Where Do You Go When Your Own Family Torments You?
Crimes against girls are usually blamed on outsiders, but the truth is that girls suffer most at the hands of their own families — from female foeticide to sexual abuse and killings in the name of 'honour'.
Whenever crimes against girls and women are discussed, outsiders — chiefly the in-laws — are usually assumed to be the culprits. Girls have been tormented in many ways in their marital homes, and probably still are, but when it comes to crimes against girls their own families are no better. It is their own families who decide their second-class citizenship. In fact the truth is that girls are tormented most by their own families, yet the law often does not even identify these offenders. It is assumed that girls receive boundless love from their families and that crimes are committed by outsiders. But society and the statistics tell a different story.
Who is the first to make sure that girls are never born? Who plans, after a sex-determination test, to kill girls in the womb? Clearly the girls' own parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. You may remember how recently twin baby girls were thrown into a canal by their maternal grandmother and uncle. Parents, too, abandon girls after birth, leave them behind in hospitals, and sometimes even hand them over to death. In other words, it is a girl's closest relatives who use every trick to keep her from being born. How many of them are ever punished? Barring one or two, the offenders usually get away. The sad truth is that they are the girls' own family.
The same is true of sexual harassment and rape. In more than ninety per cent of cases, such crimes are committed by male members of the girl's family, close relatives, family acquaintances or friends. That is why so few of these cases ever come to light. Families hide such crimes to save the family's reputation in society. They advise the girls to stay quiet too, and if they refuse, they are threatened. The victim herself is treated as the guilty one. Many girls take their own lives in such cases, or carry the burden all their lives.
Giving girls as little nutritious food as possible, pulling them out of school earlier than boys, sending boys to expensive schools and girls to cheap ones, loading girls with the responsibility for all household work despite their young age, denying them their share in property despite the law — countless such acts, which could also be counted as crimes, are committed by the very families girls are born into. I often imagine that if girls knew before birth that they would face such crimes where they were about to be born, perhaps they would choose not to be born at all.
Besides this, recent NCRB data showed that love affairs are the third-biggest motive for murder in the country. The shackles of family, religion and caste do not let young men and women choose the life partner they want, and if they do, their lives are in danger. Such crimes are committed not only against young people in villages but also against self-reliant young women and men in cities. According to this data, crimes such as murder have declined in India overall — yet killing children who marry by their own choice seems to have become common. Families lure their children home on a pretext and kill them, something the children could never imagine.
Between 2001 and 2017 this figure rose steadily, and such killings now account for as much as twenty-eight per cent. In the national capital Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh it is the second-biggest motive for murder; in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra it is the third-biggest. Police say that love affairs and extramarital relationships also lead to such killings. In many cases people kill their own children. Sometimes mothers kill their own children so that nothing gets in the way of living with a man other than their husband. And if the other 'father' does live with the child and the child is a girl, the poor girl becomes the victim of all kinds of crimes at a young age. Even small children are not spared.
What are called 'honour killings' usually happen when young men and women marry by their own choice. Sometimes these incidents make the newspapers. In April, in a village in Maharashtra, a 24-year-old woman was killed by her own parents. She was a pharmacist by profession and had married a Brahmin man, while she was a Maratha. Her family was unhappy about this. A few days after the wedding, the family sent her younger sister to her home. The sister told her that the family had accepted the marriage and that their parents had called her home. The young woman came home happily — and there she was burnt to death. Her family showed her no mercy at all.
