The darker side!

Many years ago when I reached her tiny mud house uphill in a remote village, the 18-year-old was holding her two-and-a-half-year-old baby.

The numbness on her face, her blank eyes, and the abject poverty the tender soul was living in pained me. The hapless ‘forced’ mother was a rape victim.

I tried to be warm to her to know the real story. She took time, to be frank with me. Ultimately she shared everything with me.

“I was so scared when it happened to me. I did not share it with my parents also,” she said, as she hastened to add, “I did not know the repercussions.”

The girl's father was a daily wager. Her family got to know about her pregnancy when she was admitted to a local hospital with pain in the abdomen in the fifth month.

On much persuasion, the girl told them about the incident. A Police case was then registered and the accused was arrested and convicted.

At a tender age, she delivered a baby after some complications.

An NGO tried to help the girl through court and got some relief for the girl that was short-term, apart from the compensation given to such victims.

The innocent girl passed tenth class after giving birth to a child and then got admitted to another school for senior secondary, despite social questioning.

Poverty put a break on her studies and there was no effort for social or economic rehabilitation of this crime victim from any quarter.

The NGO obviously had its own limitations or resources. The media also forgot about it after some time as usual.

I did try to take up the issue even beyond my professional commitment, by talking to high-ups and the politicians then, but to no avail.

Probably for them, setting one precedence for one case meant similar help to all.

The girl, like many other such victims, was left alone in the struggle with the kid, fighting poverty and whatnot. The incident draws my attention to a fiction I had read long back in a magazine.

It said that after the bread earner of a family was murdered, the family was virtually on the roads, unable to make both ends meet….while the person who murdered and was put behind the bars had facilities and opportunities for him to change his future, what they call a 'reformation'.

This actually forces me to make a direct comparison here---between the victims of crime and the ones who are convicted and jailed for the crime.

I have often gone to the jails to do stories on jail reforms. There are great efforts to reform convicts for their rehabilitation in society on release.

“They are also humans. They may commit mistakes at one point in time, but they have every right to make amends in life."

That’s what my octogenarian friend, Saroj Vashishth, who worked for jail inmates for years long, used to say.

She would engage the jail inmates in creative activities, helping them write poetry, and their feelings or facilitate them stage theme-based one-act plays in prison for positive occupation.

That’s perfectly fine.

Nobody contests what the policymakers do for jail reforms.

The visit to jails and interaction with jail inmates did sensitize me as a journalist. But what about the poor victims of such crimes? They become lifelong sufferers. There should be some mechanism for their social and economic rehabilitation.

It really pains me!