Gang - Rape a crime against the soul

 “Don’t tell me how to dress. Tell them not to rape!”

Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored.

If we take honor out of the equation, rape will still be horrible, but it will be a personal, and not a societal, horror. We will be able to give women who have been assaulted what they truly need: not a load of rubbish about how they should feel guilty or ashamed, but empathy for going through a terrible trauma.

The law has to provide real penalties for rapists and protection for victims, but only families and communities can provide this empathy and support. How will a teenager participate in the prosecution of her rapist if her family isn’t behind her? How will a wife charge her assailant if her husband thinks the attack was more of an affront to him than a violation of her?

This is where our work lies, with those of us who are raising the next generation. It lies in teaching our sons and daughters to become liberated, respectful adults who know that men who hurt women are making a choice, and will be punished.

More than two months after December 16 Delhi gangrape case, the Standing Committee on Home, which adopted its report on the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2012 agreed to replace the word 'rape' with 'sexual assault'.

A Parliamentary committee examining a bill seeking to enhance punishment for crimes against women on Tuesday recommended death sentence for rapists in case the victim dies or is left in a vegetative state.

However, despite suggestions by several members, the committee decided against recommending a relook at the age of juveniles as the Home Ministry said the Women and Child Development Ministry was examining the matter.

In a hilarious article published in The Citizen Julie Masiga in an article writes:

“A Saudi Arabian cleric has issued a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling) that all female newborns in the Kingdom should wear a full-face veil.

Speaking to al-Majd TV last year, Sheikh Addullah Daoud said that the burkas would stop incidences of baby molestation.

In the interview that has just come to light, the cleric supported his views by claiming that babies in the Kingdom were being sexually assaulted.

So, babies are inciting men to sexual violence now? Babies, who can’t walk or talk, are somehow stirring up uncontrollable feelings of lust in adult males?

Someone stand up and hand me a bunch of bricks. The idea that men must be protected from the allure of the female form has been officially pushed to its limits.

It is that kind of thinking that has led to some of the most heinous crimes against women – the idea that a woman’s body is an object that must be shielded from the roving eyes of men, or else.

It is an impossible task to prevent the mind of a man from contemplating a violent sexual act and yet, when we ‘fail’ to do that, somehow it becomes our fault.

Because for a man to attack a woman sexually, obviously she must have done something to provoke him. In the face of her sexuality, he is as defenseless as a baby.

The logical end for this twisted argument therefore, is that men are absolved of blame and women are burdened with shame.”

http://thecitizen.co.tz/editorial-analysis/-/28895--tell-them-not-to-rape

  

In the aftermath of the gruesome attack, an Indian self appointed spiritual leader quickly played the ‘women-must-take-responsibility’ card. “Guilt is not one-sided,” guru Asaram Bapu told followers. He argued that the girl was culpable for the viciousness of the attack because she resisted instead of asking for mercy. “She should have chanted God’s name and fallen at the feet of the attackers,” he said. Such "sexist" and "misogynic" remarks from the political class, Asaram's statement infuriated the activists for whom he had so far been a distant figure. The so-called guru, hardly a stranger to controversies, had said that the victim of the Delhi gang-rape could have saved herself by addressing her violators as bhaiyya and beseeching for mercy.

This was the most shameful stance any man / male could take and am ashamed to say I belong to this society where the blame of such a heinous crime lay squarely on the shoulders of the victim and not the criminal.

AIDWA's Sudha Sundaraman condemned the godman's statement terming it as injustice of the worst kind and advocating strong punishment against leaders making irresponsible statements. “The statements made are highly objectionable, regressive and anti-women. Such people should be called to question. This is further victimization of  the victim.”

The strong sentiment was echoed by the Centre for Social Research's Ranjana Kumari who said that such "irresponsible and ridiculous statements were responsible for encouraging rapists." "Such people should be socially boycotted. It is these people who are responsible in society for creating misogynist values," she said.

Activist lawyer Vrinda Grover was also outraged  contending that Asaram Bapu was far removed from the reality, and represented those who were scared of women empowerment. "What he is saying is that women must beg for her life and not fight back. Reports said that the victim expressed a will to live. That is a huge paradigm shift from those victims of sexual assault who would like to kill themselves out of shame. People like him are scared that women are now asserting themselves," she said.

Social scientist Imitaz Ahmad also reacted angrily to the Asaram's utterances. "The Delhi rape case has become an occasion for whosoever to say whatever they feel like. A rapist is not going to go into the niceties of the act. Nor by calling him brother will stop him in the act. Somewhere deep down there's a moral, ethical and social decay in our society. We need to re-think our moral structures and values if we want to get over this".

