Violence against Women in Kerala: The Fear Factor

The consumerist culture has become a cancerous growth in Kerala’s once-golden culture. In nearly every home, there is purposeful, ostentatious display of consumerism, paving the way for an unhappy, highly criminalized society with increasing levels of sexual harassment and violence against women.

Violence against Women: Women Fear Any Place outside Their Homes

Earlier in 2010, the popular women’s magazine, Vanita, had done surveys on whether women feel safe in Kerala. The results of the survey bared several serious problems affecting women’s safety in the state. Most significantly, women expressed constant fear while traveling or shopping because they fear to use bathrooms/changing rooms in hotels, shopping malls or any place outside their home due to cell phones being hidden in them. They also fear to travel by buses or trains due to the increasing incidents of sexual harassment. Many women said that the fear had begun to exhaust them emotionally, draining their ability to work with confidence or to travel with ease.

Violence against Women: Gold, Greed and Pornography Scandals

Violence against women will never end but if we are able to discuss these issues publicly via educative forums, there will be an incremental change, no doubt. Other problems that women in Kerala point to as issues that affect their safety include:

• Women themselves are greedy for gold that they incite men to commit crimes and sometimes take the initiative to commit crimes to make more money illegally.
• The web of dowry practice and ostentatious weddings has led thousands of families to the brink of financial ruins and a huge spate of suicides.
• Pornography scandals – There are rackets that thrive on clicking photographs of respectable, good looking girls and then using their pictures on pornography sites, magazines and so on. Later, these girls are blackmailed in various ways.

In July 2010, a married woman in Kerala was found dead, with her throat slit and her jewelry stolen. She had been having an extra marital affair with a young man through phone and had invited him to spend the night with her. On meeting her for the first time, he saw that she wore a lot of gold jewelry. Past midnight, he killed her and stole the jewelry. Her husband hushed up the incident but other women who spotted strange marks around her body and neck informed the police that it was not an ordinary death. Kerala’s cyber police traced it to the young man based on smses and phone call data in the deceased woman’s cell phone.

Violence against Women: How to Create Awareness and Trust

In high schools and colleges, the issue of crimes and violence against women should be discussed seriously and students should be taught to be discriminating. There should be educational trips to meet NGOs that work to rehabilitate rape victims so that students realize the actual horror and psychological breakdown associated with this trend of growing violence against women. Police cells and hotlines should be set up for women in distress and immediate action should be taken against men who harass women. If the State government can create an environment whereby any form of violence against women becomes internalized as unacceptable and shameful for the perpetrators, it is perhaps the first endeavor of leaning towards a civilized society.