Shame
By Aradhika Sekhon

BALPREET was raped. As she walked home from school one day she was overpowered by four young men and made unconscious. Two days later she recovered consciousness to find herself imprisoned in an unoccupied house. She escaped through a broken window and made her way home, and her family decided to keep quite about the rape. About three months later she discovered that she was pregnant. To escape the "shame of it" she was packed off to Delhi, where she came into contact with a social worker. She is now at a home for distressed women, where she’s being ‘rehabilitated’. Balpreet was 14 when this happened.

Then there was the father who repeatedly raped his 12-year-old daughter and, on discovering her pregnancy, along with his wife poisoned and murdered her. The girl’s grandfather registered a case with the police but when faced with the fact that he’d have to shoulder the responsibility of the three remaining children, he took back his complaint!

Then there was a girl who was waylaid and raped by her rejected "suitor". A case was registered, got knocked about the courts for six years, while the accused was free to do as he wished and, finally, bitter and heartsick, the family decided to withdraw the case.

The law says that man is said to commit rape if he has sexual intercourse with a woman against her will, without her consent, when she is under 16 years of age, or with her consent when it has been obtained by putting her or any person in whom she is interested in fear of death or hurt, or with her consent when she is unsound of mind, or intoxicated, or when the man knows he is not her husband but she believes he is.

The punishment prescribed, provided rape is proved, is imprisonment for seven years and a fine. Recently, Home Minister L.K. Advani recommended that rape should be punishable by death. The recommendation has been opened to the state legislations for comments and the Maharashtra state assembly, then headed by Manohar Joshi, has already indicated willingness to adopt the same. This forces us to take a closer look at the crime about which one reads often in the papers and, it being a common enough occurrence, forgets even before turning to the next page. Rape is the ultimate violation of the human body, the human feeling and human spirit. It is the most complete subjugation of the weak by the strong and the final perversion of masculinity and machoism.

Picture the utter helplessness of the victim when she is overpowered. She cannot fight and win, she cannot appeal to anyone for help, nothing, nothing she can do but be used, violated, crushed. And, after the heinous act is completed, it is she, the helpless victim, who has to live with it for the rest of her life — shamed, subjugated, traumatised. If the crime is hushed up, she has to fight her tormentors quietly, constantly. If it is reported there’s a different but equally terrible time ahead of her — to look at the headlines and read about her victimisation, to have to face the sympathy and comments of friends and to look into peoples’ eyes and know that they know. In the court the victim has to be prepared for a harrowing time when she has to answer all and any questions.

Renowned psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakkar says that a major factor in the profile of the rapist/abuser is the likelihood that he has been himself abused as a child. In an effort to master his own trauma, he actively repeated as an adult what he underwent as a child. Yet, there is no single psychological reason. For those who assault children, fear of one’s sexual adequacy with an adult partner is also a contributing reason. But the one thing that the perpetrator is secure about is the fact that his crime will remain secret, and the chances are he’d go scot-free even if he were to be caught. "It is opportunistic" says Anita Ganesh, author of Samvada, a Bangalore-based NGO publication, a fact borne out of thousands of rape/rapist profiles, a recent one being the case of two school masters in Himachal who drugged and raped a student under their care.

Many feminist activists believe that it’s the power structure of society — the relationship between men and women, adults and children — that perpetuates the crime. Says Kakkar about inter-familial rapes: "There are indications that girls tend to be abused more by men within the family and thus suffer from a more severe trauma than boys, who are often sexually assaulted by those outside the family circle". Analyst Malika Akbar says that incest is a manifestation of raw instinct but sexual abuse of any kind — rape being the ultimate step — is an expression of tremendous hostility and the abuser derives a sense of power from the act. "It is a kind of perversion, not in the purgatory sense but in its true meaning". She says: "Education has very little to do with it. One theory is that a sexually deviant person expresses a deep sense of non-existence. Abuse helps him to give a fragment of coherence to his self". Feminists, however, contend that such explanation would mean that all sexual abusers are deviant and, thereby, justify a reprehensible act. They say that this phenomenon has more to do with the existing power structure where a man feels he is superior, the controller of the woman and the child and has sexual rights over them. Abuse and rape is, therefore, a matter of choice.

In a study carried out by Samvada on 250 respondents, it was found that compared to a milder form of sexual abuse like eve-teasing and touch overtures, where 13 per cent of the victims are less than 10 years old, 32 per cent of the victims have been subjected to serious abuse — forced oral sex, rape and using the victim to masturbate. Does this mean that the lesser the age of the girls, the more powerful the abuser feels and, therefore, the abuse is more serious? Does the fact that small girls are easily coerced and more likely to be ignorant about sex encourage the serious abuser rapist to look out for young children?

