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OPINION » COLUMNS » KALPANA SHARMA

January 5, 2013

THE OTHER HALF

KALPANA SHARMA

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When people come together.... Photo: R.V. Moorthy

TOPICS

 The fight against rapecrimesexual assault & rape
social issue

Hope lies in the fact that even if the rulers are deaf and have lost the ability to speak words with meaning, the people have found a voice.

Since December 16, a day that is now seared in national consciousness, and December 29, when many of us felt we had lost a member of our own family, millions of words have been spoken and written on rape, on sexual assault, on women’s safety, on the attitude of Indian men. Thousands of young women and men have come out on the streets to demonstrate their anguish at the absence of justice for Indian women. Passion, anger, rhetoric, argument, posturing, empty promises, brute force — we have seen it all in this fortnight.

The despair at the State’s silence is justifiable. But the hope lies in the fact that even if the rulers are deaf and have lost the ability to speak words with meaning, the people have found a voice. Never before has the issue of violence against women been such a dominant topic of discussion.

Even in the 1970s, when the then nascent autonomous women’s movement launched its campaign to change rape laws following the custodial rape of a young tribal girl, Mathura, by two policemen in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, the response was tepid compared to what we have seen today. This was not just because the issue was rape of a tribal girl, far removed from our urban sensibilities or that the perceived levels of violence on the streets in the cities were lower than they are today. The absence of 24-hour television to amplify the protests could have contributed.

I believe the real reason was that most people would not accept that women’s rights are human rights. There are many in this country who still refuse to acknowledge this. Yet, thanks to the determined campaigns by women’s movements across the country, there is a break in this wall. Laws have been amended. Women are more visible in decision-making positions although nowhere near what is needed. And most importantly, a generation of young women has grown up believing that they are entitled to the same rights as men. While our generation, the mothers, sometimes chose to keep quiet and tolerate, this generation, our daughters, will not. They want their voices to be heard, they have better and more effective media with which to make their views known, and they firmly believe that in a free country they should not be denied these rights. That is the change we witnessed when we saw thousands of angry and determined young women holding placards, facing water cannons, suffering the lashes of the police lathi. It is something that cannot and will not be easily reversed. The silent rulers sitting in their soundproof offices in Delhi need to recognise this.

On a personal note, I saw this change in the response to my last column “What’s wrong with Indian men?” (Sunday Magazine, December 23).

In the past, whenever I have touched on the subject of violence against women, I receive at least a dozen vituperative emails from men berating me for being a “feminist” (which I am proud to declare that I am) and generally ticking me off for not understanding the “plight” of Indian men.

This time, I received almost 70 emails, the majority of them from men, most of them quite long and thoughtful. Space does not permit me to quote from some of these submissions but it was evident that every one of them had thought hard about what needed to change in the attitudes of men to prevent occurrences like the one that triggered the current outrage. The one I quote below reflects some of the sentiments expressed:

“I write not only as a 21-year-old man of young India, rather more as a man of the concerned India. Witnessing the recent events that have shook the nation, I’m only left with the option of asking myself, where is Our India? I was a part of the protests that took place at India Gate. I saw things change in a matter of minutes. We were not a part of any group or political organization; we were just a spontaneous gathering of young citizens of India asking about our rights and questioning the people in power. I would also like to make a point that not all the people were actually concerned on this sensitive issue. But then, where do these things end? Will they end by bringing in tougher laws, or making public speeches assuring that ‘someday’ things will change? I have now started doubting the future of my nation. We have to go beyond the social barriers that have hindered the growth of our society for the past many decades. Has our country fallen so deep that a rape case is needed to awaken us?

We proudly call ourselves the largest democracy in the world, but I think we all know what the reality is. In this male chauvinist and egoistic society I am ashamed to call myself a man. Our country is in a dire need of a revolution which not only changes people in power, rather their thinking. One after which the men of our society at least start respecting the wombs from which they are born. But the question still remains, HOW?”

This young man’s views reflect the churning that has begun. For it to continue, we have to move beyond slogans to working out the concrete steps that must be taken — making the criminal justice system more responsive, changing the sexist attitudes among politicians, in the media, in our school texts, in our films, at our work places and refusing to give up fighting for change, even within the confines of our inefficient and limited democracy.

(To read the original, click here)

Adding to the victim's trauma

The Hoot, December 28, 2012

We have to question the media’s thirst for every detail about this woman’s condition, their invasion of privacy. Was it really necessary for the doctors to give out a daily health bulletin on live television, asks KALPANA SHARMA.