Reacting in a similar vein, Ayesha Kidwai, an academic, said: "The statement is appalling. The thing we have to understand about competitive sexism as evident from such statements of religious leaders is that they are uncomfortable with the questions women have raised recently. What he has said goes beyond sexual assault; it is a tawdry attempt at putting the blame back on the victim.

Lawyer Kirti Singh said, “It is obvious the way they treated the victim that the rapists did not have any human consideration. It was a sexual assault of the worst kind with brutal beatings. You do get these kind of statements on a victim's conduct or clothing. But this one is really far-fetched."

Lawyer Manohar Lal Sharma has taken up the case on behalf of 3 of the rapists and with his outlandish statements, seems to be giving a lesson to everybody on how to defend the Delhi gang-rape accused. According to Sharma the confessions / statements were given under duress and police brutality and sodomisation. Sharma had caused controversy with his remarks that the girl's male friend was responsible for the "whole thing". "The boyfriend betrayed her, he is responsible for the whole thing", he said. In an interview with Bloomberg, Sharma was quoted as saying the male companion of the murdered 23-year-old was “wholly responsible” for the incident because the unmarried couple should not have been on the streets at night. “Until today I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,” he told the financial newswire. But he backed away from this controversial statement a few hours later.

More than two months after December 16 Delhi gangrape case, the Standing Committee on Home, which adopted its report on the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2012 agreed to replace the word 'rape' with 'sexual assault'.

A Parliamentary committee examining a bill seeking to enhance punishment for crimes against women on Tuesday recommended death sentence for rapists in case the victim dies or is left in a vegetative state.

However, despite suggestions by several members, the committee decided against recommending a relook at the age of juveniles as the Home Ministry said the Women and Child Development Ministry was examining the matter.

The bill introduced in Lok Sabha last December will be withdrawn to make way for a fresh bill in the ongoing Budget session of Parliament. The new bill will replace the Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance promulgated earlier this month.

Notwithstanding the ordinance, the committee decided to study the bill and give its recommendations on a fast track basis so that these can be incorporated in the fresh bill.

Besides the 2012 bill, the panel had examined the Justice J S Verma Committee recommendations and the ordinance before making recommendations.

In a fresh incident Three sisters aged between six and eleven were raped, murdered and their bodies dumped in a well by an attacker In India who lured them with food.

The girls, whose mother is a poor, widowed domestic servant, were last seen outside a cheap roadside café selling rice and dahl, and may have decided to follow their killer because they were hungry. The case has provoked fresh outrage in India which has seen a sharp increase in rape and sexual violence cases reported since the gang-rape and murder of a Delhi student on a moving bus in December. Villagers in Maharashtra state protested over the failure of the police to act after the girls' grandfather reported them missing last week.

When the police found the three girls' bodies on Saturday in a well near Murmadi, two miles from their home in Lakhni village, they initially recorded their deaths as "accidental". An autopsy later confirmed the girls, aged six, nine and eleven, had all been sexually assaulted, while the cause of death has not yet been established. There were no signs of external injuries, police said.

In his address to the nation on the 64th Republic Day the President, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee said in his address to the nation that the Delhi gang – rape incident has left our hearts empty and our minds in turmoil. He further said that “When we brutalise a woman, we brutalise society.”

The President also had words of support for the young protesters who took to the streets in large numbers after the shocking incident. 

"If young Indians feel outraged, can we blame our youth?" he asked in his address. 

A 1996 survey of Indian judges revealed that 68 per cent of them believed that “provocative attire was an invitation to rape” and 55 per cent felt that the “moral character of the victim” was relevant. In 2013, India’s rape conviction rate is just 26 per cent and only 7 per cent of police officers are women.

Last year at about the same time when the Delhi rape occurred, Swaziland applied a law that is more than 100-years old to ban Swazi women from wearing clothes that revealed either their stomachs, or other “sexually explicit parts” of the female body.

Speaking to journalists in Mbabane, police spokeswoman Wendy Hleta said she was clamping down on “immoral” dressing.

“The act of the rapist is made easy because it would be easy to remove the half-cloth (sic) worn by the women. Women who wear skimpy clothing draw unnecessary attention to themselves. We are not encouraging the harming of women. However, people should not accept such conduct of behaviour,” the spokeswoman said, adding that women who broke the law would face up to six months in jail.

It is unsettling that some women have bought into this blatant male propaganda that men cannot control their sexual impulses and therefore, women must protect them from themselves.

The idea might be to blame women for being immoral, but when men attack babies, what does that make them? If we refuse to assign blame, it makes them weak. And if we do, it makes them monsters.

At the end of the day, it has little to do with women themselves. As one of the placards held by protesters in Delhi read: “Don’t tell me how to dress. Tell them not to rape!”