Women’s Day: Please don’t promise CCTVs for their safety
Imagine a city with a camera at every street corner to record your move. You step out on a breezy March evening to enjoy the cold with your partner but there’s not a moment of anonymous pleasure to be had.
An app on your phone buzzes to locate areas declared unsafe for women, and it includes every place you used to frequent – the “unsupervised” Jahapanah forest, the “dark” bylanes of Mehrauli and the low-income parts of Jamia Nagar he lives in. The safety that was supposed to set you free has locked you in. The makings of this dystopia are swirling around us – in recent years, every incident of crimes against women in Indian cities has been followed by a torrent of discussion on bolstering safety mechanisms for women.
But as a string of crimes in Bengaluru showed earlier this year, the imagination of safety for women in public spaces always ends up focusing on monitoring their moves – by dotting the cityscape with closed-circuit television cameras. The Karnataka government responded to the allegations of rape and molestation by announcing the purchase of 550 more CCTVs, never mind that the thousand-odd such devices had failed to stop the assaults in the first place.
When AAP came to power in Delhi in 2015 on the back of a pledge make the national capital more safe for women, the first thing it promised was more CCTVs and marshals on buses. Two years on, rapes are as rampant as ever and few women take night buses, despite the token marshals.
The focus on CCTVs is a dangerous trend because it erases the socio-economic history of women’s safety and reduces it to a question of State surveillance, in the process prioritising resources to purchase of cameras and cementing existing biases.
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“The core philosophy behind the proliferation of CCTVs is an unsubstantiated claim – that people are likely to be deterred from exploiting their historically accumulated power to harass women if they know cameras are watching them,” says Jasmine George, a women’s rights activist whose organisation Hidden Pockets maps cities.
Remember, she adds, that no such deterrence was effected by tough laws or policing but it is assumed that CCTVs – which at best are crime solving and not crime deterring tools – will be the magic bullet. In London, in spite of having more security cameras than any other country in Europe, only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images in 2015.
Additionally, this bolsters the notion that crimes against women are always inflicted by unknown persons -- the ubiquitous stranger rape – and erases that most such violence happens within the home, by family members, where there are no CCTVs.
The diversion from a movement seeking a social power structure change to one that stresses on monitoring hurts those who need the narrative to change the most – women locked inside the family. Ten cases of cruelty by husband and relatives are reported every hour across the country as per the National Crime Report Bureau.
Source: Hindustan Times, 8-03-2017
