Creation of awareness among women through the mass media about the different resources and help lines available for them, sensitising members of the public, people-friendly public transport and strict enforcement of rules that ensure women’s safety, are a few of the recommendations made by the city-based Cultural Academy for Peace (CAP).
It has called for giving sterner punishment to those who harass women.
All serious offences against women must be made non-bailable and law enforcers who fail to initiate proper action against violators must be pulled up, it said.
Buses must stop on request for women and children even if there are no bus stops after 7 p.m., the NGO has suggested.
The recommendations will be handed over to the State’s Home Ministry.
The other measures recommended include installation of complaint boxes for women near police-aid posts, work places and schools, initiation of follow-up action in different cases by forming local-level committees and measures to alleviate the suffering of migrant women. Posters that portray women in bad light must be banned, it said.
The CAP has also demanded that more personnel be posted in the police cyber cells and awareness should be made of different cyber laws.
A few days ago, it organised a seminar on ‘Care and protection of the girl child’, which coincided with the convocation ceremony of women who attended the ‘Wheels for women’ scheme (a free training programme for women on driving autorickshaws).
Inaugurating the function, former Judge of the Kerala High Court P.K. Shamsuddin said that schemes like the Nirbhaya Project and one to protect women from sexual offences, apart from legislations like the Protection of Privacy and Dignity of Women Bill are all aimed at ensuring their protection.
In her presidential address, Beena Sebastian, chairperson of CAP, said that women are the worst affected by the existing socio-political anarchy.
Those who participated in the seminar included Fr Roby Kannanchira, director of Chavara Cultural Centre and people from different walks of life who are concerned about the increasing insecurity that women and children face.
A discussion was held, in which issues like female foeticide, the brutal attack by on Afreen by her father – that later led to her death at the hospital, sex-change surgeries and the increasing number of youth and young women going missing, were discussed.
The panelists spoke about how societal degradation has led to girls and young women increasingly falling into sex rackets.
The health and schooling of girl children must get top priority, they said.
