Thursday, December 20, 2012

Lets STOP this shame!

A young 23 year old paramedical student boards a bus with a male friend. In the next 30 minutes, she is brutally raped by a gang of 4 men, stripped naked and thrown out of the running bus. All this in the heart of the national capital. If this does not make us hang our heads in collective shame – what will ?

The horrific nature of the crime has brought people out on the streets spontaneously. News channels are awash with analysis, post mortems and outrage. While all this happens, the innocent victim battles between life and death in a city hospital.

  What drives such bestiality in a few men?

Some say, it is the education system that is now bereft of values? Some say it is the lack of education. There is an argument about a sex-saturated environment. Some say it’s the weak judiciary…. And many fingers are being pointed towards the policing system. The truth – as is always the case – is perhaps inter-twined amongst all these different reasons.

But for a second, stop to think of the mental make-up of these men who committed the crime. In the heart of the city, they raped a girl, threw her naked out of the bus…. and expected to just walk away and continue their pathetic lives ??!! Expecting to teach such grown up men the meaning of respect towards women and society, through any means is being utterly simplistic and naïve in our expectation. The only means that curbs this kind of thinking is the fear of the law.

But how do we instill the fear of the law? By increasing the policing and numbers in the police force for sure. But along with this, there is a need for leveraging other communication channels like the media and all public spaces. The messaging should be one: “We are watching you ALWAYS & EVERYWHERE”. Considering that the income tax department of the government already does this kind of messaging (albeit in a different context) – this is not something new for the government. There is also a learning we have from the experience of retail stores. Just putting up a sign that says, “This store is under constant CCTV surveillance” is seen to bring down the rate of pilferage.

Another learning for us comes from the experience of New York City. Crime in New York City was high in the 1980s and peaked in the early 1990s. However, during the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1994–2002), there was a precipitous drop in the crime rates. Since 1991, the city has seen a continuous trend of decreasing crime year on year. Neighborhoods that were once considered dangerous are now much safer. Violent crime in the city has dropped dramatically with the murder rate at its lowest then level since 1963. What was the magic pill?

Again, there is never one single silver bullet, but in the words of Rudolph Guiliani – when he was asked why it was important to clean up the streets and get rid of graffiti as a way to curb crime, this is what he said: “Well, I very much subscribe to the "Broken Windows" theory. The idea of it is that you had to pay attention to small things, otherwise they would get out of control and become much worse. And that, in fact, in a lot of our approach to crime, quality of life, social programs, we were allowing small things to get worse rather than dealing with them at the earliest possible stage. So we started paying attention to the things that were being ignored. Aggressive panhandling, the squeegee operators that would come up to your car and wash the window of your car whether you wanted it or not -- and sometimes smashed people's cars or tires or windows -- the street-level drug-dealing; the prostitution; the graffiti, all these things that were deteriorating the city. So we said, "We're going to pay attention to that," and it worked. It worked because we not only got a big reduction in that, and an improvement in the quality of life, but massive reductions in homicide, and New York City turned from the crime capital of America to the safest large city in the country for five, six years in a row.”

The broken windows theory was first introduced by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, in an article titled "Broken Windows". The title comes from the following example:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars. When people start perceiving that “no one cares” – the small crimes slowly start snow-balling into bigger ones.

Lets come back to the Indian context. We have a surfeit of “broken windows” all around us:

     • Traffic rules are broken with impunity

     • Eve teasers get away scot free

     • Spitting on buildings in public spaces – goes unchecked

     • Our public areas are by and large an embarrassment when it comes to cleanliness

Clearly the message that we are giving out loud and clear is that as a society – we “do not care”. The same criminals who dared commit this horrific rape, in all probability had got away with many many smaller “broken windows” before they arrived at this tragic point.

It is time we looked around and learnt our lessons from other industries & other countries! This national shame should never happen again.