You must be wondering what has Rape or for that matter, any crime got to do with the price we pay for Tea or Coffee. Yes, there is a relation and let me explain how.
We (India) are an emerging economy and one of the many parameters of measuring growth is the percentage of women in the workforce and according to this data from the world bank, About 24.5% in India (For the year 2017), 45.2% In China and 44.3% in the USA of women are part of the workforce there are 210 countries way ahead of us, and if I remove African and developed countries some of our neighbors fare better than us for example (though our economies are not the same) Vietnam, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka . (The data is available on world banks website) so, the reason why I am giving this stats is that as we know the more the women in the workforce the faster is the overall development of the society and economy and because of these crimes and fear of it happening women don’t come out to work. So the last time a rape happened from the shameful Nirbhaya case in Delhi, Kathua, Guru gram etc what was the typical reaction of the people or the government? Don’t go out after 6 or 7 in the evening, hire more security, have GPS in cabs, pick and drop facility, company provided cabs for odd hours drop, and various other security measures and mind you these services don’t come for free. So, imagine when the CEO or HR of any organization looks at the cost of employing women what would come in his/her mind?? Don’t employ women! That is the net reaction. So the economic downside of a single rape or any crime is paid by the entire society and the cost structure starts shooting up and we don’t even realize it. And in a country like India where there is a huge population from the rural India who are migrating to urban cities it has a multiplying effect. The cost structure keeps on increasing from say the tier 3 to tier 2 to Metro cities being the highest. So the cost is now amortized by employing women in newer cities like Gurugram, Noida, Jaipur, Pune etc. so when a crime happens in these cities women stop getting into the workforce, parents are reluctant to send their kids to other cities stop living in PG, Rented houses etc so the local economies have come to abrupt or complete halt and it’s all because of this one rape which is statistically speaking ignorable but the effect of it on the economy is so huge that we end up paying personally. Each time you check into the mall, star hotel, airport, etc the cost of maintaining the guards at the doors, mirrors, scanning machines, metal detector, CCTV, and many more gizmos that cost is added to the cost of that tea or coffee, alcohol, cigarette, food etc. we have to pay for it, no one would pay for it. Although the women who are raped, a person shot in Taj or CST may or may not be our relative or near and dear we do end up paying for it economically.
While we are happy that no major terror attack happened in India since 2014, but it would be foolish to say that we are not suffering its after effects, from paying extra for that cup of tea, frisked at every mall, airport, cinema we are terrorized it has gone into our psyche, Taj gets bombed increase security of star hotels, Cinema gets bombed do the same, school, bus, railways, planes etc. we forget the cost that we end up paying otherwise. This is causing a huge dent to the economy in the way that we or any country would raise more and more policemen, RAF, CRPF etc. which are non-productive (I mean these guys do a great service to the nation but economically they don’t add value or produce any economic value) so each time a crime, rape etc. happens we are moving more productive people out of the productive workforce to protect or safeguard the society or the nation thereby increasing the load or adding on the cost on to the lesser productive people , so all those young men holding guns are out of the productive force who probably would spend the entire life 20-30 years not adding any economic value. The time to do business now has gone up the waste of time at each mall, airports, time that jets waste due to security clearance, when you enter the office and asked to show the bag, etc. its wasteful expenditure of money as well as precious time. And this would go on forever and probably after the next attack, rape we might have to go through more checks. So what is happening is these incidents are slowing the economy, increasing non-value add expenditure, waste of time, take more men out of productive workforce into non-productive (so in one way Pakistan is not only killing our men but also harming our economy)
So what is the way forward? I am currently reading this book by George Kelling who introduced the theory broken windows and he says “consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags (Bangalore is the best example) of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars. He talks about crime and its relation to strategy to contain or eliminate crime from urban neighborhoods
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, according to him, is to address the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems are less likely to escalate and thus "respectable" residents do not flee the neighborhood.
Though police work is crucial to crime prevention, the presence of police authority is not enough to maintain a safe and crime-free city. People in the community help in crime prevention. He proposes that people care for and protect spaces they feel invested in, arguing that an area is eventually safer if the people feel a sense of ownership and responsibility towards the area. Broken windows and vandalism are still prevalent because communities simply do not care about the damage. Regardless of how many times the windows are repaired, the community still must invest some of their time to keep it safe. Residents' negligence of broken window-type decay signifies a lack of concern for the community. He also says this is a clear sign that the society has accepted this disorder—allowing the unrepaired windows to display vulnerability and lack of defense. The theory thus makes two major claims: that further petty crime and low-level anti-social behavior is deterred, and that major crime is prevented as a result. Criticism of the theory has tended to focus disproportionately on the latter claim.
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