Having shown in the first part of this two-part artillery that the Indian Male is actually unfairly maligned beyond a reasonable point, I shall now list out the various possible reasons behind rape and the possible ways to prevent rape as far as possible.
Causes and Prevention of Rape
Several reasons/causes have often been adduced for rape. Some of them are fairly well documented and some of them may be no more than conjectures. Some of them are fairly simple while some do look contrived and far-fetched.
Lust coupled with opportunity and the vulnerability of the potential victim is one of the classic reasons cited. This, perhaps, is by far the most common.
Abnormal psycho-pathology of some men is known to make rapists out of them. Serial rapes, rapes of infant and children, rapes of very old women etc are usually the result of the abnormal psycho-pathology of the rapists.
These two are, in my opinion, the most common causes behind rape.
Simple sexual deprivation (of a male) may lead to rape: as in prisons. Usually both the assailant and the victim in the rapes that are said to occur in prisons are men. Rapes of women by men and rapes of women by women in prisons (and elsewhere) are hardly reported though they are suspected to occur fairly often.
Women have been said to be raped by jealous lovers and ex-boyfriends. In these days of “fiends with benefits” the “friends” who have been denied the “benefits” (some others having been granted the “benefits”) may have been choosing rape as a way to get even with the woman dispensing the “benefits”.
Rape has been said to be a way of taking revenge – not necessarily against the woman but her husband, parents, clan, …
In wars and rebellions, women have been raped by soldiers both because of long sexual deprivation during war and because of the primitive behaviour of the conqueror against the conquered or because of the hatred for the country/race to which the women belong.
Women have been said to be raped out of hatred for her, her husband, her family, her caste, religion and so on.
It has been said that men – at least some men – use rape to subjugate a woman – particularly when they find themselves unable to subjugate her mind or her people; in short, it is said to have been used to show “who the boss is”. Such perhaps are the rapes of women from underprivileged communities by land lords from other communities.
Again a woman may be raped out of contempt. But whether that is true or not, respect for a woman seems to save a woman from a rape by the man respecting her.
Women are said to be raped by men who are unable to cope with the rise of the woman either by herself or as a part of her species.
Ratna Kapoor, Global professor of Law, Jindal Global Law school, NRC, New Delhi, in her article “Rape and the Crisis of Indian Masculinity” in the Hindu dtd.19th December 2012 suggests that (gang) rape in India is because the Indian Male feels threatened by the rise of Indian women.
She says: “As women enter the workplace and the public arena, their boldness and confidence seem to trigger a sense of insecurity in a society where men are used to being in charge.” This is not really any new theory; it is old wine but presented in an Indian bottle.
She adds: “We need to inquire why young Indian men are routinely committing gang rapes in metropolitan cities against women who are just going about their daily lives.”
And she goes on to inquire: “What is the anger that motivates this level of violence? Is the sight of a smartly-dressed educated female professional generating a sense of displacement in men?”
She avers: “Over the past several decades, women’s rights have proliferated and they are claiming their subjectivity, asserting their identity as women as opposed to being someone’s wife, daughter or sister. And with the opening up of the market, women are more visible in the workplace.”
And so Prof.Ratna Kapur surmises: “That they are entering male bastions of power has challenged the sense of superiority and entitlement of the traditional Indian male.” In the same vein, she adds: “This idea of a woman as a fully formed human subject remains a difficult concept to embrace.” Prof. Kapur further says: “When women do not cover or display their vulnerability – thereby inviting the protection of the virile Indian male – what follows is a sense of emasculation and aggrievement on the part of these men.”
She suggests: “We need to think about how we can handle women’s equality in ways that are not perceived as threatening. That demands greater responsibility on the part of parents as well as society not to raise sons in a way in which they are indoctrinated with a sense of superiority and privilege. There is also a need on the part of young men to be actively involved in their schools and communities in advocating women’s equality rights.”
So far, so good.
But I think Prof.Kapur’s observations merit some serious examination.
Prof.Kapur’s article seems to be her analysis of gang rape rather than rape itself. (She says, in a very early part of her article, “Indians need to understand that gang rape is not just an aberration committed by inhuman men,” and soon reaches the conclusion that it is because of the crisis of Indian masculinity.) I beg to differ with her in that there is no reason to limit her conclusions to gang rape or to India. So, in my further comments relating to Prof.Kapur’s article, I use ‘rape’ in place of ‘gang rape’ except where I quote her or use her words.
Secondly, she seems to believe that gang rape is a typically Indian phenomenon and she goes on to find the reasons for it in the Indian context. I disagree. Though I have no statistics on hand to talk about the incidence of gang rapes in India or elsewhere in the world, I think it is quite reasonable to assume that gang rape is as prevalent in the rest of the world as it is in India.
Moreover, I think that the “Indian context” I have alluded to, viz. male insecurity in the face of the ascendance of women, is by no means a phenomenon local to India because ascendance of women is not limited to India.. Women in the West, for example, have not always been as “liberated” as they are today and they have not stopped evolving; so, Western males must have experienced similar insecurities in the past and must be experiencing the same, to some extent or the other, now. My point is that this male insecurity that Prof.Kapur refers to is by no means validly restricted to the Indian Male; insistence on the contrary is perhaps nothing more than prejudice.
