The grotesque gang rape and torture of a young medical student in a bus in Delhi has done for Indian women what the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, three days beforehand, has done for the gun control debate in the United States: got the national attention. In both cases, the problem runs much deeper than the incident, and in both cases it remains to be seen whether nationwide horror will translate into meaningful change.
The Delhi government and police swung into action with their trusty band-aids: they cancelled the licence of the bus operator; announced a crackdown on tinted windows as if the Supreme Court hadn’t already legislated that in 1989; announced that buses will display helpline numbers; and announced fast-track courts, and more patrol vans.
Which only shows that they’re still pretending that the real problem – India’s widespread misogyny – is somebody else’s problem. That social attitude is what caused a crowd of 50 passers-by to stand around the victim and her friend, both naked and bleeding after they had been thrown off the bus, without a single person offering them clothing, comfort, or any other form of help.
That same attitude is what allowed the chief minister of Delhi to say, on an earlier occasion, that women “should not be too adventurous”, and the chairperson of the National Commission for Women to say that “women should dress modestly”, or any number of male and female ministers to blame rape on the victim’s “provocative dress” or her “character”. It’s that misogynistic attitude that allows sexual assault to be watered down into the term “eve-teasing”.
That attitude cleaves to the belief that rape and other assault are only the domain of criminals, migrants and “bad elements” from the slum or the neighbouring state. It turns a blind eye to the complicity of family members who refuse to acknowledge or talk about, let alone report, assault and rape at home or within relationships, by fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends, dates, and friends. That’s not sexual assuault, that’s just a little thing. Policemen and other law enforcers come from these same social attitudes, as a Tehelka expose made clear for anyone who didn’t realise that already.
Violence, especially sexual violence, against women and children has very little to do with libido. It has nothing to do with how old the victim is, what she looks like, how rich or poor she is, what time of day or night it is, how public or private the scene of the crime is, or how horny the perpetrator is. It has to do with the crudest assertion of power and control. The rapists in the Delhi bus were not provoked by their victim’s dress, but by the fact that she and her companion stood up to their bullying. It has to do with a challenge to control.
In the short term, the only way to ensure that sexual assault victims seek and get redress is to sensitise at least three specific sections of the population to gender issues, starting now: politicians and policy makers, law enforcers, and the judiciary. We need a government, police, and social activism campaign that encourages both women and men to speak up, so that perpetrators of sexual crime can be brought to the kind of justice that everyone can take seriously.
But in a society as deeply patriarchal, misogynistic and violent as India, the only way to lower the incidence of rape is to raise citizens – rich, poor, urban, rural, male, female – to believe that boys and girls are equal members of society, that each person owns his or her own sexuality, and that sexual engagement is contingent on free consent. Schools and families have to inculcate in children a civil sensibility that treats everyone with respect, and a sexual sensibility that does not countenance violence, no matter what their feelings — sexual/emotional frustration or rejection, love, hate, powerlessness of any sort. That means sensitising schoolteachers and other educators, panchayats, and parents — to begin with.
Anyone with an ounce of sense should see the current massive outrage about the Delhi rape as the tip of that national spear. There is a real danger that the current attention will be deflected into smaller wrangles about what constitutes reasonable punishment in this case, what will be done to make Delhi safer, and which token head should or should not roll. The greater tragedy will be if, seeing justice done in this case, the outraged suddenly feel all better. If attention is allowed to melt away again, it will leave millions of women all over the country to suffer sexual assault as usual — constantly, without redress, and at the price of their individual freedom as they are constantly pushed back from the spaces, both personal and public, that are theirs by right.
