Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/01/minister-gives-wooden-bats-to.html
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Minister gives wooden bats to 700 brides in India to clobber drunk husbands
Guy must be from New Jersey.
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not sure if this is going to turn out well…adding a weapon to abusive situations, what is he thinking?
how about instead of increasing violence, he funds better enforcement, support groups, free bank accounts, education on abuse in the schools and for offenders, shelters for victims of abuse, etc. you know, the stuff that would really help and not make things worse.
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Yep. Pretty much my thought. Somehow, I don’t think the solution to violence is “escalate the violence.”
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Apparently, part of the problem is that cops don’t respond to domestic violence calls - and that’s only if the women have some way to let the police know what’s happening. So it’s up to the women to ‘take matters into their own hands’.
Insert old man from the Simpsons gif: “that’s a paddlin’!”
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yeah, why fix the problem when you can make a bigger problem and the original problem worse? 
i worry for the safety of any lady that tries to paddle her drunk abusive husband, not sure, but i’m fairly confident that the issue wasn’t lack of things within arms reach that you could potentially clobber someone with. are these same police going to turn their heads when either the husband or wife are beaten within an inch of their life with government supplied beating sticks?
what they need is proper enforcement and punishment, education on the issue, shelters and support groups, etc. anything less is nothing or worse.
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Don’t they have rolling pins?
It only just now occurs to me. Was Andy Capp supposed to be some kind of play on the word handicap? I’m probably reaching.
EDIT:
Someone on metafilter offers:
That’s deliberate - one of the recurrent gags in the strip focused on Andy’s gambling habit, which often centered on handicap horseracing.
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Escalation can be a perfectly viable solution: if you have the ability to bring enough force to bear; and won’t’ face even greater consequences for being willing to do so.
Of course, this situation meets neither of those criteria, so this stunt will either be forgotten about or end in disaster.
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Well, no-one specified it had to be a good solution.
This reminds me of the NRA types who think that what’s needed in poor and crime-plagued communities are more firearms or that the remedy to school shootings is to arm teachers and students. [note: no, this is not an invitation to anyone derail the discussion into one about American gun control]
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Someone should hand those out at Fox News.
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Not with bats that small he isn’t.
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And thus, said minister ended up nicknamed… The Batman.
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He’s not the minister we need, but the minister we deserve.
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Bhargava said he wanted to draw attention to the plight of rural women who face domestic abuse from their alcoholic husbands.
“Women say whenever their husbands get drunk they become violent. Their savings are taken away and splurged on liquor,” he said.
Let’s not ignore the alcohol component. When I first traveled in India in 1970, the whole subcontinent was virtually dry, but cannabis was common in many areas. It would be interesting to know if the domestic violence has increased since the legalization of alcohol. I am betting that it has.
And in India’s little neighbor to the north, Nepal, cannabis products were legal and widely consumed back in the '70s. But the US didn’t like that, and pushed for a ban, holding aid money hostage. Sure enough, the next time I was there, in the mid '80s, pot was scarce and alcohol was king. The farmers who had previously been able to simply grow a few plants for their evening relaxation had become paying consumers of alcohol, thus becoming poorer in many ways.
Thanks, US cultural/economic imperialism!
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Yep. It was ‘Handicap’ as in racing. I believe it is an accurate portrait of Reg Smythe’s father, whom he loathed. The new cartoons done by others do not have half the bite of the originals.
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I think this is just a wee bit much. It’s insisting that nothing less than perfection is acceptable. They aren’t going to invent a new culture overnight. While those things get worked on, empowering individual self-defense is a perfectly reasonable step. Whether giving bats to new brides is a good idea or not is reasonable to debate, but I think criticizing it because their criminal justice system isn’t perfect or their culture not feminist enough is too easy when you aren’t the one needing to defend yourself and your family’s resources at this moment.
You go to war with the minister you have, not the minister you wish you had.
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I thought marriages in India were all arranged by the parents. Does that change anything, if true?
What would it change?
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So minister Bhargava has somehow designed wooden clubs that don’t also operate in the hands of drunken husbands. That’s some amazing weapons technology.
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