The New Uprising and Change It Can Drive

For the first time in history of the country there is a social movement that is driven by women. Finally the women in society have found their voice, united themselves spontaneously and have spoken out against oppression. This should have happened many moons ago, but it took one horrific crime and one brave heart survivor to spark a revolution.

There are, many things that the movement is asking for: capital punishment, public lynching, castration, fast trials and many more. May be all the demands are right. May be all of this should be agreed upon. May be this will improve life of women in our country.

To do any of this requires executive action. To make all our 400 plus MPs to agree on a single agenda is not easy. They may eventually come around to drafting and legislating a new law. The new law may improve the situation visibly.

The society has always placed the males on a higher pedestal than females. The desire to dominate the females has been the driving force of social codes in the country. The changing gender roles, increasing independence of women, the drive from women to be independent is creating a pressure on males that they have never faced. This competition and knowledge that you are losing out is possibly behind this social malice of today.

I have always believed that only laws cannot change deep rooted social malice. To change them the society needs to take positive action.

While the desire for better laws, sensitive law enforcers and faster court indictments is all fine, this will take too much of time. The cops will still not record every event of eve teasing, the victims will not always go to the cop station, the social stigmas attached to such events will ensure that the crime is continued to be committed every day.

The current mass uprising has been ignited, fuelled and spread by the social media networks. They have truly become the change agents. The same power of social media can be unleashed to drive a really powerful change. This change can be long lasting and a radical social change driver.

Let's start with eve teasing, the more widespread of two evils. This is one evil that is not as widely reported as it should be; the victims are forced to treat this as part of life, and this is an evil that seems to have a no cure.

What we need is to create one central eve teaser registry. Every event that ever happens should be reported and recorded here. As far as possible the names and identities should be reported on the site. As a registry this should be open to every woman in the country, and registering a complaint can be through a simple SMS. Once registered the entire onus of proving that the person is not guilty should be on the shamed person and not the one who registered the complaint.

The entire Police Force in the country should pick up the complaints from this site and investigate the incidences. Let them apply the principle guilty until proven innocent.

The entire registry needs to become more than just a complaint redressal forum. This needs to become the registry that drives your entire life. Let parents check the grooms out on this registry first before they seek match for their daughters. Let the corporates check potential employees here before they hire. Let the insurance companies refuse insurance policies to the guilty, let the Passport Authorities refuse passports, or mark it on the passport of their status, let every government deny jobs to the perpetrators of crime.

A lot of these steps are voluntary; they don't need an official sanction and can be implemented easily.

Lack of credible deterrent is the prime reason for a host of crime that happens against women. Legal deterrent is one way to minimize the crime, but social deterrent is a far bigger motivation.

If we as a society stand up and drive the change within, insensitivity around such crimes will come down dramatically.

Admittedly it will drive the change in the slightly higher echelons of society, but culture trickles down and becomes a rampaging flood. It's time to unleash the collective force of our society.

Let's stand up!