question_answer

One of the most widely held beliefs is that the home is a "“haven”" for girls and women, that the risks and violence lurk in wait outside the home, that women can be safe as long as they leave home only “"when needed”".

"“Let'’s say you buy a vehicle. When it is parked in the garage at home, accidents can be avoided, right?

When it is taken to a bazaar or to the road, accidents are likely to happen...similarly, in older times, when women were housewives, they were safe from all kinds of atrocities, except discrimination, today, they are studying, working, and doing business, they are exposed to the society. When they are exposed to the society, they are more prone to eve-teasing, harassment, atrocities, rape and kidnap. Is it not? If they do not leave home, it doesn’'t happen.”"

Shiva Prasad’'s analogy might be especially ridiculous and crude, however, every woman has probably heard milder, less obviously outrageous versions of the same idea. The facts, of course, belive these notions. A Delhi High Court bench, commenting on the large number of murders of women in their matrimonial homes, with the husband as the prime accused, said, “"It appears that the married women in India are safer on the streets than in their matrimonial homes.”"

This is true, though you wouldn’'t know it for the disproportionate focus on stranger rapes in the media. Nor is this situation unique to India, with its “"tradition"” of dowry extortion and dowry killings.

In 2012, Jyoti Singh was gang-raped and killed on a Delhi bus, and stranger rape dominated conversations about gender violence in India and the world. The same year, a United Nations study showed that of all women who were the victims of homicide globally, almost half were killed by intimate partners or family members, compared to less than 6 per cent of men killed similarly.

A study in Ireland found that 87 per cent of women who were murdered in Ireland over the last twenty years were killed by a man they knew; and 63 per cent were killed in their own homes. The world over, then, streets are safer than their own homes for women, and homes are the places where women face the most dangerous violence, at the hands of those they know intimately. In India, however, confinement to the home itself is a form of violence that is not even acknowledged.

In his Hindi poem, "“Band Khidkiyon se takra Kar"” (Crashing against Closed Windows), Gorakh Pandey, a revolutionary poet, strips away the many layers of pompous chants about women’s “"greatness"” to point out the obvious: the fact that women are imprisoned in the four walls of their homes - and the locked walls and windows make the home a suffocating prison, not a haven, for women.

Why is there more crime against women today than in the past?

A) Today women are exposed more to the outside world

B) In the past women remained in home

C) Both (a) and (b)

D) Neither (a) nor (b)