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March 5, 2018

Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators


The document Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators is divided into four main parts: women as victims of violence; women as perpetrators of violence; governance, violence and agency; and theorising violence and agency. Here I will try to present some notable features of this book and also explore its possible relevance to Indian society.

It may be noted that in today’s society, rape culture significantly compromises a woman’s autonomy, even when an actual incident of rape doesn’t take place. Due to rise in number of reported cases, women live in a constant fear. Despite having stringent laws and an apparently vigilant administration, rapes do happen.
The act of rape, by its very nature, damages the victim’s autonomy since it violates her bodily integrity and disrupts her sense of ownership over her actions and decisions. Being raped can also dramatically alter the agent’s psychological life, interpersonal relationships and identity.
Also rape shatters the victim’s assumptions about the personal safety that her society offers. Often the victim ends up with a total lack of trust in others. This adversely affects her ability to make independent decisions. The damage takes years to heal. However, whether it will heal at all depends on a number of external circumstances. The autonomy is ‘shaped by complex, intersecting social determinants and constituted in the context of interpersonal relationships’ (Mackenzie and Poltera 2010, 48) that being autonomous depends on socially supportive ‘relations and recognition’. Autonomy is acquired over years and years of social existence. A rape entirely changes the course of one’s life. Once it happens, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to regain the level of autonomy that one used to exercise.

It is observed that the society, in a knee-jerk reaction, responded to rape culture by first, enacting stricter laws and secondly by promoting self-defence training for young women. Though apparently these steps bravely address the issue, in truth they are only making the solution more distant and difficult to achieve. In India, the Nirbhaya incident brought about protests and marches that tickled the lawmakers into enacting some more laws. Not that there was no law before to address the rape culture. Though the response of the Government was quite natural, but what it did best was it addressed neither the prevention nor cure. Perhaps the laws were meant to be a deterrent, but even the conservative statistics shows today that they had little or no effect on the prevailing rape culture. Over the last few years the fear or rape among the women only increased.
An upshot of rape culture is that women’s fear of rape can result in a loss of ‘self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem; nightmares and other sleep disorders; distrust and suspicion of strangers and acquaintances; chronic anxiety, stress, and depress; inability to live alone (where that is desired); and increased dependence on men for protections, which in turn undermines self-respect and self-confidence’.
The main objection against the introduction of self-defence training is that, it conveniently shifts the responsibility from the perpetrators to the victims. The directly result of rape culture is that it threatens the autonomy of women. During the self-defence training programs attempts are made to focus on re-educating and resocializing women in ways to equip them to resist rape where this inadvertently holds them responsible for mitigating the risk of rape. Also there seems to be an underlying belief that rapes can be avoided from initiatives on the part of the women. The onus of the responsibility is primarily on women and not on men. In South Africa, self-defence courses formed part of the extracurricular activity during high school.
South Africa has ‘higher levels of rape of women and children than anywhere else in the world not at war’ (Moffett 2006, 129).
It didn’t help them, and there’s hardly any possibility that it will help us. Focusing on self-defence training is like treating a symptom of the problem instead of curing the problem itself.

“I can’t even think of taking public transport after 9 O’ Clock,” says a young student in aninterview with Guardian. Even though six years have passed since the brutal rape of 23 year old Nirbhaya, women in India still feel unsafe. In the same interview a martial art teacher says that behind the back of their mind, parents are worried what will happen to their daughters out on the street. A mother, whose daughter is learning Karate, says she feels more confident now that her daughter can take care of her in the face of danger. Some of those interviewed though felt bit sceptical about this whole self-defence thing, because they think, “Asking women to keep themselves safe is a way problematic narrative because you’re keeping the onus of safety on women.” “You are trying to tell rest of the society – men and boys – you can continue doing what you want to do but girls should protect themselves,” says another interviewee.

What followed the Nirbhaya case, as a direct result of a nation-wide protest, was some tinkering with the laws. The maximum punishment of rape became death penalty instead of life imprisonment. Surprisingly that was all what the protestors had demanded for. However, the lawmakers decided not to touch the issue of marital rape as they thought that may destabilize the institution of marriage. They also refused to try military personnel accused of sexual offences under criminal law. However, for the time being, everyone seemed appeased, if not satisfied. And after six years had passed most of us forgot all about it.

