Sunday, January 11, 2009

Harassed by Wife?

That India's heavily biased Anti-Dowry laws and recently introduced Domestic Violence laws are used against men by some women in no news. Unfortunate as it is, most of women empowerment has only empowered educated city women where misuse is very high while laws themselves were made keeping in mind vast majority of rural, poor, non-empowered women. Those who really need them don't even know that these laws exists, or if the know, rarely use them because of social conditioning or consequence of repercussions due to poor law and order. In a non-violent respectable middle or upper class household, both man and woman suffer risks in entering a matrimony due to potential misuse or abuse. Here is one man cell trying to help such people. Issues such as these cannot even be openly discussed due to vehement opposition from feminists and fear of being labelled as MCP. As any astute observer of polity will note, it’s not majority which counts in democracy, but a vocal minority.

That the law is misused is no reason to ignore the usefulness of the law, for every law is misused to an extent. Question is, how much misuse is prevalent. I think it’s less than 10% while my mom thinks it’s way higher, to the extent of 50% in above mentioned demography. Both of these non-scientific hunches merely. In any case, framing a law to cover both genders is first step since it will cover fairer sex anyway. It’s no question that I am aware of the extent of female-mistreatment meted in this country, and recognize need for stringent rules to curb harassment, violence and unfairness but it’s worthwhile sometimes to pause and see who gets benefited.

11/01/2009 Edit: Vikas Gupta talked to the man manning the man-cell and came up with the website http://mencell.weebly.com/. See his post for more details.

Breaking the Bias – Lessons from Bayesian Statistical Perspective

Equitable and fair institutions are the foundation of modern democracies. Bias, as referring to “inclination or prejudice against one perso...