The findings suggest it’s time to introspect

There are some women in India for whom the country is incredibly dangerous and some for whom it is much less so, like in other countries. Women across the world are not rendered safe or vulnerable only on the

Arecent Thomson Reuters survey ( 2018) ranked India the world’s most dangerous country for women. Seven years ago, in 2011, the same survey ranked India the fourth most dangerous country for women. The other four countries that appeared in this ignominious list were: Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan and Somalia. No surprises there, for of course the most dangerous countries for women would all be in the developing world, the world yet to arrive at modernity.

In the 2018 survey, all these countries figure yet again, and we have four more “usual suspects”: Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Nigeria. A surprising new entrant into the list is the USA. At this point, I should state that at no point am I suggesting that India is not a dangerous country for women. It is. It is dangerous on the streets and in the home. It is dangerous from the perspective of all factors that the survey takes into account: healthcare, discrimination, cultural traditions, sexual violence, non- sexual violence and human trafficking.

In the last year, an eight- yearold child was raped inside a temple and some members of the Legislative Assembly, who belonged to the then ruling coalition in Jammu and Kashmir, attended a rally in support of the accused. Some weeks ago, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj was attacked by trolls online and most of her Cabinet colleagues and the Prime Minister said not one word in her defence. So, yes, India is a dangerous country, whether you are a defenceless eight- year- old child belonging to a minority community or a Cabinet minister.

But is India the world’s most dangerous country for women? I don’t know. There are some women in India for whom the country is incredibly dangerous and some for whom it is much less so, just as it is in other countries of the world. Women across the world are not rendered safe or vulnerable only on the basis of their gender.

It is important to point out that this survey is based on perceptions of 548 experts polled in regard to their opinion on which were the most dangerous countries for women on each variable. These numbers at best are indicative of perceptions and do not make for representative data. Surveys like these might provide a big picture but they often miss the nuances. In a widely cited 1986 essay, ‘ Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty in a critique of Western feminist scholarship pointed out that women in the third world are often seen as being one homogenous group and painted unrelentingly as victims without any engagement with the differences between women.

What’s noteworthy is that a Western country, the USA makes it to this list. Interestingly, in the disaggregated scores, the US is seen to be ranked in the stakes under only two categories: sexual violence and nonsexual violence. It is certainly not ranked under “cultural traditions”. It is important to point out that there is more than one survey that ranks countries on grounds of how they treat women, but no similar surveys ranking countries as dangerous for minorities, for immigrants, for Muslims, for lower castes, for black people. Women have long been the vector on which a country’s claim to being “civilized” is rated since colonial times.

These surveys must lead as they intend to do to a greater introspection of why the world, not just these 10 countries, continues to be more dangerous for women than men. We must challenge patriarchal sexist structures that help maintain gendered hierarchies through violence. But even as we do this, we need to recognise that at least the violence being done to women is recognised as violence, even if it sometimes ends up serving complex geopolitical ends.

Even as women claim our voices to speak publicly against harassment and assault, the violence against other groups of people is normalised. There are no global surveys of how countries treat immigrants. There is no ranking based on whether they separate those perceived to be illegal immigrants from their children. There are no surveys, even in the face of global Islamophobia, that ask how safe are countries for Muslim citizens. There are no surveys that examine the lynching of minorities. There are no similar surveys ranking countries based on how they treat tribal or indeed indigenous people. Such surveys then, even as they highlight some forms of violence, are a reminder that we need to think about how danger itself is framed in our own countries and in the world.

( The author teaches at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai)