a speech on gender bias.
Gender bias is widely prevalent throughout women’s life span. Indian women have become an easy prey for discrimination and aggression based on gender.
It is observed that gender based discrimination is started by the family members from the time of birth. A female child does not usually receive the same attention and affection that is bestowed upon a male child in Indian families. A boy arrives to the sound of joyous conch shells and girl’s birth in many parts of the country is greeted with silence, even sorrow.
A woman is still considered a burdensome appendage. Girls are treated as economic drain. She must be exploited or dispensed with a non-person because she crushes her family with marriage and dowry expenses.
The problems of major importance for women are linked with families, especially problem of discrimination and aggression for women are linked with marriage. Various issues like age at marriage, procedures for contracting and. executing marriage, customs of dowry and bride-wealth; divorce, separation, widowhood and female-foeticide and female infanticide and remarriage speak about the status of women.
Family in India largely exists in the framework of patrilineal descent. Such families put great emphasis on adjustability in the socialization of girls. Women had to follow the Holy Scriptures in which they were told to get happiness by submissiveness and in reality; women rarely had an identity apart from the one given to them as wives, mothers, and daughters. Although they were worshipped as deities, at home they were treated as second class members of family.
The women confront constraints due to distinction between men’s sphere and women’s sphere and between masculine and feminine roles. Woman is primarily associated with the home and man with the outside world. The home-makers, the women look after domestic chores. Women’s contributions go unrecognised, unnoticed and unpaid. Women’s poor status in independent Indian is reflected from various events as well. For instance, the suicide by female is on the increase day by day.
Dowry deaths are the best examples of gender aggression; it always shows facidal cruelty against women in India. Only for the money a bride is set on fire, poisoned or even brutally murdered even if she is not killed, she is tortured verbally and sometimes driven out of the house or driven to commit suicide by in-laws. Women are very easy victims of powerful aggression.
Rape is a crime against basic human rights and is also violative of the victim’s most cherished fundamental rights. The instances of rape are increasing day-by-day. But only few are registered because of fear of social stigma and so the instances of rape, gang rape, marital rape are enhanced.
Most women are scared of a police station which is the last place they would go to, if they were in trouble because there are many cases of rape by police. Custodial rapes happen in India and it is a worst aggression towards women as assault by those who are supposed to be the guardian of women.
Prostitution is a result of gender based aggression. The trafficking of women, young girls at international level continues to be a global problem because woman is viewed solely as a sex object and as an outlet for man’s baser instincts.
One of the evils of the modern society is the sexual harassment caused to women particularly the working women or even student in college or in higher education by their male counterparts or seniors at work places or in educational institutions, respectively.
In India there is a lack of insurance against future hazards for women, religious practices, rituals, scriptures and precepts are still the forces which continue to create women’s existing secondary status in society. The traditional attitude towards women persists even now. Many leaders, intellectuals and enlightened persons believe till today the primary duty of women to be the proper management of home.
It is also true that there are various legislations present for improvement of status of women. Since the time of Manu, law has always accorded special protection to women. This is because of their physical structure, social status and conditions of the Hindu society.
The Constitution of India radically and deliberately departs from the traditional inferior position of women in the society and treats every woman equal to man as citizen and as an individual in the democratic system.