Posted/Updated Friday, Dec 28 11:05:21, 2012

SECOND TAKE
Kalpana Sharma

“It’s like the life we have never existed … every day now passes in a flash”.  This was the headline in the Indian Express on December 25, 2012.  And it is a quote from the younger brother of the 23-year-old survivor of the heinous gang rape that took place on a Delhi whiteline bus on December 16, 2012. 

Since then there have been thousands of words spoken on television and written in the print media, scores of slogans shouted on the streets, especially in Delhi, by women and men, many of them young.  There is justifiable anger and anguish over what this one rape, among the daily occurrence of sexual assaults all over India, represents for the future of Indian women, not just their safety but also their lives as free individuals in a free country.

Yet in the middle of all the noise and slogans many people, including the media, appear to have forgotten that the story is also about an individual and her family, and their right to have some privacy.  The Indian Express story was an essential reality check, a reminder of how things could be, or should be, when such terrible things happen.

Put yourself in the shoes of the 19-year-old brother of this woman.  She is constantly described as a “victim”.  While she certainly was the victim of a horrendous crime, surely the more accurate description is to call her a “survivor”.  This might be just another term, but it places everything in a different perspective.

Amongst the many articles that have been written and circulated in the last 10 days, one that raised a pertinent point appeared in the American feminist journal “Off our backs”.  In the article “Male-pattern violence”, the author, Jennie Ruby asks why the media always reports that a woman has been raped but not that a man has raped a woman.  Terming it “gender dyslexia”, she writes:

“This reluctance to talk about men’s violence is widespread and seems to amount almost to a taboo. The news media report that “a woman was raped,” but never say “a man raped a woman.” Analyses of school violence talk about “kids killing kids,” ignoring the fact that it is almost exclusively boys committing the violence. Terms like “domestic violence” mask the fact that most of this violence is committed by men. Feminists and feminist organizations also fall into this pattern by using the term “violence against women.” This wording puts the focus on women as victims and hides who is perpetrating the violence. If we can’t even say who is doing most of the violence in the world, how can we hope to stop it?”

So even if nothing else changes, the media should at least have another look at the terminology it uses when reporting on such cases.

Secondly, we have to question the media’s thirst for every detail about this woman’s condition.  Was it really necessary for the panel of doctors to give out a daily health bulletin on live television?  How does this help?  Is this not feeding into voyeurism?  When a person is so critical, they waver between life and death.  There are days when there is an improvement; at other times it seems hopeless. Anyone who has had to care for a person in this condition knows how your emotions swing from hope to despair almost by the hour.  In such a situation, you do not need people constantly asking you “how is she/he?” or “what is her/his BP, pulse rate, red blood count etc etc”.  Why should anyone but the family be told all this?  Is this not a gross invasion of privacy?  What were the doctors at Safdarjung Hospital thinking when they agreed to the demand for a daily news bulletin? Surely the doctors could have told the media firmly that the girl’s privacy had to respected and that they would give information as and when the family agreed to this being made public.  Was the family even consulted before all this was done?

And fourth, let us look at why some newspapers and TV channels felt they had to give the woman a fictitious name, as if respecting her anonymity was too daunting a challenge for journalists to respect.  Hence, while Times of India has decided to call her Nirbhaya, and patted itself on the back for having picked what it deems is an appropriate name given her courage, other are variously calling her Damini, Amanat etc.  But her brother, who has to hear these names, told the Indian Express,  “It’s hard to digest that this is my sister they are talking about.”  He says the first time he saw one of these names flashing on TV, he thought the channel had got his sister’s name wrong.  He says he was furious but then someone explained to him that “it is a phenomenon known as personification.  I don’t like it, but they say she is the face of a movement.”  

Unfortunately, the young man was misinformed about the meaning of “personification” and how it is commonly used.  Here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

“Anthropomorphism or personification is any attribution of human characteristics (or characteristics assumed to belong only to humans) to other animals, non-living things, phenomena, material states, objects or abstract concepts, such as organizations, governments, spirits or deities.”

Is it really that difficult to follow this story without dramatizing it further, giving the survivor a fictitious name – as if by doing that the horrific aspects of this story will become more believable.  It is astounding that responsible media persons can endorse such a decision from within these media organisations.

The survivor’s brother also told the Indian Express about the pressure put on his father to issue an appeal once violence broke out during the demonstrations at India Gate.  After this experience, his father does not want to speak to anyone in the media. “My father is scared that a wrong message has gone out.  It seems like we don’t want the protests. We are suffering so much, why should we be against the movement?  Now he has decided against speaking to the media.  There were more requests from the police, but we told them we don’t want to risk it again”, he told IE.

