Police, doctors, lawyers: time to learn gender sensitivity

In the year gone by since the Shakti Mill gang-rape last August and the multiple campaigns to make the city safer since then, statistics show that the incidence of crimes and violence against women is on the rise. What’s the point in the media focus or public discussion on that incident or the issue of women’s safety, many ask.

Some women activists, in fact, believe that the media focus is misplaced because Mumbai is relatively safer than other cities even today and focus on its non-safety tends to only make people anxious. Perhaps, it is safer than Delhi with which it tends to be compared. First up, it’s a poor comparison. Secondly, the smugness about the relative safety is broken by rude wake-up calls every day of every week.

The rising incidences of sexual assault and harassment are to be expected; more women, emboldened by what they read and hear, come forth to report cases, say veteran activists. This is the usual trajectory. But as the incidence rises, it’s bringing new pressures on the two agencies that must deal with such crimes and their survivors but are most ill-equipped to do so: the police and the medical health system.

The Bandra-based woman, who was assaulted in the early hours of last Sunday when she was out with a friend to buy cigarettes, has spoken of the travails she had to go through before a FIR was registered. She was shunted from one police station to another on grounds of jurisdiction, women police officers required by law were not present, men officers did all that they are notorious for, which is asking unnecessary questions and commenting on her clothes, and so on.

This won’t be the last time that a survivor of sexual assault or harassment is treated like some moral trespasser in a police station. It is not only about the poorly-concealed bias among the men in khakhi or in public hospitals towards women, especially unconventional and independent women. It is about the ability of the system, which means every biased officer and constable in it, every biased or out-of-pace doctor, to respond to the societal and legal changes.

Policemen are sometime unaware of the changes in law, of the finer aspects of new laws such as the Prevention of Child Sexual Offences, of the need for a shift in their responses to survivors of sexual crimes, of the term called gender sensitivity. The need is for training and re-fresher courses, away from the glare and noise of individual cases.

In some hospitals, even today, the two-finger test is conducted to assess if rape occurred. It is not that there are no protocols for medical examination or collection of forensic evidence. The issue, again, is for medical health professionals to be geared to doing what is in the best interests of the survivor, as mandated by new laws and procedures. The legal system is no less harsh on the survivor, with defence lawyers taking delight in the survivor’s discomfort in open court.

Just how traumatic the police, hospital and the court, as systems, can be is lucidly brought out in a piece written by a colleague of the Shakti Mill gang-rape survivor for a website this week. In it, she laments about the trauma and disgust that she felt as they lived out the first few days after the incident. It’s a powerful and moving insider account.

A large part of her ire is directed at the media, both television and print (no, she does not list Hindustan Times among the offenders), in which the system turned on the survivor for every sickening scrap of exclusive information, not heeding the fact that she was one of their own.

Beyond the media bashing, what comes through is the utter non-preparedness of the police and medico-legal system; they can at best handle a case but are clueless about how to deal with the survivor. This has got to change.