Hyderabad: Young women who belong to rich families feel public transport to be unsafe, while those residing in the rural belt of Telangana state found cinema halls and narrow roads leading to schools to be unsafe. While the rich feel unsafe in crowds, the poor fear lonely spots.
An intensive study called ‘Wings 2018: World Of India's Girls’ done by the international NGO Save the Children, studied and spoke to young women from urban and rural regions of six Indian states including Telangana.
The study found that rich girls were molested, teased, harassed and abused mostly in public places while girls from rural areas faced the same behind closed doors like cinema halls and government schools.
For the state of Telangana, 222 rural girls were studied from Khammam and Nalgonda districts. Some 356 urban adolescent girls were studied from Hyderabad and Tier 1 cities such as Urban Nizamabad and Warangal.
The findings of the report on the perception of unsafe public spaces were: Travelling in public transport was seen as the most risky across both urban (47 per cent) and rural (40 per cent) centres.
Over one in four adolescent girls using urban transport feared she could be abducted, physically assaulted or even raped. Nearly three in five girls feel unsafe in situations where the public place is overcrowded and 53 per cent feel unsafe when there is inadequate lighting.
In the rural belt, one in three adolescent girls is scared of traversing the narrow by-lanes of their locality as well as the road to go to their school or the local market. And one in four adolescent girls in rural India feels unsafe when they use open spaces/ agricultural fields for open defecation at dawn.
Incidents reported in Hyderabad city substantiate these findings. In 2017 a ‘She’ team arrested 30 men who were molesting women and minors during the Ganpati visarjan. From groping women to sprinkling water and flowers on them, to stalking them, these men went about their business in broad daylight during a religious procession. The She team shot a video of the shameful behaviour.
Two days ago, a 51-year-old private employee was awarded three days jail after he was caught harassing ladies and performing obscene acts at the Dilsukhnagar bus stop. G. Harry Paul of Kothapet was arrested and admitted he had behaved obscenely.
The Hyderabad She teams registered 3,158 cases of harassment of women between 2015 and 2017. However, She teams claim that harassment of women in public places has gradually reduced. In Hyderabad, there are 100 She teams, who receive complaints through WhatsApp, letters, and the police app, Hawk Eye.
In December 2017, a 25-year-old migrant tribal woman was allegedly raped by an unidentified man at Devaigumpu, a tribal hamlet on the fringes of the forest near Krishna Sagar village in Burgampadu mandal in Kothagudem district.
Also in 2017, the body of a seven-year-old girl was found with bruises and nail and teeth bites in Jayashankar Bhupalpally district. The body of the Class I student with her clothes partially torn was found in a haystack in her family’s agricultural fields near Gori Kothapalli village.
Psychologist Meena Kumari says that in urban pockets, women feel unsafe owing to the poor maintenance of open public spaces, poor lighting and loafers hanging out consuming alcohol and drugs.
In rural areas near woods and in narrow lanes and bylanes girls feel vulnerable because of poor visibility and the lack of policing or surveillance. When it turns dark, parents in the villages restrict girls from venturing out. “Women feel unsafe in open and crowded places mainly due to the attitude of men and boys towards girls and women,” Dr Kumari added.