As I write this, the woman has been taken to Singapore for treatment and her life still hangs by a thread.  One hopes the daily health bulletins will stop and the family is allowed its right to choose what it wants to convey to the world outside.  She is their daughter/sister.  Her story might have galvanized people to come out on the street and demand changes in the law.  But that is a decision that people made; she did not and neither did her family.  The media must respect that even as the wider debate on rape, on women’s safety, on the criminal justice system and the law, and on the misogyny in Indian society continues. 

(To read the original on The Hoot's website, click here.)

What’s wrong with Indian men?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Dec 23, 2012

  

No easy answers. Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury

This is a question more people need to talk about and not be satisfied with clichés or the usual solutions.

Another horror; another rape. This time in a moving bus; at a time of the night when people are still on the roads in Delhi; in a populated area and not some remote jungle. Each time you read news like that of the bestial gang rape of a 23-year-old para-medical student in Delhi earlier this week, your senses are numbed. What is happening to us? What is this brutality we witness all so frequently now? Can it ever stop?

I doubt if we will find a satisfactory answer in the short run. But it is a question that more people need to talk about and debate and not be satisfied with the clichés, the usual solutions or even some unusual ones.

I spent last weekend in my old school, a place where I had five happy years before completing my schooling. It is an all-girls residential school with a substantial proportion of day students. Our memories of our school days, when some of us met again after many decades, were those of the fun times, the carefree years, of a place where we felt safe and were not inhibited from expressing our views. Of course, the very fact of a compulsory school uniform imposed a level of conformism but even within that girls found ways to assert individual personalities — a tuck here, a stitch there. And hair always remained the ultimate expression of rebelliousness — refusing to be neat was the preferred statement of individualism.

All these years later, the girls in that school still wear the same school uniform but they have changed, as has the world around them. They exude the same confidence some of us did. I want to be a Cordon Bleu chef, one girl told me. Another said she wants to be a lawyer — but with the army. Another became really excited when I mentioned I was a journalist. Clearly, for these girls no career is out of reach.

Yet, reading about the Delhi incident, I thought about these young women who are on the verge of stepping out into another world, away from the relatively safe environment of an all-girls school. With modern communication and social networking, they are not as secluded as perhaps we were in our days when even contact with the boys in the school across the boundary wall was frowned upon. Today, girls have Facebook friends and are daring enough to meet them even if all they know about them is what these young men choose to put on their “profile”. I am told that often it is girls from the most conservative homes who take such bold chances and end up in all kinds of trouble.

Yet, whether it was our generation jumping the boundary wall to meet boys or this lot setting up meetings through social networking sites, the compulsions are the same. But is the world a more dangerous place today for young women than it was in our days? If so, how does one prepare them for it?

The predictable formula is to urge them always to be vigilant, to be careful, not to take unnecessary chances. Against the background of the recent spate of sexual crimes against women in Mumbai, the Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) in Mumbai, Himanshu Roy, had this to say: “The most obvious method of preventing such crimes is that women should be aware of their environment. This does not mean that they should be suspicious of all their male relatives, friends or colleagues, but it would be wrong to assume that none of these will ever harm them.” In effect, he was suggesting that the onus of preventing the crimes is really on women. Roy needs to be reminded that the job of the police and law enforcement is not to tell women what they should do, but to do their own job more effectively.

At the same time, many believe the problem will be tackled if the government, law enforcement and society at large figure out how to “protect” these girls from violence. The courts have suggested more policing, asking for plainclothes women police in malls, cinema halls and public places, with closed circuit cameras. But are women safer in a police state? Can we really “protect” women in a society where they can experience the worst forms of sexual violence inside their homes?

Furthermore, even if there are men who genuinely try and “protect” women and intervene, they do not succeed. In the Delhi incident, the girl’s male companion was mercilessly beaten and thrown out of the bus. In Mumbai, men who tried to intervene were murdered. So who will “protect” the protectors?

A male reader of these columns suggested that we should not focus exclusively on women and instead we needed to make more of an effort to understand men and what drives them to such violence. Without justifying the violence, he felt it was a combination of repression and suppression that drove Indian men to such levels of violence. He might have a point. We have not looked at Indian men, at what is happening to them, what is turning some of them into people who would be better off caged.

These are troubling questions. There are no easy answers. We can begin by debating and discussing this issue much more than we do, in our schools and colleges, in the columns of our newspapers, and in our families.

(To read the original, click here)