Monday, January 20, 2014

Rape involves both power and violence. grime and punishment

Rape involves both power and violence. The laws heavily punish those who violate their power or dominance over anyone. But like murder, rape involves several shades of grey, the darkest covering those to whom rape means sadism and torment, aiming to obliterate the victim's humanity through delivering the most painful experience of it, producing what Slavoj Zizek calls 'second death...the annihilation of nature's cycle itself'. Should these rapists get the same punishment as everyone else?



 we are no longer painfully shy about discussing sex, particularly its bad things in public, manifest in anxiety about rape. Second, we're seeing booming citizen activism, individual experiences becoming public concerns. Third, these two meet in multimedia, channels, journals and websites working in quick time. The result —


 a vibrant, noisy conversation encompassing empathy and hurt, one where the doubting can question women apparently maliciously screaming rape, while the logical retort, men can complain of harassment too.





Pause for a moment — you'll hear a revolution in the air. This involves sex — speaking of it, debating, discussing, analysing it. It may seem absurd for provocative sexual discourse to have just begun in our antique, argumentative land.


 The West experienced this in the 1960s, which many of us know only through Forrest Gump's black and white clips. But India's colonial experience made us hesitant about discussing sex — when a society hates its body for not being free, it doesn't discuss its pleasures or pains freely. The Gandhian experience added reticence — the Mahatma's confessions of guilt over sex led others to shy away, not from sex, but from talking about it.



The result — huge sex crimes, like Partition's rapes, were painted with one broad brush as 'bad things', left undiscussed and unresolved. Crimes aside, the reluctance to depict even a consensual kiss had Indian cinema nervously showing bees bobbing in the breeze instead. Verbal mentions were unthinkable — words like 'rape' couldn't be uttered without causing polite conversations to freeze. The results of such reticence were devastating, creating billions of Indians illiterate in sex and its rules, often suffering abuse but unable to say so — and no one listening.



This is hugely positive — but there are dangers here. Think of Delhi law minister Somnath Bharti's recent late-night encounter with the Delhi police, the minister — who earlier named a rape victim — insisting the police raid a house allegedly containing prostitutes and drugs. When the police refused — they can't arrest women at night or search sans warrants —


 the minister's followers reportedly tackled the women themselves, forcing them into a car, heckling, slapping and taking them for medical tests. Now, think of the hectic scrutiny of recent high-profile rape and molestation cases, intimate accounts flooding the public sphere, cameras chasing alleged aggressors, zooming in for dramatic tremors of guilt.



 we are no longer painfully shy about discussing sex, particularly its bad things in public, manifest in anxiety about rape. Second, we're seeing booming citizen activism, individual experiences becoming public concerns. Third, these two meet in multimedia, channels, journals and websites working in quick time. The result — a vibrant, noisy conversation encompassing empathy and hurt, one where the doubting can question women apparently maliciously screaming rape, while the logical retort, men can complain of harassment too.

This is hugely positive — but there are dangers here. Think of Delhi law minister Somnath Bharti's recent late-night encounter with the Delhi police, the minister — who earlier named a rape victim — insisting the police raid a house allegedly containing prostitutes and drugs. When the police refused — they can't arrest women at night or search sans warrants — the minister's followers reportedly tackled the women themselves, forcing them into a car, heckling, slapping and taking them for medical tests. Now, think of the hectic scrutiny of recent high-profile rape and molestation cases, intimate accounts flooding the public sphere, cameras chasing alleged aggressors, zooming in for dramatic tremors of guilt.


The two are extreme ends of the same anxiety, one impacting the powerful, the other, the vulnerable. Both show deep disregard for legal rules of privacy and protection every one of us is entitled to. In our anxious public conversations over sex's bad things, maintaining our balance is key. Swinging from reticence to wordiness — sometimes, sliding into voyeuristic grime — won't help. Neither will running roughshod over the law do.



Speaking of which, as the Verma commission report's first anniversary nears, it's time to calmly examine existing rape laws. Here's a query — do you remember five-year-old Gudiya in Delhi last year? Gudiya was lured by two neighbours promising her potato chips. She was tied-up — hauntingly, under her own home while her parents, a construction worker and his wife, searched frantically everywhere — and raped for days.


Gudiya's assailants pushed plastic objects into her private parts, damaging her so severely, she needed five surgeries. Yet, her story melted quietly off the press. So did preoccupation with her masked assailants, awaiting judgment under amended rape laws. Following the Nirbhaya gang rape, the law finally recognised certain acts — acid attacks to trafficking — as serious crimes. But with innumerable Gudiya-like cases — reported child rape in India's leapt by over 330% since 2001 — the laws need further refinement.



Recognising different degrees of violence that compose rape is crucial. Imagining 10 years in jail might deter your office sleaze. But did it frighten the gang that raped a 51-year-old Danish tourist? Given our abysmal rape conviction rates — about 24% — will a 10-year sentence, delivered after yawning decades, deter repeat offenders like those in Shakti Mills? This approach is again too broad in its brush strokes. With the juvenile, allegedly most savage to Nirbhaya, walking free soon, will this leave us shouting over a few shame-faced celebrity heads?



India has overcome great obstacles by finally talking about sex and recognising rape as a major crime. But now, rapes must be understood as crimes of variegated violence and given graded punishments, premeditation and savagery topping the list. For this, respecting the law remains vital. We can't let collective anxieties deteriorate into breathless grime — then, nothing can really be cleaned up.




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