Seeing Red

    Whether I'm in a shopping mall, supermarket, restaurant, or airport I always pay particular attention to where the toilets are located. Why? Because you never know when nature will call and having been a Girl Guide in the past, I like to be prepared for all eventualities.

    Now, I've visited some horrible ones, some palatial ones and some I don't have the words to describe. But, no matter where I've 'spent my penny,' I've had privacy and I've felt under no threat to my personal safety whilst I was going about my business.

    However, this isn't the case for many of the female population of India; the young girls and women harvesting the produce that we find in our supermarkets have to find a private spot to defecate and urinate in the fields where they work.

    The problem isn't that they have to go out in the open, the problem is that they cannot go safely. Girls as young as eight years old working in the fields are being gang raped and murdered while slipping off to have a private moment. In this developing country as a whole, a rape takes place every twenty-two minutes.

    One of the country's governors said ,“Even God cannot prevent rapes.” No, God can't protect the female population from rapists, therefore there has to be human intervention. That's where the government has to please take control, using its laws and education system.

    Unfortunately, the government only seems to seeing red when they've been bragging this week about their space programme being the first Asian one to have entered Martian orbit and not that its female population faces violation on a day to day basis.