This year, the government of India has launched ‘Mission Shakti’ for the safety and security of women. The purpose of Mission Shakti is to enable and strengthen interventions for women’s safety, security, and empowerment. There are many initiatives that the government has tried to deploy in public spaces. There are cameras and video monitors at traffic signals in the city. This helps the police book the over-speeding offender. It also helps in capturing incidents of violence that are meted out to women on the roads. Despite all of the gender-sensitive development programs, women still feel threatened when they are alone in public places.
According to NCRB reports, India registered 31,677 cases of rape in 2021—an average of 86 daily—while nearly 49 cases of crime against women are lodged every single hour.
One has to agree that even in 2022, women live in perpetual fear of rape, molestation, and the glaring inequality of not being given the right to occupy space as men do, unhindered in public spaces, since time immemorial.
With more women joining the workforce, safety needs to be addressed more aggressively than ever before. As a result, it is critical to educate boys early on in school, while also re-educating grown men at home on gender equality issues.
This sensitisation also needs to be supported with the right initiatives towards quick redressal of complaints, ensuring that women don’t feel humiliated or threatened to register complaints.
Unfortunately, India’s metro cities have registered complaints of gender violence in public places. An NGO based in Delhi called Breakthrough did a study on the safety of women in India. It found that 78.4% of respondents had been hurt in public.
The answers to safety for women remain hazy. Some women are left with no choice but to travel alone at night after work. They unwillingly sign up for the questions that are raised about her character while risking their safety. Most women are aware that society won’t spare a minute to point a finger at them.
Single women who work at home convince themselves that they are not afraid. They learn to take the risk of working late. It is frequently an individual decision as to how much one can dare to courageously negotiate self-safety while considering the risks of being alone on a bus, train compartment, metro, or pavement.
It is always a daunting choice, but nonetheless, some women have no option in their lives.
Being in public spaces, where they are surrounded by more people, is considered a wise move. Therefore, women, over time, learn to forget their personal ambitions if it requires them to study in public libraries or work late at any specific job.
This, in turn, creates frustration as many women often find themselves at the wrong end of the stick in their career growth because they don’t want to risk their safety by working late if they don’t have access to their personal transportation.
Prathibha, a 50-year-old woman who chooses to use buses as her means of transport, said that “I avoid crowded buses because I am always afraid of being groped following an episode of inappropriate behaviour by a man when I was travelling.”
Women of all ages have faced abuse in public spaces. Public transport still feels inaccessible for women, whereas men roam free and fearless.
Mohua Chinappa is an author and a podcaster of a show called The Mohua Show.
