Dress Restriction for Girls in Colleges

Recently there was a news in the media regarding the dress code for girls in colleges in Kanpur city which is in northern India. The girls did not like the ban and reacted by protesting it. Similar bans have been called for recently in Karachi and various other colleges. The target is always the girls and they are told that wearing jeans would invite eve teasing. Some places the plea is that jeans is a western dress and we should stick to our culture.

I think the reasoning is absurd. The sickness is in the loafers and idiots roaming around in the streets and we are treating it by telling the girls to wear traditional dresses. As if you have a pain in the legs and instead of treating it we say amputating the leg will relieve the pain in the leg. Can the college authorities assure the girls that the eve teasing will stop if they start wearing traditional dresses? Another reason I don't like such bans is it is giving in to the rowdies.

I am not against the traditional dresses, and in fact I think girls look beautiful in them, but again choice should be with the person as to what they want to wear. If sticking to the culture is the main point then the boys should also not be allowed to wear T-Shirts or jeans and instead should come to college in Kurta and Dhoti which are traditional dresses for male in India.

Some people would argue that the crime against the women will rise if they are in Jeans and T-Shirt. That is also not very true. In fact if a girl is confident in these dresses then there are less chances of eve teasing compared to a weak body language in traditional dress. There are scores of rapes and crimes happening against girls and there is no statistics to suggest that most were in western dresses. I feel if the dress is dignified and not revealing it should be allowed. If compared to Tops, sarees, the traditional dress shows more skin. Some ladies wear Sarees in a very dignified manner while some can make it look vulgar.

The major solution in my opinion would be to run a public campaign to educate people on how to handle eve teasing, encouraging people to help girls live a dignified life and at the same time give police more power to tackle the culprits. Recently in Kanpur, police caught few eve teasers and invoked the strict national security act on them. Such kind of actions can be deterrents to crimes against the women and not the knee jerk reactions being shown by the weak college administrators.