Reuters had a piece yesterday on Blank Noise, a movement that is pushing for safer streets for Indian women. They recently began organizing “night actions� in a number of cities, where women walk down the street, largely wearing revealing or tight clothes with a message to street harassers -- that they should be able to wear whatever they please without feeling threatened.
'If I was not in a group, God only knows what would have happened,' Amrita Nandy Joshi, a 31-year-old Oxford graduate said as the group made its way down a dimly-lit New Delhi road after 10 p.m., a walk normally done only with a male escort, if at all.
Along the most recent march in New Delhi, the women spray painted the streets with brief descriptions of harassment that each of them encounter on a daily basis, leaving a mark of awareness concerning the lack of safety that exists for women in India. A few facts:
- A woman is raped in India every thirty minutes.- More than 30 percent of rape cases reported in India’s major cities last year were committed in New Delhi.
- Street harassment, such as verbal taunts and groping, is a frequent occurrence.
Sadly, the Indian media refers to street harassment as “Eve-teasing,� which is largely portrayed as a joke or friendly “teasing� toward women. Blank Noise is attempting to call “eve-teasing� out for what it really is and make the Indian public recognize that just because it’s considered normal doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable.
Their next project will draw on what women wear by collecting 1,000 pieces of clothing that were worn during street harassment and put them on exhibit in public places with the slogan, “I didn’t ask for it.�
To me, this is local activism at its very best. Make sure to check out their blog.
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I hate to be an ass, and I certainly don't want to sound like I think any number of rapes are OK, but that is a pretty damned meaningless statistic.
I am from Georgia, and looking at our crime statistics, if instead of 10m we had 1.2b people like India, we would have a rape every 14.2 minutes and 45% of them would be in the metro-Atlanta area. I think to imply that somehow those numbers imply some kind of unimaginably bad situation is overstatement in the extreme.
What Kebernet said. If an Indian woman is raped every thirty minutes, it puts India's rape rate at 3.5 per 100,000 women per year (the US is at 70). So either women are organizing nightwatches in a country with a rape rate that should be the world's envy, or the real rate is at least an order of magnitude higher than 3.5/100,000. Since I trust the women who organize the nightwatches to know just how ubiquitous rape is, I have to conclude that the real rate is much more than the one that the women are spraying.
"women walk down the street, largely wearing revealing or tight clothes "
"Their next project will draw on what women wear by collecting 1,000 pieces of clothing that were worn during street harassment and put them on exhibit in public places with the slogan, 'I didn’t ask for it.'"
Does anyone else see these statements as supporting the theory that there is a way a woman could dress that WOULD be asking for it?
“So either women are organizing nightwatches in a country with a rape rate that should be the world's envy, or the real rate is at least an order of magnitude higher than 3.5/100,000.�
Yes the rate of rape might be lower (and I am ready to bet that it is more under-reported than here in the US), but the rate of street harassment is most definitely much higher. You are not gonna get raped walking down a busy street in the middle of the day, but sure as hell somebody is going to try to grab your ass or shoulder you or make a comment about your looks or ask for your phone number, etc. That’s what this campaign is about more than about rape: Women should be able to walk down the street without being groped by strangers.
Martyfiveten,
No I think they are trying to say that no matter what you were wearing you can’t have been asking for it.
sojourner, I'm sure that's what they meant. I understand what they're trying to say, I just think the concept of not asking for it should exist apart from appearance entirely. It's equating harrassment w/a woman's appearance and not a man's attitude; I think it could be read as, "See? I was wearing this - would you hit on me if I was wearing this?"
In the extreme?? Even if a woman was getting raped every 3 hours, it would still be a "bad situation" that needs to be addressed. I would say comparisons aren't that relevant in this case.
"Their next project will draw on what women wear by collecting 1,000 pieces of clothing that were worn during street harassment and put them on exhibit in public places with the slogan, I didn’t ask for it."
The results of such an experiment would be interesting but the clothes will be probably be so ordinary and prove that harrassment can happen to anyone.
Again, I am not trying to imply that any level is acceptable, but the reason I offered up Georgia as an example is (oddly enough) we have a fairly low incident of rape relative to most of the country, and ours is twice that of India.
The fact of the matter is rape is a crime, and it is a crime generally committed by people who are either (a) fucknuts crazy, (b) sociopathically enabled by their society or (c) all of the above.
While you can address (b) to a certain level, you can never eliminate (a). And frankly, if it was "a rape every three hours" I would tend to say you are well into the (a) category.
Under-reporting aside -- and for the record, something not addressed by the quote -- those statistics aren't anywhere near the league of your central Asian countries, where, for the record, there is no legal recourse. I certainly applaud these women's efforts, and having lived in both Italy and (briefly) Japan where street harassment is a real issue, I understand the motivation. I am just saying that using those numbers to imply that it is a level heretofore unknown to the average American woman is, at the least, dishonest.
For all we let this administration lie to us with selective out-of-context statistics, there is no reason for "us" to engage in the same behavior.
Again, I am not trying to imply that any level is acceptable, but the reason I offered up Georgia as an example is (oddly enough) we have a fairly low incident of rape relative to most of the country, and ours is twice that of India.
The fact of the matter is rape is a crime, and it is a crime generally committed by people who are either (a) fucknuts crazy, (b) sociopathically enabled by their society or (c) all of the above.
While you can address (b) to a certain level, you can never eliminate (a). And frankly, if it was "a rape every three hours" I would tend to say you are well into the (a) category.
Under-reporting aside -- and for the record, something not addressed by the quote -- those statistics aren't anywhere near the league of your central Asian countries, where, for the record, there is no legal recourse. I certainly applaud these women's efforts, and having lived in both Italy and (briefly) Japan where street harassment is a real issue, I understand the motivation. I am just saying that using those numbers to imply that it is a level heretofore unknown to the average American woman is, at the least, dishonest.
For all we let this administration lie to us with selective out-of-context statistics, there is no reason for "us" to engage in the same behavior.