The Lost 'Human' Status of Womankind

Her chin was bruised, her left eye was black…’what happened?’, someone asked…she bit her lower lip and said softly, ‘O, I just..Umm…fell off the stairs’

From the mighty queens the world-history talks of, to the modern-metro-woman; the fair sex has travelled a long way. Yet, each morning the paper brings in a new story, of how a woman was raped, physically abused or burnt alive somewhere or the other. The question is: ‘Has our society progressed culturally?’

It was only yesterday, when I read this grisly article about how a young girl, aged 18, was inflicted violence upon, for escaping from her husband’s house in Afghanistan. She pleaded and begged them to understand the fact that, had she not fled, she would have been killed. But her efforts were in vain. They sliced off her ears, smashed her nose, and left her on the mountainside to die. This does not date to long back, it occurred last year.

‘Concrete-encased high school girl murder’ was a 1988-89 incident in which a Japanese girl, Junko Furuta, 16 at that time, was murdered. For 44 days, she was assaulted, beaten with metal rods and golf sticks, put up with acids on her body, made to eat cockroaches, and drink her own urine by four boys. Finally, one day, death brought her solace. Her murderers continue to move freely even today.

Our own country too falls in line, where in one state, ‘didi’ is the new talk-of-the-town; the ‘Khap’ is (in) famous for the ‘Honor killings’ carried out in their states so as to prevent inter-caste marriages. Absurd, it is; despite the existence of several worldly laws for protection of their rights, an unimaginable number of women have been subjected to inhuman treatment. The laws have proved to be ineffective to the frontier.

What is most shocking is that, even today i.e. in the 21^st century, the male-dominated society refuses to acknowledge ‘women’ as ‘humans’. The acts of violence range from battering assault, rape, female infanticide, female foeticide, dowry deaths, prostitution, trafficking, women being beaten in the suburbs, arrest of women searching their husbands and children, sexual assault of refugee and displaced women, abuses against women in custody, domestic violence, abuses against women workers and the list goes on….

The so called ‘weaker sex’ continues to be ‘a forced slave’ of man, not a willing one. ‘She’ is supposed to be calm, submissive and a meek individual. Women like Aisha and Furuta keep suffering all their lives, and many such incidents are lost without trace. The problem is in the core of all things; our values are going down the drain. What is the point of fancy growth rate figures, if basic human rights are snatched away?

The entire while in which I wrote this post, I kept thinking, whether it would serve a purpose at all. I couldn’t find an answer. But, why I continued is because John F. Kennedy once said,

““All this will not be finished in the first hundred days, nor will it be finished in the first thousand  days, nor in the lifetime of this administration, nor perhaps during our lifetime on this planet Earth, but let us begin it…!!””