Carry pepper spray/ talk at home

This post also features in my FutureChallenges blog with a few edits here. 
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We are living in a fucked up world.

For every incidence of sexual violence I get to know of experienced by my friends, a sickening feeling overcomes me & fills me with dread. dread for the many girls who will never tell their experience to anyone. dread for the unimaginably horrible world we live in. If very close friends too share such experiences only when they are sure that they won't be judged, I shudder to think of how many of the women I interact with everyday or pass by would have had to go through such ordeals as well. Is any woman/girl/child safe at all in this country?

We might build walls. we might only travel in our own cars and never in the dead of the night. But is it any safer?

How can it be any safer for women, if their world is built on the notions of shame, purity, 'decency' and so on? By defining our 'culture' squarely on the basis of men's right to judge a woman, we are creating the ground for sexual violence that gets justified in one perverted way or the another.

A girl gets pinched and people look at her as if she invited it because she was wearing shorts. what kind of twisted culture is this? Let women roam around naked if they wish to. Nothing should give any one the right on anyone else's body.
If as a family unit, we indulge in judging women in perverse logic of decency, we are bound to fail. None of my friends who have shared the experience with me, have shared it with their family members. If your sister/mother/daughter/neice can't tell you what she has/is going through, what use is the family and the 'sanskaar' bullshit?
For this world to be any safer, the family has to be more open and give up on being judgemental. How often do the men in the family know anything about what their women counterpart are going through? how many have a clear understanding of menstruation? how many families can talk about body and sexuality without getting weird about it? my hunch is zero. but we can try to build such families in the future, can't we?
If we remove the mystery, the sexual perversion around women's body in our culture, perhaps, then the men will know better than to be so hopelessly pathetic and clueless about sexuality. If there is no cultural anxiety about 'choli ke peeche kya hai', there will be less frustration, less show of power through sexual violence and less every day horror of eve teasing. i hope.