#BoysLockerRoom didn’t happen overnight
It didn’t happen because some boys in Delhi turned out to be monsters in isolation. It was systemic. Such desensitisation and violence never get built up in children overnight. It was built over years, it was built each time they witnessed an occurrence that was systemically anti-woman.
It happened because the boys don’t even know how many probable sisters their parents got aborted.
It happened each time the boys saw their parents favouring them over their sisters. Clothes, timings, friends, roles, freedom, education, careers, relationships, every single time.
It happened because nothing in their school textbooks or teachers’ discourses sensitised them on gender but many things desensitised them.
It happened because no government cared to seriously introduce good quality, open sex-education for children at a time when porn and hormonal, violent peers were their only sources of information and parents failed miserably in their roles.
It happened because thousands of marketers actively used a woman’s body as a shortcut to achieve higher sales.
It happened because so many Filmmakers decided to use a woman’s body to achieve greater ticket sales. And so many glorified systemically discriminatory practices against women in their movies.
It happened because those boys saw so many around them get away with vulgar, violent jokes about women.
It happened because they heard an unlimited number of people stereotype and discriminate against women and very limited number of people consciously refrain or protest when someone did the former.
It happened because they saw porn that was blatantly violent and exploitative.
It happened because they saw sensitive men who quietened up/opposed violent men, get mocked, ridiculed and boycotted.
It happened because they witnessed several rituals within their religions that are blatantly anti-women.
It happened because they saw many more women get paid a lot lesser/not at all, for the work they did v/s men. They learnt women are to be valued lesser than men and that men supposedly do the heavy lifting.
It happened because girls were systemically led to believe that only certain kinds of bodies and attire were attractive and that they must embrace those regardless of their ability or comfort. Which led to a barrage of girls (many underage) squeezing themselves into tiny clothes and posing in certain sexual postures without truly understanding or ‘choosing’ to do so.
Attraction and sex are biological. Objectification and violence are mental! The individual boys who were involved weren’t the root cause of this. They too are victims, victims of a system. Punishing them is part of a solution but not the solution in its entirety. The end can only come by slowly and painstakingly attacking the root causes. Which can only start if our leadership demonstrates extraordinary will to change these bits within education, judiciary and law-enforcement + if each one of us individually made it our mission to change our attitudes and protest each time somebody else displayed a symptom.