‘Combating Online Violence Against Women & Girls: A Worldwide Wake-Up Call’ – A waste of a good coffee



‘Majority of women suffer online abuse says UN Report’; reads the early morning coffee news item. This is enough to make me want to go back to the safety of my sleep. But it is time again to unravel these mysterious statements by the UN.

The report goes on to talk about ‘cyber violence’ and further says that ‘India is one of the countries where reporting about cyber bullying is low’. Again and again we hear of these ‘unreported’ cases somehow being ‘reported’ perhaps telepathically from victim to UN report makers. Or does the UN also employ tarot cards and astrologers’ parrots to pick a number. More on that in a moment.   
Let’s take a break to refill the coffee mug. Things are about to get more interesting.

The report named ‘Combating Online Violence Against Women & Girls: A Worldwide Wake-Up Call’. The quotes go on as such ‘only 35% women in India reported their victimization while a larger majority 46.7% had not. About 18.3% were not even aware that they had been victimized’ Now coming to the interesting part, which poses a few serious questions.

  1. How did they know the exact figure of 46.7% had not reported victimization when it was not reported? Are the UN reporters on some kind of medication that made them hallucinate?
  2. How did the UN know it was just 35% of women who reported abuse when they did not know how many actually faced the abuse? How does the UN know the actual number of women who are online? Is the UN secretly stalking these women? Does the UN realize it is a crime?
  3. How could 18.3% not even be aware that they had been victimized? Is this the online analogy of telling someone that they were sleep walking, or is it just a covert message being sent to women to get in touch with their ‘feelings’ about being abused?
  4. Where is the report on how many men face online abuse?
  5. Where is the report on how many men have ‘not reported’ their online abuse?
  6. Where the report on how many men are not even aware that they have been victimized by these UN reports?

The report goes on (..and on and on) to says that women in the age range of 18 to 24 are ‘uniquely likely’ to experience stalking and sexual harassment in addition to physical threats. The above statement can only be made by an unemployed astrologer desperate for some attention or it could be made by a very respectable body called the UN which has stopped being effective in curtailing real human issues and is now waging war against Men & Boys.

Seems like the UN is no longer a place where real humanitarian work takes place, nor does it stand for equality or justice anymore. This is evident from the end statement of the news report which reiterates the UN mandate as Sensitization, Safeguards and Sanctions- Sensitization of ‘feelings’ so that it can create  Safeguards against imaginary threats and impose Sanctions against about half of the human population. 

Addendum 1: For Your Information, UN please consider the following: https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/647450208452878336



Addendum 2: 

Fact-checking the UN: Is the Internet dangerous for women?

A Burning in Hyderabad

News reports started off saying that a kerosene-burning of a woman took place in the side lanes of the old city of Hyderabad. The accusation of the 30% burn victim is that she was attacked and burnt by her relatives. The woman is currently hospitalized and undergoing treatment. Police had taken custody of the accused and questioned. 
After investigation, other facts came to light. The relatives claimed that they were not involved in the incident. The burn victim claimed that she was working in Deloitte software company.  She claimed that the attack took place at 10pm in the night. During investigation, the police officials could not get any leads. At this stage a young man came forward to say that he was an eyewitness to the incident. But when the police interrogated him further, he claimed that the woman called him up at 9.30pm and told him that she was burnt and told him to give false witness of the incident.
Even her rescuer confirmed that he did not see anyone who could have set her on fire. On further investigation, police found out that she was not working for Deloitte. She already had 13 cheating cases on her. She even put false cases on many of her relatives and made them run around courts. An elderly relative explains how she put rape case against him, his wife, his deceased daughter and his two sons. When they were acquitted, she filed writ petition against their acquittal in the High Court. It is reported that she even put cases against people who refused to helped her and also against people who helped her! MBT party leader Azadullah Khan says that he himself, his brother, party workers and even a lawyer who helped her with bail were also implicated in fake harassment cases by this woman.
The news report concludes that at present, the police are investigating further into the case, but as of now it seems that the woman has allegedly has set herself on fire to implicate her government-employed relatives and extort money from them.

Marriage in the time of WCD, a Prenuptial Out-law

 


Marriage breakup in India these days takes lesser time than it takes to complete six balls in a cricket match. ‘Over’ says the Umpire in a cricket game; his decision is final, no appeals, no reviews. But in an Indian divorce, the real match begins for players of the game. Prenuptial agreements or contracts as seen in the Western world are supposed to minimize the litigation for the warring couples, and to ensure that no party uses divorce for the express purpose of financial profit. However, in India, it is a different power play altogether.

