Is SHE a toy?

What is a woman? Is she a mere body to harass? Is she a toy to play with? Is she somebody you can feel? Is she somebody to satisfy your sexual needs?

In our daily newspapers, rape rears its ugly façade almost every day.  Sometimes, it is a brutal rape and murder by a stranger, gang-rape of a girl by her acquaintances or in many cases rape of a girl by her own father or elderly relatives. It is shocking, amazing and ridiculous.

Where do the perpetrators get such courage and confidence from that they stop a running bus, pull out a woman and leave her by the roadside after raping her, that they trap a foreign diplomat and rape her in a car, that they catch hold of a college student and violate her atop a building even as heavy traffic passes by a few feet below?  How is it that a cop instead of protecting a young girl shuts her inside a police post and does the unthinkable?

The questioning of cops and lawyers put after a case is equivalent to raping them again. Not surprising that they prefer to seal their lips and kill their sense of dignity and honour. And I am not even talking about the numerous others subjected to molestation, groping, eve teasing and degrees of verbal and physical abuse – at the movie hall, in the bus, in crowded bylanes, markets, trains, almost everywhere.

It is more than surprising to witness this in every corner. I put up the question again, what do you think a woman is? Why isn’t she sought as an individual, equivalent or more powerful than a man, but as a mere toy for pleasure?