Every year, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women is celebrated on November 25 to create awareness about the ways by which everyone comes together to stop violence.
While a lot of efforts have been created in the recent past, violence against fairer gender remains a recurring problem globally. Be it domestic or sexual, women continue to violence and the fear of abuse.
While cogent data has been missing, one can say, looking in the society and news which one comes across, the incidences keep rising.
The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 which came into effect in October 2006 defines domestic violence as any act, omission or commission that causes injury to a woman’s physical or mental health and includes specific forms of violence such as physical, sexual, verbal, emotional and economic abuse. The Act seeks to provide relief to women in the form of protection order, residence order, monetary relief, custody order and compensation orders. Breach of any protection order is a criminal offence. Authorities needed to act fast. While data is lacking regarding it, there are no prompt means for registering the complaints.
It is also not just confined to domestic violence but there have been increased incidents of rape, harassment and other such undesirable acts against women.
It is not the case that anticipation or forewarning against the rise was not there. Most rapes are perpetrated by people known to the victim but there are hardly befitting punishments. Most of the rapes are not reported for the reasons well known and also specifically documented. One does not know exactly how many women were raped or trafficked? One does not know how many were married forcibly and under-aged in desperation to see them safe and fed. Nevertheless one can with a degree of certainty say that violence is the ominous, omnipresent, obvious reality in the lives of the fairer gender. Systematic creation of a support infrastructure like easy access helplines, secure shelter services with enabling cultures and sensitisation of people against violence need to be done in the manner as it ought to be. It is perhaps high time that everyone join hands together to stop all kinds of violence against women. As has been rightly stressed by the United Nations, there is need for funding prevention strategies to proactively stop gender-based violence.
