The troubling response to the Delhi gang-rape

I write this entry as the horror and the theatre of the brutal rape and the ensuing protests play out in India.  The rape itself sickened and enraged me; but the mass-protests that have followed, which have included calls for the death penalty and castration for rapists have left me equally disturbed. 

 

I agree that this rape has brought an issue to the forefront of Indian consciousness that otherwise is given no voice.  Rape, usually a taboo subject, has become a topic of widespread discussion.  The government and the police, though slow in reacting and responding, are beginning to show some signs of life – but I fear that this awakening will be brief, and the “system” shall go back to its usual torpidity soon enough.  Still, something has shaken us out of our stupor, certainly.  All this notwithstanding, I am left troubled, unsatisfied, and uneasy by the response to this rape.  Here are some reasons why:

 

I.  We have to realize that there is a distinction between wanting retribution for an act of violence against a woman, and actually believing that women are equal to men and deserve to be treated as such.  There have been reports of women being molested at the protests by men protesting beside them.  It’s clear from this that for many of the men protesting and asking for stringent punishments for rape, it is not so much that a woman has been denied basic respect and dignity, but that a woman has been disrespected and dishonoured.  Whereas the former ideas are about the fundamental right of a human being to expect that she shall not be violated, the latter concepts involve notions of society’s and family’s ownership of a woman’s body that can be violated under some circumstances and not others.

Of the thousands of men and women who protested, a sizeable number of them – both men and women – will continue to live out and perpetuate unequal social norms in their daily lives: at weddings, they will expect the bride’s family to acquiesce to their material demands in the form of wedding arrangements and dowries; they will pressure their wives and daughters-in-law to abort female fetuses and will physically and/or psychologically abuse them for giving birth to girls; they will impose restrictions of dress, movement, speech, and action on the women in their families; they will presume that the first priority of a woman is as a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother, and that her priorities to herself as a woman are negligible if not non-existent. 

The loudest voices at the protest have come from those demanding dire judicial consequences for rapists, but unless our national dialogue stays focussed on combatting the underlying misogyny of our culture and the inequities of patriarchy, it will not mean much change for the average Indian woman.

 

II.  Why has this rape caused outrage, and not others?  We have heard the dreadful statistics of rape in India: estimates are that several hundreds of thousands of rapes occur each year in India, and forget convictions, a scant few are even reported by the victims for fear of persecution and dishonour.  This rape was brutal and horrific, no doubt.  But even as protestors vented their outrage at this rape, women and members of alternative gender and sexual orientations continue to be victims of sexual assault throughout the country.  This rape, in many ways, fits conveniently into our pre-programmed notions of violation and abuse: urban, educated, middle-class women assaulted by lower-class, mostly-uneducated men.  For many of us who have a voice in India – we members of the urban middle- and upper-classes, the educated – violence against women is something that is perpetuated by men at the margins: habitually drunk men in the slums of India’s cities who beat their wives as a matter of course, or the rural uneducated who think that over-lordship over women is their birth-right.  While these men may certainly be part of the demographic, what we ignore in making these presumptions is how much violence and abuse of women occurs in middle-class urban homes; how much sexual violence is used as a tool of intimidation and control by upper-caste men over dalit women, by the police and the armed-forces over the citizens they are entrusted to protect; and we are totally blind to the abuse of transgender men and women (hijras/kothis).  Even as the protests continue, there are claims being made that this is a problem that we are being subject to from some alien, outside sources, or because we have forgotten our Indian traditional values; there continues to be a refusal to accept that rape, sexual violence, victim-blaming, and the marginalization of women are endemic to our culture, and that we must all bear the burden of this, and the responsibility to fundamentally change it.

 

III.  Violence only perpetuates violence, it does not resolve it.  Violence is useful as a weapon of provocation; it is woefully inadequate as a tool of justice.  When we demand that violence be punished by death or with equal brutality, we tacitly affirm that violence is a legitimate way to resolve our problems.  The death-penalty, police-brutality, torture, rape, psychological and verbal abuse, and class-, caste-, and sex-based subjugation are all part of the same continuum of violence.  The problem here is not that rapists are dealt with too leniently, or are not punished harshly enough.  The problem at the heart of the issue is the culture of violence, in which violence is acceptable social tender.  The only way to extricate ourselves from this web of abuse (we are all both victims and perpetrators in this), is to remove violence from the equation. 

 

In the end, all I can say is that our energies are better spent struggling against violence and oppression (based on class, caste, religion, sex, or skin colour) at every level, than to insist that rapists be hanged and women be protected.  This is not a problem that will go away through the judicial or criminal- “justice” system, or by telling women how to ensure that they are not raped.  No.  This is more basic than that.  It starts with how we raise our sons and daughters, and with our acceptance of oppression and violence as inviolable truths of life.