If there was one thing I regularly relied on while commuting by bus to college in Mumbai in the late 1980s, it was the brass knuckleduster in my bag. With that around, I felt pretty invincible. When a man tried to rub against me, just slipping my fingers into it made me feel powerful. On about three occasions, I actually used it to jab a persistent harasser.
Those days, safety pins, hairpins, umbrellas, were the objects carried around by young women to ward off street sexual assault. These days, the weapon of choice for most women is the mobile phone. When Why Loiter conducts gender and public space workshops and asks young women to open handbags and “take out the one thing that you rely on to keep you safe in public”, this is the item that is most pulled out of the bag. The exercise is intended to demonstrate that in the absence of reliable state or institutional provisions for safety, individual women strategise and produce safety for themselves in a multitude of ways. Increasingly, across the class spectrum, they seem to use mobile phones to help them in that endeavour.
All this came to mind when one recently heard about a panchayat near Mathura announcing a fine of ₹21,000 for women caught using mobile phones in public. Apparently, for a woman there to use a cell phone is a ‘crime’ equivalent to drinking, gambling and cow slaughter. This is not the first time mobile phones have been banned for women in ruralised India. Last year, villages in Mehsana and Banaskantha districts (Gujarat) imposed a ban on unmarried women possessing a mobile phone. Several village councils in Rajasthan, Haryana and Bihar have imposed similar restrictions. Three years ago, villages in Muzaffarnagar (UP) banned women simultaneously from using mobile phones and wearing jeans – apparently both were signs of degenerate ‘Western’ morals that incite violence against them.
The ban against young women using mobile phones is presented as a way of keeping them ‘safe’. But the safety constructed here is less about providing real protection to women from non-consensual attacks and more about preventing women from setting up consensual everyday sojourns (or in the extreme, elopements) with ‘inappropriate men’ via the cell phone. That is keeping women safe from their own desires and choices.
Most women living in Indian cities find these tirades against mobile phones not just ridiculous but extremely problematic, considering they today use the cell phone in many different ways to manufacture safe everyday access to the public.
Many women often call/text their families about every leg of their commute in the city, because in places like Mumbai, that commute could be as long as 20 kms. One woman executive mentioned that when she takes a 4 am cab to the airport, her phone is on for the whole distance to her destination. More commonly, and this is reported by both middle and working-class women, they pretend to talk on the phone when walking a deserted or dimly-lit road.
“It’s the façade of ‘someone is looking out for me at the other end of the phone so you better not mess with me’,” explained one woman. Some use phones to take photos/videos of stalkers or car/bike number plates of harassers.
Those with smartphones find GPS location services useful when in new areas. Increasingly, women install safety apps with panic alarm features for emergencies on their phones, though surveys show few use them and their workability on cheaper handsets is suspect. But the fact is that cell phones are the companions that women increasingly trust when in public. Taking mobile phones away from women merely curbs their freedom to choose who to talk to. It doesn’t make public spaces safer. For that, we need to address the real issue of rising crimes against women and turn attention from mobile phones to the actual perpetrators of such violence.
Sameera Khan is a Mumbai-based journalist, researcher and co-author, Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets
