OUTRAGING THE modesty of a woman: that's how Section 154 of the Indian Penal Code sees most crimes against women. We run into the phrase quite often: in 2006, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) logged 19,348 cases of rape from across India, up from 15,847 in 2005. And these are just the reported cases — 71 percent of these crimes go unreported for fear of stigma and repercussions. According to the 2006 NCRB statistics, 18 women endured sexual violence in one form or another every hour. 2006 was also the year when dowry deaths, the rallying point for the women's movement in the 1970s, accounted for the lives of 7,618 women, a 12.2 percent increase over 2005.

In urban India, as more and more women take up jobs, drive cars and bikes, work nightshifts at BPOs and opt to live on their own, men seem both unprepared and unwilling to accept this public visibility and independence. These, however, are not necessarily men from small towns or the underclass, as popular perception would sometimes have it.
After the New Year's Eve incident in Mumbai, where a mob of about 70 groped two women in up-market Juhu, media reports emphasised that 12 of the 14 arrested were "school dropouts from the lower middle class", implying that class envy or a supposed lack of educated sensibility lay behind the offence.

But the insecurity women live with is not the doing of the average auto-rickshaw driver alone, adjusting his rearview mirror to view a passenger's bosom. As another theory has it, the urban sexual predator is often the nouveau riche male, inebriated on his big bucks, big cars and sometimes on strong beer
(...) The Blank Noise Project ran an online poll asking respondents what specific acts they thought constituted sexual harassment.

Here are some of the results:
Staring 66%
Whistling 79%
Staring at breasts 81%
Talking to breasts 80%
Rating 50%
Passing lewd comments 82%
Singing suggestive songs 66%
Rubbing 86%
Groping 81%
'Accidentally' touching 76%
Flashing 75%
Blowing kisses 81%
Making kissing sounds 82%
Stalking 73%
Fingering 78%
Masturbating in open view 74%
Adjusting rearview mirror 50%
Unsolicited conversation 55%
Unsolicited photography 77%
Spitting 49%
Winking 75%
Crashing vehicles 70%
Honking to get attention 70%
Following a woman driver 76%

COURTESY:
WWW.BLANKNOISEPROJECT.BLOGSPOT.COM

(...)From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 5, Dated Feb 09, 2008

[ 10 February 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]