LET’S TALK ABOUT RAPE
What is it about India and rape?” an Italian research scholar visiting our office last week asked me. “Why is there so much of it happening?” I tried to respond with all the usual answers: yes, the situation is bad but it is not as bad as other countries (I even pulled out statistics to prove my point). Perhaps the increase in numbers is really an increase in reporting, which means women are coming forward to speak out. We may be hearing more about it because the women’s movement in India is strong and activists have ensured the issue remains in the public eye. I also knew that while all of these responses had some element of truth in them, none of them was adequate, and there was a lot they left unsaid.
The rape story in India does not seem to go away, and ever since the protests of December 2012, the issue has remained in the public eye. It’s this that allows us to see exactly how widespread sexual violence is. It’s happening everywhere: a mother and a daughter pulled out of their car and raped in the fields near a highway; children spirited away from their homes and raped in nearby fields and often left there to die; an aspiring law student tortured, raped and killed in her home in Kerala, groups of women raped in communal violence as in Muzaffarnagar—the list goes on and on.
What little statistical data we have back up these stories. The National Crime Records Bureau statistics say that the number of reported rapes in the country went up from 22,172 in 2010 to 36,735 in 2014; that in 86 per cent of these cases, the offenders were known to the victims; rapes inside the family increased by 25 per cent in 2014 over the previous year, with Delhi registering the highest number of cases.
So what exactly is happening here? We have a new, stringent law in place. More and more victims/survivors are coming out to report. And yet, it seems as if the numbers are on the rise. Are we to conclude then that there is no fear at all of the law in the mind of the rapist? Or that, despite the law and the fact that women are speaking out, impunity for perpetrators still remains strong?
A recent, three-year-long qualitative research project run by Zubaan, the publishing house I work in, supported by the International Development Research Centre, and covering five South Asian countries, confirms this. Whether it’s the law, or medical practice, or social sanction, or the ways in which we bring up children, or indeed preserving community ‘honour’, the perpetrators of sexual violence almost always get away.
Indeed, as the study shows, the moment you start to look at the question of sexual violence, the borders of South Asia seem to melt away and our countries—in this case, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India—could be a mirror of each other.
In all of these countries, the law on sexual violence is heavily dependent on ‘evidence’; much of this evidence comprises forensic samples or signs of injury on the victim’s body. In no country are these systematically collected or stored, nowhere do we have enough forensic laboratories where samples can be tested; nowhere are hospital workers trained to deal sensitively with victims/ survivors; and many medical textbooks everywhere still teach would-be doctors that when women say they have been raped, they are mostly lying.
But the news isn’t all bad, for it is also true that in many ways, women, some men and transgender persons have begun to speak out about sexual violence; in some instances, they’re refusing to allow themselves to be stigmatised, to be defined merely as victims. It’s not we who should be ashamed, they’re saying, it’s the perpetrators society needs to ostracise. Contrast this with other kinds of irresponsible speech on sexual violence, something that, ironically, no one paid much attention to, but now that it’s in the public eye, everyone feels they have to say something, though they’re not entirely sure what. There’s this clamour about teaching boys to respect girls, then that boys will be boys, that women who don’t want to be raped, can’t be, that ‘one small rape’ (or something similar) has negatively impacted India’s tourism industry.
Perhaps it’s time to recognise that sexual violence is a serious and widespread crime; time to stop speaking irresponsibly about it; time to start thinking how we can address this deep-rooted malaise in our society. Studies across the world speak of the social, economic and psychological costs of sexual violence. It’s time we recognised these.
The news isn’t all bad; women, some men and transgender persons are refusing to allow themselves to be stigmatised
The author is a Delhi-based writer and heads the publishing house Zubaan