REVEALING CLOTHES ARE THE CAUSE OF RAPE?

By Deepika Bhardwaj

Time and again, ministers, politicians and other influential community leaders have been telling women and girls not to wear jeans, short skirts, dresses or shorts. Women have also been told not to go out after dark, date, be friends with boys, or even use mobile phones.

We live in a culture that produces girls’ tops with narrower shoulder straps than boys’, girls shorts that expose more leg than boy’s shorts, then shames girls for wearing them.  We live in a culture that tells boys’ it's okay to shed clothes in order to be comfortable, but tells girls that their comfort is secondary to how others perceive them.

 Samajwadi Party leader Abu Azmi said scantily-clad women attracted male attention and that rape cases were on the rise due to "women wearing less clothes".

Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the right-wing Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which is the ideological mentor of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, said rapes were an urban crime shaped by westernisation, and were not happening in rural India where traditional values were upheld.

A female politician, Asha Mirje, caused outrage for saying that "rapes take place also because of a woman's clothes, her behaviour and her being at inappropriate places".

The message that we’re receiving isn’t just that more ‘revealing’ clothes are wrong. It’s that our female bodies are wrong. That by having breasts and hips and legs and exposing them, we are less.

It is high time that at least the sane minded people understand that a rapist acts on it juvenile psychological urge to exert dominance on its prey, a way to exert their physical superiority that comes with a complex instilled upon them from childhood perhaps through a faulty upbringing, where they weren’t told right from wrong, but were told to “BE A MAN”.

The irony: It’s funny how some misogynists comment that women should not be at a place of power because they tend to take decisions driven by emotions and hormones but the very first excuse they come up for the rapists is that ‘she was wearing so and so clothes , how can you expect him to control himself?’ Well if lesbians can control themselves in womens changing rooms with butt naked females walking around then men can too. If not then they are mentally and emotionally unfit to be a part of society.