It is imperative that the government ensures that rapists are caught and punished. What should follow is for the legal establishment to mount decent prosecution cases leading to conviction of offenders. Needless to say, there is inefficiency embedded in the administration. And women everywhere have to suffer a great deal for the small victories of men.

That so few women have proportionately figured in places of importance in history should give one enough reason to examine our social structures, unless one believes in the inherent inferiority of females. It has remained an enigma why women in the past have never rebelled en masse against social and institutional inequality. The answer might possibly lie in the fact that the reward for being subjugated and subordinate was handsome, while the penalty for rebellion was severe.

Society’s structures have been built by the bricks of centuries by men. Nowhere has this bias been more evident than in the fields of religion, education and sex. Women have either been denigrated or placed on imaginary pedestals. Everywhere they have had to be the repositories of society’s virtue.

After Darwin’s theory of evolution scuttled the Biblical story of creation, social scientists woke up to the fact that there existed yawning gaps in the knowledge of the origins of society. Sir Henry Maine first held the view that the patriarchal system of authority was original and universal. He even dated patriarchy to the moment of paternity, when the male first realised his role in the propagation of the species.

Lewis N Morgan observed the process of transition from jus maternum (mother’s right) to jus paternam (father’s right) when man’s superior strength caused the male’s economic function to supersede, for the first time, the female’s nurturing one.

Marxist theorists like Fredrich Engels, who based his theories on the work of Morgan, believe the passage from matriarchy to patriarchy marked not only the historical defeat of the feminine sex, but also signalled the development of private property. In fact, monogamy, slavery and the evolution of private property – all developed along with patriarchy.

Perhaps sexual subjugation really ties up with what contemporary social scientists now believe to be the reason for patriarchy and man’s subordination of women. Ernest Crawley calls it “physiological thought” – early man’s fear of women based on female functions such as reproduction, nutrition and sex, and a woman’s inherent closeness to nature.

The discovery of patriarchy contributed greatly to the downslide of women in society. The laws of Manu, which date back to around 100 BC, say, “The mother is but the field which brings forth the plant according to whatever seed is sown.”

It is interesting to see how most religions have cemented inequality between men and women. In the West, the religious symbolism is exclusively masculine. It is God the Father in Judaism, followed by His Son in Christianity. The mother figure is either non-existent (in the former) or a secondary figure in the power structure (in the latter). In Christianity, a woman is either Eve the temptress contributing to the fall of man, or the Mother of God. She is an impossible ideal, a pure virgin even in conception.

Islam is said to have very progressive laws relating to women in the areas of widow remarriage and property, but women have been allowed little actual participation in the institutions that have controlled them and which have gradually been subverted.

India did not always have the oppressive patriarchal society it has today. Historians have found evidence of a liberal matrilineal society still evident in the Nairs, the people of the Malabari coast, and the Garo tribe of Assam. The coming of the Aryans, an Indo-European race in the 2nd millennium BC changed the fabric of the society.

Although Hinduism was fair to women in the early Vedic period and the concept of ardhnarishwara – the duality of male and female in the divinity – was an accepted notion, in reality, the attitude of society towards women slid rapidly downhill. Double standards came to be sanctioned by religion. Thus Manu was able to say, “In childhood, a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead, to her sons; a woman must never be independent.”

It is known how the ugly custom of sati came about, but the fact that it came to be venerated and associated with high virtue indicates the male bias inherent in it. Today, sati is out, bride burning is in. The trauma of rejection that greets a female from the moment of birth continues to haunt her. There is a growing feeling among men that they can molest women anywhere with impunity.

Two stark realities can no longer be ignored. First, most people in authority have become emasculated and corrupt in our country. Secondly, there has been a vast increase in the number of criminalised youth. The spreading consumer culture and the accompanying advertisement explosion have played a key role in both the developments.

In the early 1920s, long before expressions like “industrialism” and “consumer culture” came into vogue; the British historian RW Tawney described the acquisitive society as one “whose tendency and preoccupation and interest is to promote the acquisition of wealth”.

The perception of women as commodities has been sharpened and made ubiquitous by 20th century industrialism, whose ethos has rapidly spread in India. The perception got a fillip with contemporary advertising, which capitalises on woman’s sexual attractions to draw attention to products.

Man’s greed for sex is aggravated by the woman as his greed for commodities is stoked by the varieties on display or advertised. He becomes the compulsive womaniser who seeks every attractive woman he sees – as the compulsive consumer wants to possess all attractive things around him.

The malaise is deep-rooted in the male psyche. Being stronger, he breaks her physically as well as emotionally. It is time Indian males realised that the nation that does not honour its women cannot survive long. Just stiffening penalties won’t lessen crimes against women.

Peaceful change requires the backing of society and it would help if men realised that feminist movements are not anti-men but for women. Perhaps Oscar Wilde guessed correctly when he quipped: “All women become like their mothers. That’s their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”