Gender & Masculinity Scholars - Boys' Socialization & Violence

i am not going to talk about women…or how this country has rape culture or that we cannot think of ourselves as civilized because not only have we not been able to create safety, a basic precondition for living, as far as girls are concerned, we have given up…girls get raped, therefore girls get locked up’ is still our only solution. As quickly as one group asks for castration, another asks the same old aggravating question, “why was she there?” Meanwhile parents, institutions, panchayats rush in to lock the girls…in more clothes, more curfews, more digital Lakshnan rekhas. I am going to talk a little bit about boys. And how we are raising them. And how little their life is worth. A 29year old soldier, who leaves his home in Mizoram and goes all the way to Jammu and Kashmir to serve his country, dies because a bunch of happy hooligans returning from a picnic get angry and kill him. Another young man chooses an orange bandana to go and save his culture from boys and girls, especially girls, who might show some semblance of freedom. These are not isolated incidents. These are boys being bred and fed to the machine of violence, often sponsored and/or sanctioned by people with power, money, influence. How do we make a safe country should be priority for us all. I want to hear your views on this as I research for my next book. In my previous book also, lack of women’s safety was identified a major blocker to growth and progress. But I want to go beyond women’s harassment, rape or loss of izzat (much of which also comes from a complex patriarchal association of women with men’s honor)and explore what makes us so casually violent??? Why is life so cheap (is it because we are too many?)