How we are accessories to the crime.

I came across this yesterday on Facebook. The author is Anonymous. I know I don't normally post other people's writing here, but I thought this was worth sharing and preserving on my blog. Although it's addressed to men, I agree with Chaitrali from whose page I found this, that women too can be guilty of many of these crimes:

A Message - by Anonymous:

"You stay silent when your mother is treated like shit by your father,

You stay silent when your friend takes dowry from his wife's family,

You stay silent when your classmates sits at a nukkad whistling 'maal' at passing women, saying it is innocent fun,

You stay silent when a million women every year in this nation are murdered before birth or their breath dunked in milk before god, after it,

You don't report the drunkard husband who beat up your maid servant because it is not your business,

You stayed silent when your boss hit upon a female colleague and you told her to grin and bear it because it happens everywhere,

You sing along with your favourite male stars as they call their 'items' chikni chameli and halkat jawani etc.,

You stay silent when our police and paramilitary gang rape tribal and lower caste women and shove stones inside their rectum, saying that that's an aberration of the system,

You did not protest the lower pay that your female colleagues got just because of their sex,

You helped your parents arrange a marriage for your sister against her wishes saying she doesn’t know her mind,

You stayed silent when in a family discussion a woman’s voice was silenced by the cacophony of male voices,

You force a woman to wear burqa in the pretext of sharia law, or justify her domesticity because some asshole called Manu wrote some asinine laws hundreds of years back,

You think feminism is shit and feminists loud mouthed 'bitches' who have no better work to do than cry victim,

You applaud as Hindu right wing men barge into a hotel and slap ‘immoral’ women with the intention of ‘reforming’ their ‘maa’ ‘behen’, (mother, sister)

You stay silent when females in a party are sent away to discuss 'childish' things even as you discuss 'important' things like politics and all in their absence,

You stayed silent when your father directly and sarcastically showed your mother that she's lower than men in intelligence time and again,

You objected loudly when your girlfriend, wife wanted to put her life and career ahead of yours, saying yours was more important,

And now suddenly you have become a man because ONE woman was brutally beaten and raped while you conveniently forget the hundreds of women whose psyche you were responsible for brutally beating and raping directly, or indirectly through your inaction... and now you evoke the same 'maa' and 'behen' argument to protect them...

Thanks to the serpent of your awakened manhood, that woman in Delhi will perhaps get justice. But what about the millions of other women in the country of different religion, region and sect united by their shared injustice who will perhaps never get justice precisely for the same reason - your manhood?"

-Anonymous