Friday, October 12, 2007

Wife-beating okay??

An article in today's TOI cover page instantly caught my eye - 54% women say wife-beating okay. And these statistics are only for India. I really want to meet such women who think it's ok for a husband to beat his wife!!! Also, 51% of men think the same. This means there is 50-50 chance that the person I marry would be a wife-beater (assuming that a person who thinks wife-beating is ok is very likely to beat his own wife). Only 2% of these abused women have ever sought police help - this is not surprising keeping in mind our centuries-old mentality of keeping ghar ki izzat within four walls of the house even though the battered woman may have to resort to extreme measures of killing herself (or in rare cases killing the husband) as a result of continued violence meted out to her.

Another startling fact mentioned in the survey was Buddhist women have the highest level of violence .. so much for assuming Buddhism was all about non-violence!! But then which religion teaches us to be violent?
I personally feel that condoning an act of crime is as bad as committing it. To a great extent we women are ourselves responsible for the kind of situation we are in today ....


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was laughing at the same article when i saw it in the coffee shop yesterday. But to take numbers put out by TOI that too based on their survey esp. that 50% of the men want to beat their wife hmmm

Vee said...

Well, that's a comforting feeling - that TOI numbers are not to be trusted. Things don't look as bad then :)

ME-MOI-MYSELF said...

I like the last statement. Women in the form of MILs or the submissive wife - yes they are equally responsible.

I have heard of and at times interacted with educated, literate women from good lineage, who take this treatment silently - some even going on to defend their actions and their spouses; "this is a common occurrence here". Hello! Wake up!