve-teasing by friends and siblings. They have run public engagement campaigns in buses for en route safety of the girls, demanding safe buses and safe routes. These movements were seeded in Rohtak, Jhajjar, Sonipat and Panipat, where TKT started, but now they travel with the TKT graduates wherever they go.
The consciousness and empathy of the TKT graduates is the vector which spreads the idea of safe public transport, safe spaces for women, girls and people of other marginal identity groups. ”Why is safe transport so important, you ask? If the girls can travel safely, then they can dream fearlessly and work hard to achieve those dreams. This programme needs to be seeded across the entire state of Haryana, for that matter across the country. Then this question of why safe transport, won’t need to be addressed.,” explains Rohit to this author. Rohit is a TKT graduate who is 17 now.
November 25th launches the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence which goes till 10th December, the World Human Rights Day. UN Women has called for recognising the shadow pandemic of domestic violence and addressing it. Hope the post pandemic world truly transforms, provides safe spaces and safe public transport and more importantly safe and just society for all.
(Author works on the intersection of international development, human rights and media watch. She has been a fellow of International Centre for Journalists Washington DC and Senior Fellow of Kalam Institute of Health Technology. She can be reached at biraj_swain@hotmail.com. Views are personal.)