On 1st Feb, 2018, the Centre, according to a report published in Times of India, told the Supreme Court that it was not in favour of amending laws to provide for death penalty to those found guilty of sexual assaults on infants and children.

However apparently the people were already way too dissatisfied with the way things were being handled. In Jharkhand, Ratan Lohar, a man convicted in a rape case, was out on bail. He went to Ram Dadaiya slum where he had created terror earlier. There were some altercations between him and the locals. A group of people lynched him (Hindustan Times, Mar 03, 2018). On 19th Feb, 2018, about 1,000 men gathered in front of a police station in Arunachal Pradesh and demanded that two inmates be handed over two them. The two suspects were charged of raping and murdering a five year old girl whose decapitated body had been found in a tea garden on 12th Feb. They lynched the suspects (Sky News, 21st Feb, 2018). Terribly unfortunate as these incidents were, they only showed how little faith people had in our legal system.

What the Government, the activists and the protestors together failed to eliminate was the rigid patriarchal mindset of our society. Most of us will naturally resist any change to that, because directly or indirectly most men benefit from this system. The police are particularly well positioned to provide assistance, but very often because of their own prejudice and lack of training and reluctance to intervene (especially when there’s caste or communal politics involved) they often display a dismissive attitude. The majority of cases of sexual assault and battery end up in one or the other health care facilities. Medical system and its personnel, though well placed to identify signs of abuses, often choose not to intervene. Then there are religious outfits who suggest women should be subservient, patient despite high emotional and physical cost to themselves. They often play a major role in unjustly placing the burden on the victim. All these people contribute heavily to the prevailing rape culture.

Now we’ll examine some of the remarks that came from various classes of our society. Recently Snehlata Shankwar, a biology teacher from Raipur’s Kendriya Vidyalaya warned the girls against wearing lipstick and wearing jeans. She said,
“Girls expose their body only when they don’t have beautiful faces. Girls have become so shameless, why did Nirbhaya go out so late at night with a boy who wasn’t her husband? It’s difficult to understand why an issue was made of this. Such incidents happen with girls in remote areas frequently. Nirbhaya’s mother shouldn’t have allowed her go out so late at night.”Source: Times Now, Jan 30, 2018
Just about a year after the Nirbhaya incident, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley commented at a tourism minister’s conference,
“One small incident of rape in Delhi advertised world over is enough to cost us billions of dollars in terms of global tourism.”Source: NDTV, Aug 22, 2014
On 18th August, 2015, Mulayam Singh Yadav shared his doubts on the feasibility of gang-rape,
“Four people are named for rape, can it be possible? It is not practical.”Source: Catch News, 14 Feb, 2017
Earlier in April 2014 he had shared another of his precious reflections on the misuse of rape laws,
“Boys make mistake. They should not hang for this. We will revoke the anti-rape laws.”Source: Catch News, 14 Feb, 2017
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee also joined the controversy with a highly regressive comment on Nirbhaya gang-rape case,
“Earlier, if men and women would hold hands, they would get caught by parents and reprimanded but now everything is so open. It’s like an open market with open options. Rapes happen because men and women interact freely.”Source: Catch News, 14 Feb, 2017
But what topped them was probably the statement made by a god man called Asaram Bapu, who, during that time had around 7 crores followers. Immediately after the incident he commented,
"She should have taken God's name and could have held the hand of one of the men and said I consider you as my brother and should have said to the other two, brother I am helpless, you are my brother, my religious brother. She should have taken God's name and held their hands and feet...then the misconduct wouldn't have happened."Source: Times of India, Jan 8, 2013
This is eerily similar to the statement given by Mukesh Singh, one of the accused in Nirbhaya Case, in his interview given to BBC’s Storyville documentary crew.
"A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night," he told the BBC. "A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes."Source: CNN, Mar 4, 2015
Singh, who showed no remorse and merely dubbed the incident as an accident, suggested that they "had a right to teach them a lesson."

