Rape Amendment Bill: Will This Change End The Matter?

The Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2011 has culminated a chagrin amongst majority of the Indian public. What seemed to reduce the criminal conduct has actually uprooted the society as a whole. The Government has put forward a Bill that proposes to include ‘sexual assault’ under the term ‘rape’. On this the social activists have given a wide variety of opinions that further divides them by a great margin. Not that they totally oppose the proposed bill, the question that haunts most of them is does that prove helpful in any sense? The main problem with our government is that they do not search for a solution, they search for more questions that they will certainly not be able to answer.

Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2011

According to a survey carried out throughout India, our metropolitan cities have shown a drastic increase in the number of rape cases in the past few years with capital Delhi topping the list. These are the most reported cases as against murder or any other criminal offences.  And as a matter of fact there are no cases being reported regarding sexual assault against men. Is that there are no such extreme cases or they are not being highlighted? It is truly an unknown truth. With the people becoming so aware of their rights and criminal intimidations, there is hardly any chance left that there are any such prime cases of sexual assault against men that are not recorded purposefully. And the other question that arises here is that are the derogatory cases reported by women by any way comparable to these? It depends on the society and people whom you question!

What the government expected was that by this bill the public would coalesce and admit its ambit. But this has come as a shock for them as a whole. To those like Anjali Gopalan, who had been fighting for a gender-neutral law, this decision has come as a success. But this not get the consent of many others. Many social rights’ activists believe that the government as a whole has complicated the matter much more than it was before. Truly speaking the situation has deteriorated further.

What the government should have thought about was how to reduce the pain for women that they have been suffering from decades. It is only recently that some matters have arisen about cases of torture against men. By giving a gender neutral law the cases of criminal offences against any of them- either men or women will be eliminated completely, can we say so? Of course no, by making such laws there wont be any improvement in the society, there wont be any improvement in the way men will keep dominating women, there wont be any improvement in the way women will be kept under extreme conditions of torture and harassment.

The need of the hour is to educate the society. The need is to inculcate a sense of respect and honour for women in the mind of men. Not only this the need is to inculcate what is meant by humanitarism and what God meant whan we created all of us as damn “humans”.

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