In December 2012, a 23-year-old woman named Jyoti Singh was raped and murdered by six men in Delhi. This incident sparked nationwide protests, which held the government accountable for lack of women’s safety in the country. The victim was called “Nirbhaya”, meaning fearless and the case was popularly referred to as the Nirbhaya case. This incident was widely covered by both national and international press, and brought the debate of sexual violence against women in India to surface.
In light of this case, Delhi was hailed the “rape capital of the world” by the international media, which continues to use the title when reporting sexual violence in India. While this might have seemed unjust—especially to someone like me, a woman born and brought up in Delhi—the statistics also reflected this sad reality. It was reported that more than five women were raped in Delhi in the first four months of 2018 (The Hindustan Times, 2018). According to the data from the Delhi Police, until April 15, 2018, a total of 578 rape cases had been reported in the city. This is despite the massive protests after the Delhi gang-rape case, where the public demanded stricter laws, better treatment of victims by the police, a faster criminal justice process and awareness regarding victim blaming and stigma surrounding sexual violence in India. According to the latest statistics, a woman is raped in India every 13 minutes, which means by the time you will be done reading this article, someone around the country would have already been raped.
The coming week will mark Nirbhaya’s seventh death anniversary, and with the recent gang-rape of a 26-year-old woman in Hyderabad, there is no better time to ask who do we blame for India’s rape epidemic?
When approaching the subject of criminality, the easiest way to look at criminals is from the hero and villain perspective, wherein criminals are simply the quintessential ‘bad guys’. The idea of a criminal brings to mind someone who is essentially flawed with a deviant nature. It helps create the idea of ‘us’, the law-abiding do-gooders, and ‘them’, the wicked lot, and through this division individuals (in the ‘us’ group) also find an easy way to blame all that is wrong in the society on ‘them’ without having to ever look inwards. This was seen during the nationwide protests after the Delhi gang-rape case, with politicians and authorities labelling the rapists as “monsters” who, according to them, did not represent the majority of the Indian populace.
It is important to identify the core elements that have shaped the collective attitudes of our society, which these men are also a part of. Societal attitudes towards women play a significant role in the perpetration of violence against women and how society responds to such acts. Before I discuss certain themes emerging from my research with more than a hundred convicted rapists in Delhi’s Tihar Jail, I want you take a look at some of these statements:
“She has two children, and so far as I know, she is separated from her husband; what was she doing at a nightclub so late at night?”
“A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night.”
“Women should take their brothers or drivers along if they want to be out late at night.”
“She had a questionable character, she was too mature for her age and dressed inappropriately.”
“Fashionable dresses worn by women, even in rural areas, are among the factors leading to an increase in rape cases. The police have no control over this matter”
Now here they are again, but this time you can see who made such remarks.
“She has two children, and so far as I know, she is separated from her husband; what was she doing at a nightclub so late at night?”
—Former sports minister of West Bengal
“A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night.”
—Mukesh Singh, Nirbhaya rapist
“Women should take their brothers or drivers along if they want to be out late at night.”
—Former commissioner of police, Delhi
“She had a questionable character, she was too mature for her age and dressed inappropriately.”
—A convicted rapist in Tihar Jail (my research participant)
“Fashionable dresses worn by women, even in rural areas, are among the factors leading to an increase in rape cases. The police have no control over this matter.”
—Former director general of police, Andhra Pradesh
Could you have differentiated the rapists’ comments from the others? Possibly NO.
Have you had the chance of meeting or knowing someone in your own life who has held similar thoughts? Possibly YES.
And that is exactly what I found through my research with convicted rapists in India over the past four years—that these are not monsters, they are ordinary men coming from our very own society. There is a widespread perception that rapists as a group have more traditional and oppressive attitudes towards women. But are these men, in fact, as exclusive and rare in their thinking about women as we tend to think?
In order to answer this question, I compared a sample of convicted rapists with convicted murderers. I found that there were no significant differences in murderers' and rapists’ attitudes towards women. Gender was socialised in a similar way by both groups of offenders and some of the factors that played a role in the gender socialisation process are actually quite well known to us. For instance, domestic division of labour—observing parents and their respective domestic duties or cultural archetypes of femininity, role models of ideal womanhood emerging from our cultural epics. I recall how while dealing with a case of divorce a division bench of Justices P.B. Majmudar and Anoop Mohta said that, “A wife should be like goddess Sita who left everything and followed her husband Lord Rama to a forest and stayed there for 14 years.” (The Times of India, 2015). In the UK, in one of her interviews with BBC’s The One show in May 2017, when asked about the division of chores at home, former prime minister Theresa May replied, “There’s boy jobs and girl jobs, you see.” Her husband, Philip May, then added, “I definitely do the taking the bins out, I do the traditional boy jobs by and large”. Similarly, in 2017, the chief of the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Mohan Bhagwat, said that the place of women was in the kitchen. Why do we get offended when rapists use these cultural nuances to justify their crimes or blame the victim when similar views are also expressed by powerful individuals and leaders of our country?
Denial features quite prominently in the narratives of sex offenders all around the world, and it was not unusual that almost all rapists in my research maintained that they were not guilty. So, this was the first common theme in all the interviews of the rapists—‘lack of acceptance of responsibility’. The second was ‘sense of entitlement’—all the interviews highlighted male entitlement, which is a common feature of any patriarchal society where male members from a very young age not only get access to privileges but also learn to demand these. In this context, it was entitlement to sex.
Then there was victim blaming, which is a core part of what is called “rape myths”. These are false stereotypical cultural beliefs that mainly serve the purpose of shifting the blame from perpetrators to victims. And finally, there was confusion with consent. Most rapists had either not sought consent from the victim or had misunderstood consent. Again, this was not surprising as in our country, sex remains a taboo. So if you are not going to talk about sex, how can you address sexual consent and sexual violence?
Playing the blame game will get us nowhere. It is important to make systematic structural changes that address everyday normalised misogynistic attitudes in order to make our country a safer place for women. Historically created and culturally defined traditional gender roles in India have led to the formation of negative and oppressive societal attitudes towards women which continue to persist till today. This socially sanctioned and normalised female oppression in India allows rapists to justify and minimise their sexual offending, evade responsibility and blame the victim. And that is why the issue of sexual violence in India needs a strong call to action which must, first and foremost, include changing mindsets.
Dr Pandey teaches criminology at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, Department of Law and Criminology, Sheffield Hallam University, UK.