Changing Customs Harming Women and Girls

"We [India in general] spend money on buying tobacco, liquor and mobile phones, but are unwilling to construct toilets to protect the dignity of our family."
"In villages, women have to wait until sunset to answer nature's call. This is not only physical cruelty but also outraging the modesty of a woman."
Justice Rajendra Kumar Sharma, Family Court, Rajasthan state

A new ad in India shows women mocking men who answer nature's call in nature. It's part of a national effort to encourage men to put a toilet in the family home.   Astral Pipes/Screenshot by NPR

A not-uncommon sight in India is that of people squatting in a field, or men face toward a wall in public view, urinating. It is customary in the countryside that in the absence of no toilet facilities in homes or available to the public in public buildings, that people will perform their toilet functions in the outside. This includes not only rural areas but urban enclaves as well. Clearly visible, squatting on railroad tracks, or in fields, but nothing unusual to scandalize a society that has long accustomed itself to seeking relief in public.

Women and girls tend to wait until the evening hours before they venture out for that purpose. Their innate sense of modesty mitigates against the humiliation of being seen performing such bodily functions in public. In a society where rape of women and girls and the caste system appear to embolden man to feel entitled to sexually molesting the unguarded and the vulnerable, this practise leads to situations where in the dark, women become victims of both rape and murder.

India has achieved great technological strides as well as financial benefit from its enterprising and capable population, those that are educated and forward-looking, yet it remains mired in a medieval mindset when it comes to personal hygiene and performing natural acts of bodily elimination. Thus it has always been and no one seems to see the need to alter this social habit. At least not men; for obvious reasons women feel otherwise.

Several years ago public-health advocates were urging women to refuse marriage to any man who couldn't provide her home with a bathroom. The message was launched in public view that stated: "No toilet, No bride". And in a sense, given a shortage of marriageable women as a result of Indian society preferring male babies, indulging in aborting female fetuses or in infanticide, many man look in vain for a wife, so this campaign would have made practical sense.

The Times of India recently reported that a family court judge determined that grounds for divorce would be acceptable through the argument that a husband had failed to provide a family bathroom, as a cruel act of dereliction of head-of-family duty. This particular case was that of a 24-year-old woman whose husband shrugged off her request for a bathroom with his response that it was an unnecessary convenience.

Old, accepted customs die hard. Although it has been illegal for some time to denigrate Dalits (formerly known as 'untouchables' in Hindu India's caste system), the Dalit community is still suffering social stigmas of contempt and exclusion. And so it is too with the initiative by the government of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which is attempting to persuade the population of the need for a forward-looking society to build and use toilets.

A campaign across India shows children making fun of people who buy smartphones, flat-screen TVs and motorcycles but continue to defecate in the open. (Rama Lakshmi/The Washington Post)

There is a connection between the caste system where the despised 'untouchables' were considered to be useful only for employment that no one else in society would touch, such a cleaning out toilets. That extends to the thought that installing a toilet in one's home is therefore unclean. Government-run public relations include an advertisement with a child saying "Uncle, you wear a tie around your neck, shoes on your feet, but you still defecate in the open. What kind of progress is this?"

What, indeed.