For Tamil film star and DMK party member Khushboo, the reason women don’t feel safe in India is largely down to the flimsiness of the laws in place to protect them.
“They are not stringent enough and some of them have not even been modified from pre-Independence times. Many of the cases don’t even come to light. It took massive public demonstrations for action to be taken in a case like the Jessica Lal murder. The laws to protect women definitely have to be tightened and there has to be a serious punishment meted out to men who commit acts of sexual violence. Only then will there be a sense of fear among them that they cannot indulge in such acts.”
Recent statistics show, rather disturbingly, that as women gain greater access to public spaces like the workplace, more cases of sexual violence are
being reported. It would seem that a lot of men are unable to accept a woman on equal footing and Khushboo agrees.
“A lot of men have these inflated egos and are unable to
accept a woman doing better than them or being more successful than them.”
She has experienced this at a personal level too. “When I was making the film Chinna Thambi (young boy), which was directed by P Vasu, the climax of the film was centred on me. Someone remarked to the director after the film that this was bad and that it should be called Chinna thayi (young woman) instead. Thankfully, the director Vasu wasn’t insecure about this and he told that person that it was the script of the film that really mattered. Still, someone had a problem.”
The actress is also concerned about the escalation in recent years of child sexual abuse and feels that children have to be warned against this form very early on. “It’s very important that the child is educated from very early on about what is a good touch and what is a bad touch. They should also be told never to go out alone with strangers. The problem is that, so often, the offender is not a stranger but someone the child knows, maybe even a member of the family. So they have to be told to be very careful.”
A strong relationship
between mother and child is
also essential, according to her, in dealing with these cases. “There has to be one member of the family whom the child can completely trust and who she can tell anything to. A lot of the time with child sexual abuse, the child is in trauma and is too scared to tell anybody what happened. The building of a relationship
like this is essential for every family,” she says.
Khushboo is also critical of the role played by the media in
reporting these cases. “The
reports are very one-sided. A lot of the time, especially with the electronic media, they are concerned only with a fast
report of the incident. They don’t focus on the trauma felt by the child the next day and her trouble with facing the world after something like this has happened.”