Empower HER: Education as a Force against Violence on Women

Abstract

Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human rights violation, and it is perhaps the most pervasive. It is a particularly severe problem in India. While 2020 saw the registration of 28,046 cases of rape, this increased to 31,677 in 2021. Conversely, overall crimes against women rose from 56.5% in 2020 to 64.5% in 2021. The majority of cases categorised as crimes against women were reported under ‘Cruelty by husband or his relatives’ (31.8%), followed by ‘Assault on woman with intent to outrage her modesty’ (20.8%), ‘Kidnapping and abduction of women’ (17.6%) and ‘Rape’ (7.4%) (NCRB, 2021). The Government of India has enacted specific laws and implemented several schemes operated by different departments and ministries to safeguard the interests of women and uplift their status in society. In spite of constitutional guarantees, legislative provisions, judiciary mandate and administrative efforts, women security in India is still lacking in some areas. Mere enactment of laws and chalking out of schemes are not much effective for curbing these atrocities thereby empowering women. This empowerment is possible only through education. Thus, empowering women through education has become the need of the hour. This paper is an attempt to analyse women empowerment in India by looking into the laws and schemes of the Government of India for addressing the violence against them. The study reveals that the women of India are relatively disempowered and gender gap still exists in spite of the various efforts undertaken by the Government. This paper further discusses the impact of education on empowerment of women and how it can bring about a positive change in the attitude of people. The study concludes by observing that access to education is just an enabling factor to empowerment but to achieve the goal, depends largely on the change in the attitude of both men and women towards women.