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Lila Krishna's avatar

I think this gets it wrong. I've listened to accounts of women who escaped from this trap.

This stuff is like a many-headed hydra that targets everyone based on their specific weaknesses. A lot of rural women targeted didn't have anything going for them, and their only goal was marriage. The men promised them marriage. Many of them didn't even know Islam was a different religion altogether, they thought it was just another caste group.

You think you'll get over this by educating your children. But the challenge is the theory sounds too shocking and made up. They'll use different strategies for the ones who are educated. They'll be like "im not like what you were told i was" and the girls will be left questioning everything they were told.

Being educated and liberated doesn't help. You'll be targeted by older more experienced men who take the form of mentors and supportive mature men. Look at Aruna Asaf Ali for instance.

Even if you're old, it doesn't end. Kamala Das was targeted by her much younger biographer or secretary.

Many girls avoid and reject such men. This makes them increased targets of violence.

I notice that the islamist targeting mirrors how the men in your society behave towards women. In Britain, the british themselves turned a blind eye to poor teenage girls being sexually exploited. Look up Andrea Dunbar and the movie Rita Sue And Bob Too. So that's how it looks like in their society.

In ours, there are many issues women face. You're expected to give up your birth family's identity and take on that of your husband's family and do whatever you can to keep them happy. Men's family has an obscene amount of societal power still. Domestic violence is still common. There are very high expectations of girls and women. Getting the correct share of property is still difficult for women.

So the legal differences don't bother a lot of women. They decide to take their chances with the domestic violence, could it be that much worse than what they saw in their own family? Is it such a big deal to change name and take on husband's family's practices and raise kids like them?

Even families can't suss out the bad men here - they come with aadhaar cards and all stating they are Hindu.

Hindu men are not constrained because of modernity. That's not the problem. The problem is as Hindus we're looking for a lifelong partnership that spans seven births, so we're more picky and circumspect about partners and have high expectations. A predator who doesn't care about the long term can say anything, be anyone, promise anything. A genuine guy would probably say my mom might not approve of you. Someone with short term aims will say oh my mom will love you and if she doesn't, we'll live by ourselves, I'm willing to give up my family for you. You can't compete with lies. .

I'm not sure what helps here exactly. I was told to avoid men of certain religions, but I didn't see it as particularly different. Muslim men eat meat and that is bad for us? Sure, but so do men of other castes. So do men of our same caste secretly. It's just difficult to communicate to a young person exactly what the problem is. We ourselves don't know what the problem is. Sure, you don't want to end up with a shoaib daniyal but you could end up with an Irfan khan? What factors lead to an Irfan khan vs a shoaib daniyal? We don't know.

Simple methods look like sweeping generalizations. Complex conversations are incomplete. This seems like a hard problem in general.

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