Sexual Violence In India

The recent debates on sexual violence in India have brought to light the deeply

entrenched hierarchical ideas about roles in Indian society and underlying social

norms. Since the brutal gang-rape and subsequent death of Jyoti Singh Pandey, a 23

year old paramedical student, on 16 Dec 2012 in Delhi, the situation of girl in India is

under the eyes of international public attention. In our country itself the problem is

evident since many years. Rape is one among the many terrifying dimensions of

systemic disabilities that Indian women face

Rape cases registered by the National Crime Records Bureau have gone up by almost

900 per cent over the last 40 years, to 24,306 incidents in 2011, while murder cases

had gone up by only 250% over

Women as a

core group of emerged as a major theme in the Millennium Development Goal. The

Millennium Development Goal are the 8 goals set by the United Nations in 2000

which will act as yardstick to determine the advancement in the direction of the

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obliteration of global poverty. UN stated that ‘Gender Equality and Women

Empowerment’ as one of the Millennium Development Goals to attained by the year

2015. The Women’s empowerment implies the ability of women take all the important

decisions independently related to her throughout her life span that ensure her success

in all aspects of life. However these goals are far realized in a country like India. In

fact often women in India are deprived of their fundamental right to leave alone the

question of gender equality. The present paper explores the questions central to

women’s right in India that is fundamentally in nature. The article attempts to grapple

with the few challenges faced by the women in India like the dowry, female foeticide,

denial inheritance. The objective of the paper is to evolve strategies to empower

women who are as beings as men are.

There are several rights in India for the women are not aware of because of

“Missing women” – a concept developed by Amartya Sen (1990, 1992) –

refers to the observation that in parts of the developing world, notably in India and

China, the ratio of women to men is suspiciously low. Sen estimated that more than

100 million women were “missing”, presumably from inequality and neglect leading

to excess female mortality.

Kishwar Madhu 2015, where daughters are unwanted, states that in many parts of

India especially northern India where the population is not that literate, go for prenatal

sex determination tests and get the abortion done if the gender of the foetus comes out

to be a girl. She states the urgent need to educate the population of some backward

parts of the country.

Anagha Sarpotdar, 2013, says that private sector in India has by and large not been

very receptive to women's complaints about sexual harassment at the workplace. This

article highlights the importance of company policies on sexual harassment, the role of

their human resource departments, and says that the private sector has to