India needs to protect women

### Joanne Harrower

**India is currently being forced to face its own fractured society, as thousands protest against widespread mistreatment of women. One component is the sorry state of Indian policing and their inability to protect half the population. Men and women alike are waking up to the fact that their law enforcement is ineffective and archaic. But I didn’t know any of this when I was stuck in a Jaipur police station for six hours last summer. All I knew was that I was witness to a disgusting act of sexual assault, and no one was there to help. **

My friend, an Indian student from Delhi, had warned me that some men would openly grope a woman in public, but I think even she was surprised when, in a crowded cinema, she suffered the indignity of it. Immediately turning and pushing the man away, one of his friends slapped her in the face. Tens of others (only men) surrounding us just looked on in amusement as I tried to break up what could have easily become a very one-sided fight. Cinema security guards stared at her in amazement when she demanded they call the police. It was only a lucky turn that one of them went back into the cinema and managed to detain a man who knew the perpetrator.

Two hours later and we were sitting in a stifling police station with two middle-aged men, sighing and trying to convince us that it wasn’t worth pressing charges. The offender’s friend was there and no effort was made to trace the one person they should have. Only in the third hour did the police agree to start taking down details to write a report. My friend was forced to recount explicitly what the man had done. No female officer present.

In the fourth hour the perpetrator finally arrived at the police station and was, for some unknown reason, put in the same room as us. My friend was now asked to write up her own account of what happened, with additions from me as witness. Despite English being the working language of most bureaucracy, government and universities, the police assured us it had to be written in Hindi. A secretary was summoned to translate, so we had no idea what was actually being put on paper. We were asked a last set of questions including what caste my friend’s parents were.

I am almost certain the documents and case were forgotten. A lot has to change in India before women can feel safe and protected.