 
There have been several news reports informing the public that the Women & Child Development (WCD) Ministry is proposing the legitimization of pre-nuptial contracts in India. Sounds just like cricketing rules. Sounds fair and square? After all cricket is supposed to be a gentleman’s game overseen by gentlemen umpires. Some would say that’s patriarchal oppression of the stadium!  But if we allow the dust to settle and allow the playground to become visible once more, we will find that the WCD has no mandate to create rules of the marriage game on its own. Remember, in a past issue the WCD famously responded by saying “Protection of men is also not the mandate of Ministry of WCD”.
 
By definition any heterosexual Marriage involves the union of a man and a woman, then it can be said with reasonable authority that WCD has no mandate for drafting any law involving marriage. In reciprocation, and in all fairness, we the men of India recognize the fact that we do not have any mandate for marriages involving woman and woman. If at all WCD is burdening itself with heterosexual marriage laws, then a partner-body of Men and Child Development (MCD) Ministry must be immediately constituted to allow reason and logic also to be clinically injected into the draft. Provisionally, till the formation of an MCD, Men’s Rights Groups must be allowed to put in their representations to the law making body.
 
The WCD is a Ministry which has time and again shown itself to be anti-male for adults as well as children (witness the anti-male child remarks by the current Minister). If it is the official stated position of the WCD Ministry that “all violence is male generated” then logically speaking WCD should not entertain any sort of contact between men and women. So if Honorable Minister Maneka Gandhi’s views on males as generators of violence is to be taken at face value, then by proposing a prenuptial law then the WCD, by its own admission is directly contributing to the violence.
 
Besides any one-sided prenuptial law, being unrepresented by the side of men, is the same as a dowry demand, which is illegal & prohibited by the Dowry Prohibition Act.
 
Also like in the past, WCD is more suited to propose new laws and amendments for encouraging breakup and post-breakup scenarios like dowry cases, Domestic Violence Act which is applicable only for women and matters involving incentives for divorces for women, as opposed to Domestic Harmony law proposed by men’s rights groups. Therefore it can be said that till now as far as women and men are concerned, in the context of a family, the WCD has been working purely on divisive lines.
 
Marriage is a unifying concept, performed for the purpose of harmonious cohabitation and the growth of man, woman and children. Marriage is not a platform for unleashing male hatred, property division and making children the property of the State. The WCD, therefore having no experience or mandate or any intention of drafting unifying laws is uniquely disqualified from making proposals for the creation of any sort of draft outlines in any context remotely concerning marriage. We therefore summarily oppose any lab experimentation on the institution of marriage by any unscientific body. The WCD is advised to rediscover fire and reinvent the wheel & also clean itself of misandry before it even thinks of reformulating the rules of man-woman relationship of marriage. In case the government and public still think that a law on prenuptials are required, then we suggest that WCD and Mens Rights Organizations sign a prenuptial agreement first to sit together and draft a prenuptial law. Hows that for equality?

Sparks of Hate Speech near the Powder Keg of Misandry


Some of the greatest men in history like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and a long line of men and women who were inspired by these men have preached and practiced NON-VIOLENCE as a practice of life.

Union Minister Maneka Gandhi in a live Q&A session on Facebook India is reported to have said “…all the violence is male generated and goes on to say how school going boys are going to be rewarded for being ‘gender champions’.

Besides being highly misleading, inaccurate and diabolical to say the least, this speech can now be seen by many as a green signal to unleash violence against men and boys.Till now, there used be some fig-leaves of excuses to bash-up men, and now with this statement, no more vague causes will be needed to unleash violence against men and boys.

But somewhere between Adolf Hitler and Maneka Gandhi, the values of non-violence of a man like Mahatma Gandhi, whose name the Minister incidentally carries, have been hopelessly lost. The line between free speech and hate speech has been blurred with the mainstream media being so poetically mute. Is the main stream media maintaining this deafening silence because the speaker is a ruling party MP or is it because the speaker is a woman in-charge of the mighty Women and Child Development Ministry(WCD). Where is the vociferous media call for ‘THE NATION WANTS TO KNOW’?

It does not bode well for society for when a Minister leading the WCD gives out irresponsible hate speeches containing unscientific assumptions. What we have heard or read are just words, but these words betray the hate against men of this nation. Is this the official view of the WCD Ministry? And is this a precursor by the WCD Minister to roll out an official/unofficial anti-men hate campaign against the men and male children of this nation?

Being an elected Member of Parliament, is the Minister allowed to say this about the same men who elected her and her colleagues to power and also whose tax money goes into the maintenance of this Ministry? Were these feelings of male-hate illustrated in the election manifesto of this Minister during the time of election? Or is it just a jobrequirement for anyone heading the WCD Ministry? It is now left to the male voters and also the female voters of her constituency and the nation to conduct retrospection about their decision. It is also left to the political leadership to find out if the opinions and speech are personal in nature or emanate from the WCD Ministry’s official or ‘unofficial’ agenda. I put this question to the citizens who have given ministerial power to this particular minister if these thoughts and words ensure safety of the male children of the nation. Would it be safe not to question the motives of this Ministry, to say the least?

