Opinion: India the unsafest country in the world for women - blame gender segregation

A Thomson Reuters survey has said India is the unsafest country in the world for women. The Indian government’s response has been that that is not true, and that the survey used “flawed methodology”.

The Reuters survey was a perception poll. It asked the 548 experts it spoke to which countries they “thought” were the unsafest for women, so the government may have a point.

It is close to impossible to tell which country exactly is the unsafest for women. You could for example count the number of rapes reported in every country, with the country with the highest number of rapes adjudged the unsafest, but that still leaves the question of whether a number of rapes in the other countries are being reported at all.

But having said, there is little doubt that we have a problem.

Leave aside women for a minute, I, an Indian man, feel unsafe in this country. I only have to drive from Delhi, where I live, to Noida, where I work, and I find the need to lock my car doors.

To my mind, gender segregation plays a large part. The more we separate girls from boys, the more we give rise to a “masculine culture”. The idea that men are strong and women are weak and should stay at home.

A masculine culture in turn leads to what is called a “rape culture”. The idea that a woman who steps outside the home, say at night, did something wrong, something to “deserve” being raped.

National Crime Records Bureau data says the highest number of rapes in India in 2015 and 2016 were reported from Madhya Pradesh.

My memory of Morena in Madhya Pradesh, where I had gone to report on the killing of a police officer in 2012, was that women seemed to vanish from the streets of the town after sunset.

You could still see thousands of men milling about, most of them seemingly intoxicated, but you couldn’t see a single woman.

I would leave my hotel room a little after dark, run to the dhaba across the road, wolf down my dinner, and then run back to the safety of my room. Invariably during dinner, I would have to push – tables were shared – a drunk man off my shoulder.

As I flitted back and forth, from hotel room to dhaba to hotel room, I would not see a single woman.

It would seem almost “wrong”, I imagine, for a woman to show up in the middle of that sort of situation. And, to take my argument forward, almost “okay” for a man to attack a woman who might actually be brave enough to show up.

My own early schooling years were segregated. I went to one of those “elite” boarding schools for boys, and up to class X no girls studied with us.

Our principal, who said he was aware of the dystopia an all-male culture created, began to admit girls in classes XI and XII in 1986.

My sister, who is five years older than me, was admitted to my school in 1989.

But from the stories she told me, it seemed to me like the boys and girls in her time were at war. They just didn’t seem to know what to do with each other. The school prefects seemed to think it was wrong for the girls to wear nail polish, I remember her telling me.

But in five short years, by the time I myself graduated to class XI, things had changed. We seemed to have learnt how to deal with each other, how to have healthier relationships.

How to look at each other as equals. How to be friends.

Those lessons have continued in later life to serve me in good stead. They, I would like to believe, have made me a more “manly” man – someone who does not feel the need to attack a woman, verbally or physically.

But I worry that our leaders, both elected and of our communities, will not learn from that lesson. We have already had a number of them say, after a rape is committed, that the answer is to keep “our” girls away from boys. Segregate them even further.

And of course, they also spout other similar nonsense – that girls should not wear jeans, or nail polish.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)