Mahila Diwas : The fight against odds starts right from the womb

For every 1,000 men in India, there are only 933 women. And this is an improvement from a decade ago, when the sex ratio had nosedived to an appalling 927. Violence against women in India starts from the womb, with female foeticide, and goes on to take the shape of rape, domestic violence, dowry harassment et al.

A recent international study has shown that Indian men are more gender inequitable than their counterparts across the world. According to the International Men and Gender Equality Survey — carried out by the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) — 24 per cent Indian men who had witnessed violence in their childhood perpetrated violence against their partners, as compared to 16 per cent of men who had not. According to the Gender-Equitable Men scale, 24 per cent of men supported the least equitable norms among the settings studied.

For example, for the statement “changing diapers, giving kids a bath and feeding kids are the mother’s responsibility”, only 10 per cent of men agreed in Brazil whereas 61 per cent agreed in India.

Of the 1,552 men surveyed in India, only 16 per cent said they contributed to household and domestic work while 37 per cent admitted to being physically violent to their partners. The figures are much higher for the first and lower for the second elsewhere in the world. The government’s own National Family Health Survey data is also an eye-opener.

According to the data, in the age group of 15-49, 35.4 per cent of all women and 40 per cent of ever-married women experienced physical or sexual violence. Even the women and child development ministry has accepted in Parliament that despite the Domestic Violence Prevention Act coming into force in 2006, dowryrelated violence and the number of dowry deaths has increased. Dowry-related deaths across the country have sharply risen from 8,093 in 2007 to 8,383 in 2009.

“If we want to change gender attitudes, we need to address all social institutions and start at a young age,” Ravi Verma of ICRW said. Amid this dismal state of affairs, the ray of hope is the rising number of girls going to school — from 46 per cent in 2007 to 48 per cent in 2010. This is just a tiny step towards gender parity whereas we need to take giant strides.