A real man never hurts a woman. Be very careful when you make a woman cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man’s rib, not from his feet to be walked on, and not from his head to be superior, but from his side to be equal. Under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved.
We live in a culture where we are taught that we have choices about our lives and that we’re responsible for what happens to us. “If you are beaten, you’re said to have incited it, if you’re raped you’re said to have invited it. We all know that these things run very deep in the culture.”
“From the time a child is very, very small, we’re teaching that they’re responsible for the things that happen in their life both positive and negative”. So when a rape situation occurs, usually what I see going through a victim’s mind is what did I do that was wrong.”
It’s not only the victim who blames herself. Society is quick to blame her as well. “Even the innocence of children is questioned”. Often times I have sat with a police officer or a client and have heard that a four-year-old girl was responsible for seducing her perpetrator who was an adult. Now what are we saying? What we’re saying is that we don’t know how to take responsibility as a society. Therefore, we will continue to blame the victim.
Rape is a devastating crime. Some women are badly injured. Some become pregnant. Some contract HIV. But the emotional trauma can be worse than any physical injury. Women who are raped have nightmares, panic attacks, waves of self-doubt, an overwhelming sense of distrust. The lives of women who are raped are forever changed. Some say they will never be the same and really recover from their situation. The impact will always be with them.
Violence is a male tactic. General presumption to get the simplest perspective on it, male use violence to control females and they do it very often and they control those females for sexual reasons. It’s done in every species. “Males often grow up and realize that the way to get what they want is through aggressive means.” They just want somebody to vent their anger out on. I think sex is part of it. I think it’s a vehicle for their aggression. Power and control is used as an instrument to accomplish a sexual event with an unwilling victim. And to leave out that sexual event is to completely forget what the crime was, which was a copulation was stolen from a woman against her will.
It is troubling enough that such a small proportion of reported rapes make it to court, worse still that so few victims come forward in the first place. But most disturbing of all is the reason why so many people keep their suffering to themselves: because they do not think they will be believed. That rape is still a dirty secret, hedged about with so much blame and shame that victims feel they cannot come forward, is testament to how far we still have to go.
There are, of course, great legal difficulties in rape trials. Sexual assault is one of the few crimes where proof lies not in the physical facts of the matter, but in the subjective intentions of those involved. One person’s word against another’s, with no corroborating witnesses, is highly problematic for a legal system predicated on the concepts of innocent until proven guilty and proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Most rapists are never caught, and conviction rates for those apprehended are notoriously low. Even more troubling is that the average sex offender may commit hundreds of crimes in his lifetime, which means that the vast majority of rapes go undetected and unpunished.
This is no call for the wholesale abandonment of basic tenets of justice. But simply to shrug our collective shoulders, blame intractable issues of principle, and thereby leave a swathe of victims of violent assault with insufficient legal protection cannot be acceptable in what purports to be a civilised society.
In fairness, there has been significant progress in terms of institutional procedures. In many areas of the country, for example, there are now specially trained police officers and court prosecutors for cases of sexual assault. But uneven regional conviction rates only underline the extent to which such practices remain an optional extra rather than standard.
Equally, although victims no longer face the prospect of being cross-questioned by their attacker in court, pursuing a case to trial remains a horrifying ordeal. As a witness for the prosecution, the victim has no legal support, and faces intensely personal questioning from defence lawyers, often while face-to-face with their rapist for the first time since the assault. Even within the framework of innocent until proven guilty, there is more that can be done to ease the burden on victims, not least allowing them legal representation in court.
But the shortcomings of our institutions are merely part and parcel of a wider cultural understanding of rape that still militates against justice. It is that culture that must change if victims are to be encouraged to speak up.
Part of the problem is the myth that rape is primarily a threat on the streets at night. Farfrom it. In fact, rape rarely occurs in the proverbial dark alley. The truth is both more banal, and more appalling, two-thirds of victims know their attacker, and assaults commonly take place in the home of either the victim or the rapist. Perpetrators rely on shame to keep their crime secret. Too often they are proved right. And if the conspiracy of silence is a problem for women who are raped, it is even worse for men.
(The author is a practicing lawyer in South Goa)