All this points to a deeply entrenched patriarchal mindset that is too ugly to even look at. The psyche is so deep rooted that today it is passively supported even by the women who are the primary target of it. The great books that we hold so sacred reek of sexual oppression. In one of those epics, a royal princess, as a result of a pre-marital sex – that was possibly forced – gives birth to a son. An effort to suppress the incident was immediately made by calling the boy ‘a gift from the sun-god’. To emphasise it, the boy was even named accordingly. Another princess, after she got married to discover only to her shock that she now had to sexually satisfy not only her husband but also her four brothers-in-law. No one asked for her consent. In another book, a woman was brutally assaulted when she proposed to one of the hero’s brother. Her fault, she was a Dravidian, therefore too inferior to court an Aryan prince. In the same epic a princess was thrown into fire time and again to prove her loyalty to her husband. She did it without uttering a word of protest, let alone landing a tight slap on his royal cheek – something that he actually deserved.

These are some of the values that were injected in us from early childhood. The founder of every major religion is essentially a patriarch who had also showed his acumen in devising elaborate plan to exploit and enslave women. One among them even went as far as instructing how to treat women who belonged to a different religion – a process that is now perfectedand widely implemented by ISIS soldiers.

Now back to the book Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators.
... the prevalence of oppressive gender norms: norms which restrict women’s movements, the contact they have with each other and with other men, and limit opportunities for self-sufficiency.
The autonomy of women is hindered by oppressive gender norms, such as ‘women ought not to dishonour their families’, ‘women’s value is dependent upon their reproductive capacities,’ etc. All this somehow limits the role of women to two tasks – child bearing and sexually satisfying the husband. The relation of pornography to patriarchy is the backbone of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, where its relation to patriarchy has been widely discussed. Pornography offers ‘a model of how to do sex.’ But men also learn about women and sex from pornography that somehow sends the message that women enjoy being subjugated and abused. Often the focus shifts from mutual pleasure to violence. However, pornography is not the sole contributor when it comes to commercialisation of female body. Haven’t we seen the TV commercials that imply to gain access to a woman all you need is a certain shaving cream, or a certain perfume? And with the invasion of social media nothing is private anymore – not even female sexuality.

The authors of Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators believe that promoting sex education can make a great difference.
... need to educate young men about consent in terms of communicative sexuality and to emphasis mutual pleasure in sexual encounters. This is one way of ensuring that men treat women as equal partners, with their own desires and needs that ought to be respected.
This could be more useful than teaching young women self-defence, because this will address the root of the problem. There already exists such a system in India, though the methods should be improved. There are people who actively campaign against the system.
"Sex education in schools need to be replaced by yoga education," Ramdev also told reporters. "The government should stop polluting the minds of innocent young children with sex education. Society's morality cannot improve with teaching sex education in schools. And AIDS cannot be prevented by talking free sex and by using condoms."Source: Rediff News, Nov 20, 2014
Prejudiced remarks like these should be countered with criticism. Logic should replace superstitions. Celebrities play important role in enhancing/diminishing the patriarchy. Harvey Weinstein, who was accused of impropriety by more than 100 women, recently made a public statement saying a woman having sex with a Hollywood producer to advance her career is “not rape” (Times of India, Mar 3, 2018). A patriarchal society deeply impairs our value judgement and men who remain indifferent to this are also complicit.

Not long before I wrote this post, a minor girl had immolated herself in Jharkhand’s Chatra District, shortly after she was raped by a man on 22nd Feb, 2018 (Hindustan Times, Feb 24, 2018). It was when she went out of home to answer nature’s call, said the report, that she was raped. There is a vast difference in life of the victim before and after a rape takes place. It is much worsened by the fact that most of the rapes are done by people known to the victim. It proves to the victim that the illusion of safety that the society had offered was an illusion after all. Some are strong enough to cope while to some it is a pain too intense to bear. Not every incident is reported. There are police officers and lawyers who can make rape victim feel like the rape was somehow their fault and the family members of a community whose attitude about bringing shame on the family or community often silence them and every time it happens we lose yet another battle with rape culture.


Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators
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Pornography Men Possessing Women
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