Stealing a glance at the opposite sex is biology! Continuing to stare and scanning them top to bottom while knowing you're making them uncomfortable is violence!

"A woman was brutally gang-raped and murdered in Haryana's Rohtak.....The victim had allegedly refused a marriage proposal, following which the accused reached her home a week later with his friends. A heated argument broke out which resulted in the woman slapping him. In revenge, the accused along with his friends allegedly raped and murdered her......at least five to six youth abducted her from the gate of a private company. After that the accused took her to a deserted place and gang-raped her.

"The victim was tortured and her body was mutilated after the gang rape. She was killed after being raped involving at least seven people. Her skull was smashed in a way which indicates that she was run over by a vehicle in order to hide her identity," the forensic team has stated.

.....The distraught parents have claimed that this ghastly attack was carried out by the girl's neighbour..." - Huffington Post

Amidst the various emotions that a piece of news like this incites, one that I'd like to mention specifically is the disbelief I feel when I see people distancing themselves from such realities!

Such inhumanity, such violence, such brutality, such sadism does not occur overnight! Just like a communal riot cannot be incited overnight if there is no history of propaganda or hate! Centuries of discrimination gets transmitted generation over generation and hate and rage get built up to the point when a human being is able to do this to another human being. This discrimination can seem 'normal' or 'small' but it is precisely what gets built up to heightened brutality!

Stealing a glance at the opposite sex is biology! Continuing to stare and scanning them top to bottom while knowing you're making them uncomfortable is violence! It is an open challenge that I will stare at you and can do things to you if only there were no people around or if there was no fear of consequences! It is violence without even as much as a physical touch! It is emotional violence, mental violence, it shows your chain of thoughts and scares the shit out of the other! It tarnishes their peace of mind. If you do this or join in with your friends and laugh, remember you have in some way contributed to the brutalization of some woman somewhere.

Raising your daughter as continuously inferior to your son, regulating everything she does far more than your son, controlling her attire, her career choices, her academic choices, her marital choices, her sexuality, her language - far more than your son's - sends the signal that girls need to be controlled and men command that control. It is this same tendency times a hundred where that same son shall go and brutalize someone else's sister or murder a boy who harassed his own! If you do this, remember, you have in some way contributed to the brutalization of some woman somewhere.

Simply by observation, a higher percentage of people do this than the ones who don't! But when we read a piece of news such as the one cited at the top, we distance ourselves. It is hard to confront the fact that you aided it or that you are maybe 10% as bad as that very perpetrator. Well too bad it's hard! Deal with it, realize it and stop it before it gets even more unbearable!