India’s Continued Demonization of Rape Victims

This article originally appeared in The Independent.

How should a country respond when its police force is found wanting? That is the question Indian’s face after a sting-operation carried out by a leading magazine last week exposed widespread rape-denial among a senior stratum of India’s police force. If the media reaction is an index, all that this revelation could muster was a nationwide raised eyebrow. In the embattled history for social justice in India the police dismissal of rape victims and the failure to respond marks one of the lowest points.

The sting carried out by Tehelka involved secretly filmed interviews with 30 Station Holders (SHOs), the policemen in charge of investigating rape claims, in Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR). Delhi happens to be India’s “rape capital” and 17 of the 30 SHO’s in this area repeatedly insisted that the majority of rape claims they received were false. The approximations varied. “It’s consensual most of the time” was the insistence of one policeman. When asked to put a figure on the number of genuine rape complaints, another suggested 10%. Manoj Rawat, a sub-inspector in a nearby precinct, was less generous: “My personal view is that there are one or two per cent rape cases in [the] NCR”.

There is a tragic chain of causation that this attitude fails to break: without adequate investigations and in the absence of convictions, rapists go undeterred and more women come forward simply to reinforce police perceptions of false victimhood. The policemen can also be heard perpetuating all the retrograde myths about victim complicity. “No rape happens in Delhi without a woman’s provocation”: drinking, “indecent” clothing, flirtatious behaviour and, most absurdly, working with men are all things done by women to “induce” men into violating them.

If not inducement, women are busy profiting from the “rape industry”. According to one policeman, it is the women who come forward as victims that are to blame for turning rape into a profitable enterprise. Those that lodge complaints must be extortionists or short-changed escorts because “real” victims would be too constrained by their modesty to report a rape. By this absurd logic, it’s better to suffer in silence than face the indignity of seeking justice. Caste and class prejudices are also at play. One policeman is adamant that for poorer women, alleging rape is a  “source of income”. Another is certain that all victims from Nepal or Darjeeling are “sex-workers”.

The alarming disregard for the seriousness of rape was made clear last month during theNoida scandal, in which policemen responsible for investigating a complaint made public the identity and the address of a gang-rape victim. In a press conference the policemen went further, accusing the victim’s mother, as a divorcee cohabiting with a younger man, of setting a “wayward” example. The Indian penal code stipulates a two-year sentence for the illegal release of the personal details of rape victims and yet no police officer has been dismissed or charged. Apathy characterises the police’s rape prevention methods: following the Noida scandal, women in the NCR were told to stay indoors after 8pm and a curfew was duly imposed.

And yet, the most disheartening aspect of the exposé is the knowledge that these comments are the products of a much wider and much bleaker cultural attitude. In India, the suggestion that there is such a thing as marital rape is laughed at, and the high incidence of the rape of minors and the failure to report custodial rape all point to an institutional rape-denial complex. The immediate question is to ask, if this is the attitude of policemen in Delhi, a relatively progressive enclave, what is the experience of rape victims in India’s hinterland?

The stigmatisation of rape victims has a grave chilling effect on the number of reported incidents. Some figures suggest that 1 in every 50 rape case in India is reported. Of those, Delhi and the NCR have a conviction rate of just 30%. This problem is one compounded by the gaping disjuncture between law and order. Indian lawyers and activists complain that the problem is one of enforcement and the fact that rape-denial is a front-line issue is perhaps its most pernicious aspect: without the ability to adequately report rapes, women are denied recourse at the first instance.

The issue of rape-denial among India’s police force is also symptomatic of a structural problem: India’s police have long been a sort of vigilante force. Corruption is rife, custodial violence is common and policemen are rarely held to account. In this context, the dismissal of rape-victims becomes but one aspect of the police force’s indiscriminate hostility towards victims. The muted national response to the Tehelka investigation is therefore easily explained. Few, if any, retain faith in India’s police and with their reputation as a rogue force, pervasive rape denial becomes a relatively minor transgression.

Kiran Bedi, India’s Judge Judy and a celebrity policewoman, has come out insisting that a lack of training is the problem. She proposes “brainwashing” the police into taking rape seriously. Other senior figures have offered less risible solutions: have female police officers lead rape investigations or introduce quotas to encourage women to join the force. There are also those that argue that the police must not only be just, but be seen to be just and so dismissals are what are required to rebuild trust.

