Women experience fear in broad daylight

Being a clerk in the panchayat department, she is a field staff and has to visit new buildings for assessing tax and reporting to the section clerk.

Derrick Jensen, in a chapter titled ‘Predator and Prey’ in his two-volume book, Endgame, says, “If any woman, anywhere in the world, hears footfalls behind her on a darkened street, she has reason to be afraid. Robin Morgan called it the democracy of fear under patriarchy.” When I read Endgame, this observation of Jensen creeped me out. I felt that girls and women in our male-dominated, misogynistic world are deprived of real freedom due to fear. But I didn’t know in what forms this fear troubles them until quite recently, when my junior colleague Ranjini recounted a fearful experience of hers.

Being a clerk in the panchayat department, she is a field staff and has to visit new buildings for assessing tax and reporting to the section clerk. Once she had to assess the tax of a pig farm. The applicant sent two people with his vehicle and she went with them. “Sir, the farm is in a remote and deserted place,” she told me. “There was nobody except the two males and I. When they stopped the car, I thought we had reached our destination. But they told me vehicles couldn’t go to the site, which is a little distance away. I walked nearly a kilometre with them to reach the site! What a ‘little distance’ it was! As the place was quite deserted and there were no people around, I started feeling very scared. If the two men had tried to misbehave, what would I have done? Nobody would hear even if I yelled. I didn’t dare enter the buildings and returned abruptly, having fearfully completed the verification for assessment.”

Another day she said: “Today, when I was verifying the measurements of a completed building, the owner, an old man, asked me, ‘Why do you come alone to inspect sites? If I close the door and misbehave with you, what would you do? You should take somebody with you for site visits.’”If a male clerk went for the tax assessment of the pig farm, he wouldn’t experience the fear Ranjini experienced. And the old man wouldn’t dole out such advice to a male employee. Derrick Jensen says that a woman has reason to be afraid if she hears footfalls behind her on a darkened street. But Ranjini’s experience proves a woman has reason to be afraid in broad daylight too.

Sukumaran C V
Email: lscvsuku@gmail.com