Reply to Blaming the Victim (Part V- Catching them Young)

We have come to the next part of our journey of the Reply to Blaming the Victim and the topic is – catching them young. For this, I would like to highlight an incident that I was witness to during my tenure as a teacher. We were new to the school and had been given the task of correcting the 10^th std. prelims answer papers. I was given some English papers. One of the male students shocked me. He had written an incident where he was raping a girl as an answer to a really very harmless topic. I went to the headmistress and gave her the paper. I don’t know what happened after that. But, I had realized that the raping bug bites children at a young age due to various reasons. Over to Vidhya Aunty for her insights:

Catching them Young

By Vidhyalakshmi Rao

A few days ago, I was at the hospital and saw 2 little girls hugging each other. It appeared that they had seen the way Muslims wished each other during the Eid celebrations and were emulating them. This was fine as far as it went. Both were girls. So, I said it is a good thing to respect each other.

However, the old woman sitting on the next seat said, “Children learn by watching older people. You said 2 girls embracing each other is fine. But, do you know what is happening elsewhere? The trend of boyfriends and girlfriends has come. Girls from the 3^rd grade and boys from the 4^th grade are playing girlfriend-boyfriend. It was not so when my children were studying. They are kissing on the lips and boy is caressing the girl’s hips. When the boy’s elder brother asked them what were they doing? They said they were just imitating their parents. The elder brother said that their parents were boyfriend-girlfriend. They were allowed to do it. The little boy replied that the little girl was his girlfriend!”

So, where does the fault lie? With the parents and the way, they bring up their children. A couple of years ago, we saw on the television that a 13-year-old boy had impregnated a 16-year-old girl. They were planning to be good parents! But, how did they plan to support a child without a steady income was not known! Steady income can come only with some kind of education. Otherwise, you end up as an uneducated daily wage laborer. I have my own inhibitions about how a laborer would bring up his children without a steady income.

Similarly, parents not teaching their sons to respect women are at fault for their sons’ misbehavior toward any girl.

To be continued…