But each of these proposals falls far short. Just how much training is needed to purge these men of their age-old personal and professional prejudice? Critics are right to complain that training offers nothing by way of a guarantee that these policemen will have changed. Equally, India has an almost catastrophically low police to population ratio. Expunging a senior layer of police officials would only perpetuate the legal void in which rapists already act. And to argue that diversification is needed is to kick the issue into the long grass. Not only does rape-denial need to be addressed immediately, but, there is no reason to hope that the presence of policewomen will change anything: the one female police officer interviewed during the investigation parroted the same misogynistic views.

So how should a country respond when its police force is found wanting? Indians may have failed to react to the news of rape denial, but the pressing need for a viable solution is their cue to finally do something about it.

Ram Mashru

Gendercide and The West

The article was written for It’s A Girl, a film about gendercide in south Asia. It originally appeared here.

Gendercide is the unreported tragedy of our age.

I was one of those guilty of dismissing gendercide as an Asian problem. Surely, unwanted female foetuses were aborted there, in illegal clinics, not here. And surely unwanted daughters were killed there, in forgotten villages, not here. The egalitarian Shangri-La that is ‘The West’ would never allow unwanted daughters to be eliminated in this way. Surely? The shocking truth, I discovered, is that gendercide is a global tragedy.

An Oxford University study revealed that between 1995 and 2005, 1500 girls “disappeared” among Indian communities in England and Wales. Sex selective abortions are the only plausible explanation. If the study is correct, the figures mean that 1 in 10 extra girls, who should have been born according to normal birth statistics, were selectively aborted. Sex-selective abortions are illegal in the UK under the 1967 Abortion Act and yet, as the recent investigation carried out by The Telegraph exposed, families can and presumably have had pregnancies terminated here. Doctors, being secretly filmed, agreed to falsify paperwork to circumvent legal prohibitions even though they recognised the immorality of ‘female infanticide’. Sex-selective abortions are, shockingly, legal in the US and the post-communist states of east Europe all have unnatural discrepancies in their birth gender ratios.

Most, if not all, of the agreed solutions fall away when we understand gendercide as a global problem. Activists have always spoken of the need to economically empower women, to inform women of their rights and to improve legal enforcements. These are all the solutions to problems that don’t exist in the US, Australia or the UK. Those fighting to end gendercide have always kept faith in modernisation as a force that will uproot the “backward culture” of son-preference. But modernisation, though necessary, has been proved to be insufficient.

Gendercide is a problem of supply and demand. Modernisation has failed to root-out foetal gender-preference and developments in technology have facilitated femicide. With sex determination now possible at seven weeksonline, new technologies have had the perverse effect of decreasing reproductive liberty rather than can increasing reproductive control. Logic suggests then, that the process of combatting gendercide must be inverted: eliminate supply before tackling demand. This though, might not be the answer either.  Campaigners warn that those extreme enough to want a gender-selective abortion would “always a find a way”. As Kishwar Desai highlights, Indian families from the UK are prepared to travel to India to end pregnancies, where illegal abortions can be procured for a small price. It is impossible to know how many women each year go abroad to eliminate female foetuses. What is certain is that driving these abortions abroad or underground is counter to all interests.

It’s not only the absence of solutions that complicates the fight against gendercide in The West. Abortion – and controls on it – remains a fraught issue. The risk of talking about gendercide in The West is that it becomes engulfed by the abortion debate. The difficulty, as Cristina Odone notes, is that combatting gender-selective abortion ‘smacks of pro-life’. It is entirely consistent with being pro-choice to argue that gendercide is the not-too-remote consequence of permissive abortion controls. A hijacking of the anti-gendercide cause by either the pro-life or pro-choice lobby would be a huge setback.

Abortion and gendercide are distinct issues and if we are to end gendercide, we must constantly remind ourselves of this distinction. The routine elimination of female foetuses, solely because they are not male, is something we must all work to end.

