The pandemic of violence against women rages on

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The pandemic of violence against women rages on

Friday, 23 October 2020 | Archana Datta

In today’s modern, digital India, the caste factor and group identity further accentuate a dominant-submissive gender role culture, especially in the northern States

The Hathras incident forced us all to relive the horrific Nirbhaya gang rape. What stands out in public memory is the burning of the Dalit girl’s mortal remains like “trash” in the dead of the night, with policemen standing guard. Official figures confirm that on an average 87 rape cases (ten among them are of Dalit girls/women) are reported daily  in India. There has also been a 7.3 per cent rise in all crimes against women, with Uttar Pradesh (UP) registering the highest number of cases, accounting for 14 per cent of the total incidents in the country, says a National Crime Records Bureau, 2019, report.

In 2018, a Thomson Reuters Foundation Survey labelled India “as the most dangerous country for women…where rape, marital rape, sexual assault, harassment, female infanticide go on unabated.” Many dismissed the report as being “perceptual rather than based on actual experiences”, while the Government declined to comment on the findings.

Sadly, violence against women is globally pervasive, and one in three women (35.6 per cent) has been a victim of physical and/or sexual violence either by intimate partners or non-partners in their lifetime. The prevalence of intimate partner violence was found to be the highest (37.7 per cent) in the South-East Asian region, says a 2017 World Health Organisation study.

Many researchers ascribe “toxic masculinity”, which breeds sexual aggression, as the outcome of an unequal power relationship, more common in cultures that foster the notion of male superiority vis a vis the socio-cultural inferiority of women. Kamala Bhasin, a social activist, says that “in deep-rooted patriarchy, a boy inherits a sense of entitlement from his upbringing, whereas a girl becomes a victim of stereotyping as the weaker sex. The existing imbalance in gender relations has much to do with violence against women.” Shockingly, in today’s modern, tech-savvy digital India, the caste factor and group identity further accentuate a dominant-submissive gender role culture, especially in the northern States.

Ravi Verma, Director, International Center for Research on Women, Asia, says, “A strong sense of impunity among higher caste men, who consider dehumanising women’s bodies as an ultimate expression of control and power, is the reason behind continued violence against women from marginalised and poor communities, including Dalits.” In 2019, among the 3,500 Dalit women raped in India, one third of them were from Rajasthan and UP.

But, beyond the socio-cultural structures, studies have also indicated a negative correlation between the sex ratio and the hike in sexual violence cases. Now, India, is a land of “missing women”, contributing one in three to the world’s missing girls due to sex selection, both pre and post-natal, says a United Nations Population Fund, 2020 report. Rape cases in India rose to 32,033 in 2019 from 2,487 in 1971, an astronomical jump of 1,188 per cent, while the sex ratio registered a negative growth of 0.65 per cent, plummeting from 930 girls in 1971 to 924 girls per 1,000 boys this year.

Moreover, the rising rate of sexual violence is likely to create a further dip in the sex ratio, especially in the Hindi belt. A recent field report of the Indian Council of Social Science Research in UP and Haryana corroborated that “there is an increasing trend for son preference in the face of growing crimes against women, as a male child is culturally viewed as a protector of the family honour, thus safeguarding the chastity of daughters from the unsafe public spaces.”

Now, if public places are “unsafe”, then how safe is the home for Indian women? Certainly, it is not. The majority of the violence-related cases under the  Indian Penal Code have been registered under cruelty by husband or his relatives (30.9 per cent), followed by assault on a woman with the intent to outrage her modesty (21.8 per cent) and abduction of a woman (17.9 per cent). India’s criminal law doesn’t proscribe sexual violence by a husband unless the wife is under 18 years of age, and there is no culpability for marital rape. Another unique dimension of crimes against women in India is that 85 per cent of sexual assaults go unreported as there is a high share of known offenders, even if one excludes marital rape. An analysis of demographic and health surveys from 43 developing countries from 2010 onwards revealed that women’s reporting of sexual violence is very low in India.

Nonetheless, the Nirbhaya case was a watershed moment in our criminal justice system. Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother, while recalling her seven-year-long struggle in nailing the perpetrators, said, “The road to justice is very difficult, arduous and also hopeless. If you don’t have police support, even if the death penalty is handed out, it has to move through a tortuous process and is hardly implemented.”

Unfortunately, the post-Nirbhaya changes in criminal law  failed to make much of a dent in the justice dispensation system. The conviction rate of offenders remains as low as 27.2 per cent and is only five per cent in case of the death penalty, though rape constitutes 11.5 per cent of the total crime statistics. Many activists lament that the cases get weakened by easy grant of bail to the rape accused. “Even though it is a non-bailable offence, evidence gets tampered and extraneous influences dilute the process of investigation, while the police remain hand in glove … as happened in the Hathras case, when it more or less acted like an accomplice and not as the upholder of rule of law,” they point out.

Meanwhile, the much-awaited police reforms get frozen in political cold storage. Even the Supreme Court’s directives in 2006, which included separation of investigation and law order functions to make the police more “people-centric rather than ruler-centric” are yet to hit the ground. A committee to review the existing criminal justice system also ran into rough weather when a group of women lawyers protested over the  non-representation of women on it “when its remit is largely to reform sexual offences.”

So, how does one fight it out? Mohini Giri, former Chairperson, National Women Commission, opines that the issue has no tailor-made solutions. “The law cannot be the only instrument. What is needed is a strong and supportive family, an awakened civil society and coordinated action among the various service providers in society to nurture a girl child. We also need a complete overhauling of our educational inputs to detoxify the overdose of stereotyping for bringing in attitudinal changes, both in the oppressed and the oppressors,” she says. While Bhasin emphasises that “it is high time that we focus on men and talk in the active voice, like why a man commits a rape, rather than pushing the victimisation theory of why and how a woman has been raped.”

Well, women across the world raised their voices against sexual violence under several banners like #MeToo, #TimesUp, #NotOneMore et al. In today’s pandemic-ravaged world, the alarming spike in gender violence has generated a global movement #orangetheworld and #generationequality to wage an all-out war against rape. Like before, India cannot remain untouched by it.

(The writer is a retired Indian Information Service Officer and a media educator)

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