Editorial
Helpless parents before desperadoes
Community will have to stand up to such rogues
How unprotected young girls are and, by a fatal extension their parents can be, was amply proven by the gory incident in a city flat on Wednesday morning. An armed youth with a friend barged into the apartment to force at gun point a marriage proposal for the daughter of the family. As the parents resisted the attempt at physically dragging the girl away, first the father was shot in the head to die instantaneously and then the mother who later succumbed to her injuries.
The dastardly incident has once again brought to the fore the sheer sense of insecurity and danger to life that pervade the day to day living of ever increasing numbers of city dwellers, be it at home, market place or in the street.
Most vulnerable are middle aged or old parents or guardians, who along with their daughters, are drawn into the vortex of trouble. This is particularly true about a family without a son. Beginning with eve-teasing and making passes to girls to subjecting them to sexual harassment to attempts at enticing or forcing them away to hurling marriage proposals at their families, the stalking ruffians would stop short at nothing.
Whenever such assaults hog news lines we are apt to point to a general decline in law and order in which we say gun running drug addicted youths are let loose in a slack of law enforcement. We also finger-point at relaxed state of vigil at the apartment buildings where security guards are not up to the task. Whilst all these are true in varying degrees and in the case of Gulshan homicide, worryingly, the known culprits managed to escape the crime scene too; yet there are categories of crime that should provoke a social responsibility and obligation. In the matter of preventing and intervening in a developing situation, society, community and neighbourhood are in a better position to play the role of an effective antidote to the social variety of crime.
It is a sad combination of fragile parental authority, hiatus between individual families and the neighbourhood, cracks in the traditional community cohesion that is both the cause and effect of social dehumanisation that we experience today. Social values of collective fending and protection against evil that stand undermined today will have to be restored if we are not to be devoured by the monster of our own making.
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