Gendercide is an issue in relation to which our first and last question must always be: how do we end it? All manner of policy initiatives have been tried. Over concerns of sex-selection, the Council of Europe went as far as to suggest that doctors must now refuse to tell parents the gender of their baby. But technology and culture undermine policy at every stage and no legislation can combat a global cultural malaise. As Evan Grae Davis, It’s A Girl’s director has said, gendercide is one among many issues that is “greater than any single organisation can fight alone”. It is for this reason that the work of Shadowline Films, and similar projects, is vital: where policy falls short, awareness and activism must fill the gap.

Ram Mashru

[Guest Contribution] Putin’s ‘re-election’ faces empowered opposition

“I promised you we would win, and we won. Glory to Russia!” Those were the words of Vladimir Putin on the night his victory was declared. He now has a mandate to rule for six more years and, if the next elections are as disgracefully unfair as last month’s, it is likely he will rule for much longer.

Even if the elections had been free and fair, there was little chance Putin would have suffered a defeat. Under Putin, votes during the Russian presidential elections were always a vote for the Kremlin, the choice was simply between a direct or indirect vote. Putin’s electoral opponents were mediocre and unelectable, a motley crew of reactionaries, political dinosaurs and cowards. Perversely, pro-Putin sections accused credible opposition candidates of electoral discrepancies and so prevented them from running.

Putin once enjoyed the reputation of a pragmatist. He was portrayed as a man able to clean up the mess left by the violence and instability of the nineties. Now, there remains little doubt that Putin is an autocrat. In 2010, Wikileaks revealed that US diplomats refered to Putin’s Russia as “a virtual mafia state”, where “democracy has disappeared” and political corruption is rampant. Indeed under his rule, Russia was run by a criminal cartel of self-interested ex-KGB bureaucrats. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that his security forces have harrassed and, it is strongly suspected, murdered journalists; appointed sadistic sociopaths to the head of regional governments and his government also committed, what is slowly being accepted as, war crimes in Chechnya.

The line of the Putinist cabal and their supporters, including apologists in the West, is that Russia has no history of democracy, that the Russian people prefer being ruled by authority rather than be governed by popular will. The argument is that Russians have no desire to live in a free and secure society. That reason, liberalism and democracy have never succeeded in Russia is not because Russians harbour some self-hating desire to be subjugated. Rather, it is because whenever these ideals have come close to being realised, they have been stifled by violence and intimidation.

So what do the opposition do, now Putin has been re-elected?

Western leaders, while stressing the need to investigate allegations of electoral irregularties, have avoided outright condemnation. Therefore, first, those outside the country must start condemning Putin’s rule outright. For too long Putin has been allowed to continue in his criminal activity without Western leaders or expatriates openly criticising him. Russian opposition to Putin is hampered by its lack of a coherent and effective critique of Putin and the opposition needs the emboldening impact of foreign leaders taking a strong stance.

Secondly the Russian opposition must continue to take to the streets, as they have begun to do. Russia has a long history of toppling autocracy through popular, peaceful protest and Russian protesters have never been better equipped. The internet remains relatively free of state control and the opposition must use this to their advantage. In the context of state regulated press, the opposition can use the internet to to articulate their dissidence, to organise protests and to develop networks of support around the world. But, whatever happens, the opposition must challenge him, protest, challenge his rule.

Opposition to Putin is strong among the city-dwelling middle classes. It is from the remaining socially and geographically disparate groups that Putin draws his support. Putin announced his victory with tears rolling down his cheeks. Much was made of his tears – his tears of fear. Putin is scared, scared that the informed and active urban classes have woken up to the damage he has done to the country and woken up to his corrupt government. They are beginning to become cynical of his empty patriotism, his ridiculous cult of personality, and increasingly aware of the contempt he feels for them. Increasingly, Putin realises that his time is almost up.

As the third term of President Vladimir Putin looms, Russia stands at a crossroads. The potential success of this third term as president is, of course, up for debate. Some dictators have made concessions when they find their backs against the wall and of course Putin will do everything he can to stay ‘in power’. But the choice to be made at the crossroads is stark – either Putin will clamp down, becoming the tyrant he has shown the signs of becoming or he will be deposed by the Russian opposition. Between despotism and deposition, there is no middle ground.

Oliver Hotham is an undergraduate reading History at Queen Mary, University of London. He writing interests encompass politics, both domestic and international. He tweets @OliverHotham