It is a noteworthy fact that most rapes are backed by a power structure. Rapes within the family are due to the all- powerful male family figurehead. Nine-year-old Renu was brought to a counselling shelter home after being brutally raped by her father. He had earlier raped his two elder daughters, but his wife had kept quiet for fear of being thrown out by her husband. Then there was a sahib, who raped the 15-year-old domestic help repeatedly. This crime would have been hushed up had not the girl been noticed crying on her Sunday visit to the church.

Out of the family, the rapist abuser will sexually subjugate a woman if he is backed by rich or powerful parents or relatives or backed by civil institutions. There are police custodial rapes. Sometimes the man himself is in an authoritative position as in social institutions like hospitals, women and children remand homes, mahila ashrams, nari niketans etc. In most cases, the victim does not report the crime to the authorities. There exists a silence that shrouds sexual violence in a society that places a lot of stress on female ‘virtue and chastity’. So even if the victims want to cry out for justice, they don’t do so in a society that prefers (for women) ‘death to dishonour’, so often portrayed in Hindi Films. This silence borne out of fear, shame and vulnerability makes rape an act which can go on with no punishment for the victim. Indeed, the sorrow, bewilderment, anger and trauma of the victim is aggravated by a sense of shame and self-contempt, which could even lead to attempts at suicide or self-destruction.

Says Kakkar:"In many cases, the event is relived involuntarily as the person is thrust back into the traumatic event both in dreams and sometimes while she/he is awake. The patient constantly lives in a state of dread of what is happening or can happen in the future.For a child, he says, the most severe trauma is in the case where the adult rapist is a close relative or even a parent." To be abused by someone whom you trust, to be hurt by someone who you think of as your natural protector, is the most traumatic event for the child".

Almost every victim mentions the need for law to be enforced and a need to severely punish the abusers as an act of deterrence. After a case of rape is registered under the existing law of the IPC, Section 376, the existing procedures, points out Lolita Sarkar, a law professor, are another form of cruelty against the victim, more so if the victim is a child. "It allows an eight-year-old girl to be cross-examined for hours by strangers in unfamiliar surroundings. The trauma of the victim mounts as most cases go on for years".

Section 376 of the law, though in itself exhaustive and comprehensive, is full of ambiguities and loopholes for the offender, the primary one being that "where testimony of the prosecutor is not supported by medical evidence, the accused cannot be convicted" — not taking into account the mental state of the victim after the rape, for she’s hardly likely to make her way to a hospital or police station soon after a highly traumatic experience. Another highly improbable requirement to prove the guilt of the accused is "as a rule of prudence, courts normally look for some corroboration of her testimony so as to satisfy its conscience". Again, though the evidence of the victims of rape deserves due consideration and even acceptance without any corroboration, still the evidence has to be assessed. Does this mean that if the girl is free and easy of manner and conduct, her rapist will be shown leniency? And secondly, ideally, for the rape to be proved, the girl has to provide a witness who will testify on her behalf!The matter of consent of the woman is also open to several inferences, for the law states: "They (women) usually leave the matter of consent to tacit understanding. In such cases consent becomes a matter of inference".

In an article in The Times of India, June, 1995, the former Chairperson of the National Commission for Women, Jayanti Patnaik, says that there’s an urgent need to make a detailed study of all rape cases filed in the courts since 1980 and to check the end results. Such a study would bring into focus, the role of the police, the deficiencies in the initial investigations, the delay in courts and the inadequacies in the existing laws and their enforcement. Many experts and activists have prescribed punitive actions, including life imprisonment to curb sexual abuse and rapes, which have assumed alarming proportions with rapid urbanisation and mushrooming slums. Says Monika Das, who was a member of the National Commission of Women, a rapist should be dealt with strongly by the law and atleast life imprisonment should be given to him.... Also, the cases should be dealt with the greatest expediency in view of the trauma experienced by the victim.... Officials trying to hush up a rape case should be severely dealt with".

Apart from the appropriate legislation to tackle the problem of abuse, equally important is how to handle the victim. Where the rape is within the family itself, the family cannot be looked upon as a safe home for the victim. Support systems are necessary, like counselling facilities, legal action, sex education, public campaigns for awareness, need to be built-up, taking into account the context of abuse and the stigma attached to the victim in our society so that the victim can be provided with some moral and social courage to face society. Women’s organisations which ensure confidentiality and sensitivity are an answer but this structure needs broadening. At the same time, society as a whole should equip itself to deal with sexual abuse of women and children, and the police, the law and the judiciary need to be sensitised to the vulnerability of women and children and their utter helplessness in the fact of an aggressive overpowering of their bodies and minds!

(The above photograph is of an enactment conducted by students of Theatre Department, Panjab University.)