ENOUGH - Stop Rape

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Image from The Hindu

A 23-year old medical student in Delhi was recently raped repeatedly and beaten within an inch of her life on a moving bus. Crimes like these are terrifyingly common in India’s capital, and if I start posting here about every rape in Delhi (not even in India), I’d be posting several times every day.

It’s terrifying when something horrible happens repeatedly in your society, and you don’t know how to fix it. I’m not sure if capital punishment will stop future crimes. It will feel right, definitely, but I don’t know if its the immediate solution which we need.

Women hiding away is definitely not the answer. Guns are not the solution, god knows we’ve seen that. Surrounding women with guards or pepper spray isn’t it either. It’s exasperating that teaching respect to one half of the world for the other should be so difficult.

The good news is, Delhi seems to have woken up. The bad news is, I’m afraid without coming up with a concrete solution, these will be yet another set of protests which will fizzle out. 

My question is, WHAT is the solution we can push? Is there ANY way for the mentality of rape to be corrected? If we’re asking for better laws, HOW can the laws be made better? 

I know the biggest problem is the extent to which women are seen as property and objects of sexual gratification in India. I’m even up for stopping to talk to every eve teaser in town and explaining to him why he is being a horrible human being, asking him to attend sessions on the subject, anything, really. 

India needs your inputs towards providing a concrete solution or suggestion to the Indian government as well as the populance towards stopping rape. I want to take this through, we as Indians need to take this through, and I need your ideas to formulate something.

We have the momentum to mobilise the masses and make something happen, and we CANNOT AFFORD for these to be yet another set of protests which eventually fade off the streets.

Not again, not this time.

Put in your suggestions here.

An eye for an eye

NIMISHA JAISWAL

Image from washingtonpost.com

The verdict is out - Hosni Mubarak is to serve a life sentence behind bars. While this, on the heels of ‘blood diamond’ Taylor’s 50-year sentence, is seen as proof that no one is above human rights and the law, the people of Egypt are not happy.

And why would they be? The run up to the verdict has ranged from mock gallows on the public squares to protesters holding nooses outside the court. Mobilisation for an appeal of the sentence has already begun, and from what I gather from an NYT article on the subject, the Egyptians are expecting this to be a long drawn fight - they wish to draw blood.

However, I wouldn’t be going into the details of this particular verdict. What I think of is a class discussion of Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower, a book about perceptions on forgiveness. Several peace-building perspectives, like that of Desmond Tutu, focus on the power, and necessity, and need for forgiveness. They state that to forgive is not simply to forget, but to come to terms with loss, and to initiate the healing process.

What, then, of the protester in Egypt whose 15-year-old brother was shot in the heart by the police? What of the people of Sierra Leone, babies with stumps for hands, or little children with their severed and useless hands sewn on simply for cosmetic purposes? What of the thousands who have died across Syria over the last year, and what of every other tyrant or dictator who, with an amused order, cost the lives of populations?

I do agree that to hold on to hatred and to hold on to pain may not be what is needed to recuperate. I also agree that when wrongs done by one

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