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The New Year is here but there are no new beginnings where a woman’s safety is concerned in the country’s capital. Crimes against women are highest in Delhi and NCR region. Rapes have ceased to become stories that require immediate investigation and help for the victim instead rapes are just statistics that are shrugged off with indifference unless of course it involves a victim who commands a respectable social standing that makes it important for the police and the politicians to rake it as an ‘issue’.

Noida registered 5 rapes and 2 dowry deaths while Ghaziabad registered 23 rapes and 30 dowry harassment cases this year. Gurgaon reported 36 cases officially but people feel that the official figures are purposely tampered with to make it look less than the previous year. The number of rapes, robberies, murders and dowry related torture have increased tremendously in Gurgaon in 2004. Official figures in Faridabad indicate that as against 36 rapes last year, this year witnessed 43 rapes and 46 abductions. Dowry deaths were only 14 last year but shockingly this year, Faridabad has 26 dowry death cases. Police records prove that very little investigation is actually taking place to trace and punish the criminals involved.

These statistics maybe lies, who knows, but the rising number of atrocities and crimes against women are ever on the increase whether these are reflected in records or not. A woman travels at her own risk after 6 pm in the capital of the country as against the safety that metro women of Mumbai and Bangalore enjoy in contrast.

The statistics are not as shocking as the thorns of reality. Which is that victims are treated badly most of the time by the law enforcement authorities and their statements are probed and twisted and made a mockery of by competent lawyers to the extent that any woman who wants to return to the mainstream of normal life realizes that it is best to ‘forget and bury’ the incident rather than report it and become the butt of humiliation and crude male jokes.

Apart from the issue of safety, the DPS scandal has thrown open the doors of the age-old argument as to whether schools are also breeding grounds for experimentation and if the adolescent urges for experimentation are considered a natural biological phenomenon, how can the private sexual conduit of students be controlled by the school authorities so that a repeat of the DPS scandal can be prevented.

Most school authorities blame the affluence of the students that enable them to spend less time with parents and more time with friends, surfing the forbidden areas on the net and indulging their fantasies through uncensored watching of music videos that are almost porn videos and corrupt and tease the young minds totally. Meanwhile, it is interesting that mediapersons are strongly debating solutions to activate censorship of music albums and movies telecasted through TV channels.

Perhaps the New Year may begin on a note of new resolutions that may hopefully make a positive difference to the present dismal scenario.

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