Friday, October 19, 2012

Blog 8: In Rural Haryana, Women Blamed for Rape Where Men Make the Rules

Disputes in this small Haryana farming village, 70 miles from Delhi, are settled by 11 men dressed entirely in white, who hear arguments in a roomy hall and then retire to an underground room to make a decision. The group, the Sarva Jaateeya Venain Khap, is one of the largest khap panchayats, or unelected all-male village councils in Haryana, with a jurisdiction that extends to 52 villages. The system garnered national attention recently, after a series of rapes in the area were followed by a suggestion from a khap member that the marriage age be lowered to 16, keeping women sexual satisfied, to prevent further rapes. The suggestion comes on the heels of several “honor killings” in the area, in which families killed couples who had married against their wishes.
This week in a nearby village under the khap’s jurisdiction, a teenage lower-caste girl was raped by several teenager boys who dragged her into a house, one of more than a dozen rapes this month in the area. On Wednesday, she committed suicide by setting herself on fire.
Khap members said in interviews Thursday that if the girl’s family comes to them, they will ensure that the “right” culprits get punished. But, they said, they do not take up cases on their own.
Because khaps are social organizations formed on the basis of trust and social standing, there are no records of the exact number of in India. At the annual Sarv Khap, or All Khap, meeting, the number of khaps varies every year, attendees say. “There are new khaps formed every now and then, if there is a person of great social standing in a particular village, and some weak ones tend to die out,” said Subhash Nain, a senior member of the Sarva Jaateeya Venain Khap.

When reading this article I learned that there are villages in India that have groups of men that are in control of them in a manner like an unofficial government. These men make decisions about the village and the people within it. In this particular article the men are making a decision about a girl who was raped and as a result of that killed herself. The dispute was that the Khap are trying to make this incident the girls fault and not the perpetrators. In our society this would in no way be the girls fault, it would be the fault of the young boys. But even as strange as this seems the members of the village still believe that the Khep is in charge and they are trusted. They believe they would never do anything to hurt them. The elders in the village put full trust and faith into the Khep and know they are doing their best to ensure safety in the area. I am concerned for what the women in the society think; do they feel safe where they are? This may seem crazy for the people in charge to blame the victim for the action of a crime, but to them it is just another decision they had to make that day.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/in-rural-haryana-women-blamed-for-rape-where-men-make-the-rules/

No comments:

Post a Comment