Secondly, why is that there is no mention of how the Ministry would reward girls for being ‘particularly respectful and helpful to boys and deserve to be emulated and rewarded’? Don’t boys also being children, also being the mandate of WCD, deserve respect?

Today, we are sitting on a powder keg of hate against men, whether it is men among Members of Parliament, Police officers, Defense personnel, Judiciary, Bureaucrats, Media or common citizens. There is already a conspiracy of surreptitious allowance of hate crime against men. This kind of crime is in contrast with the way crime happens by individuals/groups commit against each other. This kind of hate crime is now being initiated and continues to happen only because it is allowed by the State to happen by way of its cognizance and non-involvement in correction. Therefore, by being mute, it would be a crime in itself for citizens to keep quiet against these kinds of statements, specially coming from a sitting Union Minister.

It is understandable for the common man to fear backlash from a powerful ministry which has the power of the State and resources at its beck and call. But what reasons do the men in the government, the politicians, the main stream media have? Is this a silence maintained by fear? If this statement of the Minister is not challenged, then I suggest we all wait for the Kristallnacht against men that is about to follow.

My Prison Experience – Hanging on to innocence

It was mid-day and the April sun was sharp against my face. I was the last of the prisoners to enter the courtyard. It was hexagonal with a small room near the centre.  A big man in a prison uniform looked at me and told everyone to pick up a plate. When my turn came, there were no plates left. I was terrified at the thought of asking him. The inmate looked at me like I was a cockroach. Then he uttered a “$@%8#.. andar se pilate le” (“Get a plate from inside”) and pointed to a small dusty room with an open door. I went inside and found a few bent food plates with dust and dried grime on it. I picked up the least dirty one. This one looked like it was greased with tar.
I took the plate and wandered out of the hexagon into where I saw the last man disappear. It opened into a bigger courtyard with lots of trees and barracks building on the right, with a few men sitting outside and looked at me as if I was a foreign tourist. I probably had that look of a lost boy on my face.  I looked around for the least intimidating looking man and approached him with caution. I was not sure if I should talk to him first. He asked me if I had any cigarettes with me. I told him I don’t. He scowled at me as if I had a rabid infection and after a pause, gestured at my plate and told me to clean it near a cemented water tank.
Thus began the longest plate cleaning exercise of my life. In part I was relieved I had something to do. I poured some water on and used some detergent powder that I found next to the tap. It barely even cleaned the caked dust.  I picked up some sand and tried to scrub off the tar. I saw it make some progress. I wondered if they had sandpaper supply in prison. That was the engineer in me thinking. I scrubbed and scrubbed till the skin of my hands showed signs of peeling off. The final result still had some black tar in a thin layer. With sweat pouring down my face, I could see lines of metal after my engineering feat. I prepared myself mentally to eat off the plate if I was going to be here forever.
I looked up to see a thin young man looking at me intently. He looked amused at what I was doing. He said “Bhaijaan, usko pheko. Khane ka wakat, mere pilate le lo, baad me accha wala doondh ke dunga” (“Brother, leave that plate, you may use my plate during meal-time, I will find you a better one later”). Something about his gesture was reassuring, because I felt I was going to be here for a long long time. I kept imagining, no, I was sure that my family stopped trying to get me out on bail, though I did not have much understanding of that concept then.
That evening I was sitting on my own, trying to avoid ‘the hardened criminals’, imagining all sort of sordid things that might happen to me. The same boy set up a carrom board game and asked me to play with him along with two others. The second day of prison was spent like this, listening to their life stories.
The next morning I kept listening to the loudspeaker announcements that listed out names for release on bail granted or visitation ‘Rihae or Mulaqat‘. My name or number did not come up, but my new friend came back from somewhere, called me by name and asked me to report to the Superintendent’s office for release procedure and to hurry. He did not even wait for me to thank him.
I had a lot of time to reflect on that in the years to come. I do not remember his name, lost in the hardened faces I tried to remember during the three days of ‘judicial remand’. I have forgotten the names, I have forgotten the faces, but I will remember the kindness and the concern the inmates showed me those three days, something I didn’t find in all the people who pretend to uphold law, justice and fairness in the days that led up to prison and hence.
Today, I commemorate the Prison Experience Day with my thanks to the inmates, their kindness and humanity that is lost in the ‘fair and just outside world’. Today, I wish the humanity in them with my #SelfieInPrison initiative