A few days ago a BBC online report from Kolkota made national headlines. The piece, filed by Amitabha Bhattasali, revealed that a 15-year-old pre-teen girl’s dead body was discovered near a railway track in Jalpaiguri, in eastern India. The report further said the nameless Jane Doe’s body was “semi-naked.”
The police report described how she was allegedly humiliated by the village elders, for she protested against her father’s incessant harassment over a tractor. She went to the village court, and lodged a complaint against him. The next day, she was found dead.
After further investigation by the police, the case may not be open and shut; there is more to this story than the village elders’ inflated egos getting hurt. There have been insinuations that Jane Doe’s murder could have been politically motivated: The elderly village men and the girl’s family supported opposing political parties. The village elders “threatened the girl with dire consequences.” Shortly after that, she disappeared as the court was in session.
From the initial examination of the girl’s dead body, it appeared that the girl was most probably raped before her murder (a post-mortem examination has to be conducted for confirmation). According to family members, the girl was “made to spit on the ground and lick it up,” which is an extreme form of insult and humiliation. Her death, though it has caused an uproar, is by now yesterday’s story – sadly, she is just a statistic who has joined the long list of thousands of young murder victims in India.
In remote villages in India, sexual assaults are used as a form of punishment and control, but are called serving justice. Young girls from “lower castes” are often victims of sexual attacks and murder. Outrageously, the authoritarian murderers decide whether a girl has a right to live or die.
Such trends are not exclusive to India. Across the subcontinent, young girls are subjected to torrents of obscenities, teasing, alongside rape and murder – and these are common practices.
Each victim’s story seems more gruesome than the one before. This past May, law enforcement gang-raped and later murdered two adolescent cousins of the Dalit caste in Uttar Pradesh in the wee hours of the morning. Their dead bodies were left hanging from a mango tree for the entire village to see.
Daily, somewhere on the subcontinent, a girl is being sacrificed by patriarchs in the name of justice. What boggles my mind is that after such horrific acts, the perpetrators always come up with some sort of justification for their violence. The rationale used is: Girls who defy tradition, and try to show their individualities by being assertive, by remaining vigilant against the injustices that are thrown at them, are a threat to society. Those “sacred” codes must not be violated. Therefore, such girls need to be kept in line, at any cost, according to tradition and local customs.
The reasoning behind such ghastly acts is dreadful, plucked right out from the pages of a crime or horror novel. However, it must be consistently and firmly challenged in the name of human rights.
How much is a girl’s life worth in our outdated, male-controlled society? In the official story of the Good Girl, the Right Girl, quite a lot – of course, if she is lucky enough to be born with fair skin. Her value is immediately established as soon as the village mid-wife or city clinic gynaecologist delivers her. She is doted on right after her umbilical cord is cut – then cleaned, and wrapped and given back to the proud and happy mother and father.
From day one she becomes her mother’s joy, her father’s “noyon er moni,” and a sweetheart of the extended family. Depending on the economic situation of the family, and if she is well-behaved, the fair-skinned girl is pampered like a princess. At school, she is loved by all her teachers – even if she has the intelligence of an Afghan hound.
By the time she becomes 16, boys start to take notice, and she gets plenty of playful support from others in the family. When she comes of age, prospective future in-laws are a constant at her house. The parents find a match for her from the long list of suitors. Sometimes, if she’s lucky, her preference is taken into consideration, and she is allowed to marry her prince.
Here, I am by no means relaying a story from Bengali or Hindi serials. I am talking about real girls in the subcontinent, and how one can become an object to control, and a subject of subtle discrimination, in one’s own family. These issues are nowhere near as serious as systemic violence or murder of our girls and women, of course – but they represent a quieter, more unseen type of violence.
How do we change minds about violence against women? We need stronger laws with real consequences for criminals, surely, along with constant denouncement of these crimes from our leaders. But, individually, we can also start at home with our own daughters. In this complex, modern world, parents need to emphasise moral values and self-worth and dignity over a girl’s looks, skin tone, and marriageability. We should teach our young girls how they can become their best selves as they grow up.
We should become more aware of our words, and their impact, remembering that there will be always vicious tongues to torment any girl less than “perfect” or “correctly behaved” – verbal abuse from those who are ignorant, chauvinist, and on the worst end of the spectrum, real abuse from those so fanatically devoted to ideas of “correct” femininity that they resort to violence to protect them.
We, as parents, need to break the cycle and become cheerleaders to our daughters, encouraging them to be strong and outspoken. I personally wave pom poms at parents who now are raising their daughters as equal to their sons, as those girls can grow to be independent adults, warriors who can battle discrimination and prejudice elsewhere in the world. This is the only way.