Anayana Sharma
There have been a slew of responses to the recent rape of a 23-year-old paramedical student in Delhi. While the outrage to this incident is welcome, one needs to think about the conditions that allow for rape to happen and how we even think of ‘rape’ itself. Rape exists because of a patriarchal, misogynistic culture that condones it, whether tactility or explicitly. Rather than knee jerk responses, we need to opt for constant resistance against the prevalent patriarchal values and practices. I am not a supporter of death penalty and do not consider it as a solution. By arguing for an equivalent sentence for rapists one is simply reinforcing the violent nature of our society where our morality permits us to rejoice and celebrate a human death, no matter how despicable that person is. But if one thinks that an eye for an eye will stop such heinous acts, one is wrong. The demand for death penalty is more the expression of society’s yearning for revenge and retribution than a considered understanding of deterrent action. The intensity of hysteria–erupting-in-the-moment, often fueled by media frenzy, is usually a measure of ‘projective desire’ that eases collective guilt. There is no evidence that provision for punishment is a deterrent for sociopathic crimes. Plato rightly said that “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”. Sociopaths are never stopped by legal consequences on paper when an opportunity for predation presents itself. A society such as ours which rewards people who use murder, brutality and sexual violence as social and political weapons and where the social ethic of ‘I want what I want, and I want it now, and I don’t care who suffers in the process’ has become dominant, is a production factory for sociopathic behaviours. If sociopathic socialization that expresses in such behaviours is to be contained, we must strike closer to home, more radically, and more widely. Rape and any other form of violence are a show of ownership and control of power. Unless we question this ownership and control, things won’t change. The struggle has to be a sustained one, with each one of us, fighting against all forms of oppression in relations, marriages, families, on the street, at work place, in the market and in schools and universities.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure a lot of you people genuinely empathize and would be enraged by my cynicism. To them, I apologize. My problem is with hypocrisy and lip service to the situation. I need to ask the men reading this have you never wolf whistled, talked about a woman’s breasts, passed lewd remarks and expressed moral outrage on shortening length of skirts. Dear all, so righteously angry and demanding death penalty for the six men stop being hypocritical. Rape is a societal phenomenon that goes beyond the more visible and daily forms of violence. One doesn’t always need to be in the hospital on the ventilator to feel the pain and violation of oneself. It is not a law and order problem, the problem lies within us.
Discussions on rights of women surface only when an incident of rape or molestation comes to fore. However we women are dehumanized as sexual objects every single day in Indian society. Movies, daily soaps, advertisements contribute much to show what we think about women. This is not merely about a sick mentality but is deeply reflective of the unequal power relation women share vis a vis men. And this unequal relation begins at home, in family- an extremely patriarchal institution. We don’t need protection, we need power. One needs to reject notions such as those advocated by Mrs. Sushma Swaraj who called the victim if she survives a ‘walking corpse’ rather than being a normal, strong willed woman. We need, firstly, is to get rid of the social stigma that comes attached with rape. As a society, what we need is to provide women with a guarantee that rape shall no longer be something that rips them of their right to be normal, to live. We need to stress the continuum between people who rape, people who judge those who get raped, and people who try to protect the women in their lives from getting raped by imposing structures of control. One needs to look at the larger issue of systemic social reform for gender equality to prevail at all levels. The need is to address the daily insidious patriarchy that produces rapists as they are embedded in the very body of our society. We must educate people, starting at the school level, about respect for women, for personal spaces and for the rule of law. We need to introspect, all of us, on how we contribute to the objectification of women, from the popular culture we consume to the way we bring up our children. Boys and men are raised in our society to think that we are men because we demand, we take, we win, and we conquer. We cannot legislate good behaviour, as the saying goes, we have to build its DNA – in schools, in homes, in public spaces, in our media – that must begin by refusing, unlearning and denying this entitlement to violence as a way to be “men.” I don’t think what is needed is an increase in punishment or in the speed of trial. What is required is a systemic change. Rape is a way of subjugating women and an attempt to establish superiority through violence. Men have not been able to accept that they need to respect women. We need to ensure women as individuals have a right to make choices for themselves, whether regarding clothing or which time to go out or whom to marry. So the next time, don’t laugh at a sexist joke, don’t follow rituals that are purely patriarchal, don’t stare at a woman anywhere, don’t parade your sexual encounters in public, don’t defend offensive rap songs ,don’t use profanities including women and don’t stereotype feminity . Sexism, chauvinism and patriarchy violate the rights of women. Rape is only one such form of violation. Don’t make rape the only issue and get away with everything else.
(The author is M. Phil student, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
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