Want to Learn From Yemen on Anti-Rape Law?

In the age of Facebook Warriors and Facebook Celebrities all around, where success is measured by the number of likes one receives, “Truth” takes the back seat. This phenomenon was evident the moment I saw a number of my friends sharing a status update of some HR recruiter (who are famous for such publicity stunts in order to reach out to more people). Here goes the status with the image:

The response was phenomenal. The image and the “message” got 200+ “shares” and 40+ “likes”. This made me curious about “Yemen”. Is it really such a great nation when it comes to women’s rights, that India should emulate it?

I read the following in a quick web search and I was shocked at their records:

    

1. Yemen is ranked last of 135 countries in the 2012 Global Gender Gap Report [1] [3]
2. Human Rights Watch reported on discrimination and violence against women as well as on the abolition of the minimum marriage age of fifteen for women. The onset of puberty (interpreted by some to be as low as the age of nine) was set as a requirement for marriage instead. [2] [3]
3. Yemeni parliament only has one female lawmaker. [4] [5]
4. Women in Yemen cannot marry a non-Yemeni without approval form both her family and the state. [4] [5]
5. Yemeni men have the right to divorce their wives at any time without justification, a woman on the other hand must go through a process of litigation in which they justify their reason for nullifying the marriage contract. [4][5]
6. Before the court, a women is considered only half a person, that is it takes “the testimony of two women” to equal “the testimony of one man.” [4] [5]
7. Yemen is a country where female genital mutilation (FGM) remains an issue, even after being banned by the Ministry of Public health. In addition, many women are forced to marry at a young age, made possible by state policies, which gives the family the control over whether or not a girl marries and when. [5]
8. Yemen has one of the worst records of child marriage in the world, with UNICEF recording in 2005 that 48.4% of Yemeni women currently aged 20–24 had been married before they were 18 (and 14% before the age of 15). [6] [7]
9. In 2005, Yemen ranked 136th of 167 nations in terms of press freedom. [7] [8]

References are here (I mainly took the points from Wikipedia articles mentioned below and yet have mentioned the original sources also):

[1] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2012.pdf

[2] World Report 2001 on Yemen". Hrw.org. Retrieved 2013-02-22

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemen

[4] Basha, Amal. “Yemen.” In Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice, edited by Sameena Nazir and Leigh Tomppert. Oxford: Freedom House, 2005.

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Yemen

[6] http://www.unicef.org/publications/index_26024.html

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Yemen

[8] Reporters Without Borders: 2005 Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index accessed 8-8-2006

I think it is clear the amount of our understanding of Islamic nations is pathetic. And this is why we appreciate their brutal methods of punishment, as if these were nice things worth emulating by us. We do not need to ape animals in order to become civilized. We have our own law in India and the problem lies in its enforcement and to make laws more effective and quick implementation! In no way I am undermining the need to have strict laws, but I am of the opinion that surety of punishment rather than brutality of the punishment methods can come better at reducing the crime rates! Crime against women is one of the worst forms of crimes and we should have more women-friendly police stations and faster proceedings to help reduce the crime rates.

But I think next time you meet some Facebook Celebrity sharing some brutal violent image as a “prescription” for ills in India, do think about doing a little research. It may be that in our generation of fast food and shallow opinions we may be appreciating the very demon we should be fighting against! Just like Yemen’s women’s rights!

Note: Views are personal and do not represent views of any organization associated with the author. [Detailed disclaimer]

 

Gender Biased Media

A few years ago, I got too infuriated with the Times of India (TOI), due to the way it handled a news report. Some policemen had misbehaved with some women-protesters in Punjab, and the newspaper chose to show the face of the woman being harassed, her horrified friend’s face, but the camera angle made sure that policeman’s face would remain unclear and unidentified. It happened in both the two pictures it printed while reporting the news. That was a wretched show of journalism and my dislike of TOI reached a pinnacle with that incident (but many more cases had to follow).

Now a day, especially when I am in office, I browse through news.google.com to keep track of the latest happenings around the world. With time I started getting surprised as to why even Google News props up images of women in unrelated news, at the slightest opportunity. One day I just scrolled down the page and found that pictures of women were dominating the news page unnecessarily and almost unjustifiably. Since news hosted on google news is coming from various sources, and each source has multiple images on it, google news should have some logic to select which image to prop up on its main page. Was there a gender bias even in this expectedly gender-neutral programming?

I look at this page which is from any normal day.

With the news item titled “OBC admission: Supreme Court upholds HC order”, there are lady students featured alongside. So if the media has to post a picture of some students, it will be girl-students in most cases.

Second item is on rains and calamities. News titled “Heavy rains in UP, Bengal, Meghalaya; 12 dead” Here too, we can see a group of five women joining their umbrellas and captured in the camera. So if some people die out of heavy rains, our newspapers will show the pictures of some women commuters walking or suffering in the rains. 

This kind of gender bias in the media is disappointing, and even offensive in a way. Such a practice keeps positioning women as an object and material, whose bodies would be for “display” to generate more eyeballs and raise some TRPs when it comes for the media. Advisers have historically used women (women’s beauty) to create a buzz around their products and services to an extent that we have stopped seeing any wrong in it. But it is surprising to me that even online portals running by unbiased search logic are selecting images of women only, for display.

- Rahul