Prof.Kapur’s opinion that young Indian men are routinely committing gang rapes in metropolitan cities is an exaggeration carried too far. Her preoccupation seems to be with rapes – gang rapes – of “the young smartly-dressed educated female professionals” in metropolitan cities. It is almost as if the Indian Male – an average Indian male – start his day with an agenda to (gang) rape somebody!! If that were so, rape incidents (including gang rapes, presumably) in India, as reported in the UN Study mentioned earlier, would not be as low as 1.8 per 100,000 of population.
Though I do not believe Prof.Kapur is right in limiting her assumptions and conclusions to the Indian Male, I have no difficulty in accepting Prof.Kapur’s conclusions as representative of one of the possible reasons for the incidence of rape. But it is a theory I take less seriously than the ones I have mentioned earlier though not all of them are equally plausible or equally applicable in any specific instance of rape.
Yet, one small issue regarding this theory of Prof.Kapur does keep nagging me. If the Indian Male’s supposed anger is against the professional women, there should be no rape (or gang rape) of non-professional women: ordinary householders, labourers, children, old women and so on. Moreover, if the hypothesis were correct, it is professional men who must feel most threatened by professionally rising women and be most responsible for the gang rapes of professional women. Do reported incidents bear it out?
Prof.Kapur is right when she says that “it is impossible to reduce the issue to one sole cause, that is men.” I believe she would agree that it is also impossible to reduce the issue of violence (by which she means violence by rape as well) to any single cause or motive. Individual instances of rape may have their own causes – some of which I have mentioned above.
So far I have limited myself to stating the politically correct reasons leading to rapes – worldwide.
But is that all that is there to this complex problem? Are we interested in making politically correct noises or in minimising (eliminating any crime being no more than a Utopian dream) the incidence of rape?
Punishment, however stringent, is no cure for rape; it doesn’t undo the wrong and it doesn’t wipe away the emotional trauma of the victims. Nor does it prevent rape just as punishment in the case of other crimes or death penalty in the case of murders.
Yet we must minimise rape – since eliminating all rape is more or less a Utopian fantasy.
What other option do we have then for minimising the incidence of rape?
Prevention is better than cure, they say. It is no less true in the case of rape.
How can we prevent rape? Or at least minimise its incidence?
Before I proceed further, resigned as I am to brickbats from progressive women and women’s groups, I shall present an analogy.
When one goes out of one’s house one locks it after oneself. That reduces the risk of thieves breaking in though it does not eliminate it; in fact, a determined thief can always break into any house no matter how strong the locks be. (If some locks are so strong that they can’t be broken, the fact merely buttresses my argument!) Though one can always leave one’s house unlocked and go away, arguing that nobody else is supposed to enter the house and rob one of one’s possessions, one seldom does so and one takes due precautions by securing all the doors with locks as a precaution against theft! Mind you, one is free to go out leaving the house unlocked.
Even when one does leave one’s house unlocked and goes away, the theft is no less a crime and is no less punishable. I do not think “contributory negligence” absolves an offender of the guilt of theft. But the punishment may not result in retrieval of all that has been stolen from one.
Suggesting that due precautions be taken against a crime is not tantamount to condoning the crime or justifying it.
Again, taking due precautions does not necessarily eliminate the risk of being the victim of a crime; it merely reduces it. As I said, a determined thief can always break a lock; but we do not leave the doors open enabling even a street dog to walk in without being inhibited.
So what are the due precautions a woman can take to minimise the incidence of rape?
The unpalatability of my argument begins now.
A poster I have found on Facebook says: “Don’t tell your daughters not to step out into the night. Instead, teach your sons better.”
Unimpeachable rhetoric. But it strikes me as the petulant logic of a truculent child.
I have no issues about “teach your sons better”. These sons should be taught not to molest or rape a woman – just as they, along with their sisters, should be taught not to commit any crime.
But “Don’t tell your daughter not to step into the night”? Sorry, I beg to disagree. The daughters as well as the sons do have to be told not to step out into the night. And the daughters have to be told a lot more things relevant only to women.
Girls shall be taught, just as the boys shall be, that discretion is the better part of valour, that prudence is a necessary virtue and is necessarily a virtue, that being prudent is not the same as endorsing wrongdoing of any kind, that there is a difference between freedom and license, and that freedom is enmeshed with responsible behaviour so that freedom does not mean doing whatever one wants to do. People are often judged not by the extent of freedom they have but by the way they utilise it.
Girls shall be taught that, while they are not inferior to men, they are not identical to men in any practical sense and that, in that sense, they are not equals either. Boys should be taught that women are by no means inferior to men while they are not identical to men just as men are not identical to women.
Both should be taught that men and women alike are entitled to the same educational opportunities, same work opportunities, and that law does not – and should not – show any bias against one gender at the expense of the other; this is nearly all that the “equality of genders” can mean.
Equality merely means equal opportunities to study, to work, to earn, to think etc and to be treated alike by Law. It does not mean that women can – or should – do everything that a man does. A tiger, an animal, roams freely in a jungle. But a man cannot and does not roam freely in a jungle despite being yet another animal – unless he doesn’t mind being eaten alive. The uneducated man of the primitive days seems to have been more prudent than the educated men and women of the present day. What a colossal waste of education on these people!
Why do women wear revealing clothes? What Prof.Ratna kapur calls a “smartly dressed female” is often a “titillatingly dressed female” and there is a lot of difference between the two. Dress is essentially meant to protect against the elements, to be a cover for anatomical endowments, and to adorn oneself. For some time, people went on adding more embellishments to their dress in order to embellish themselves; but now girls seem to be on a minimalist programme and they drop even the essentials! If one wears a skirt ending just six inches below the crotch or a top showing half her cleavage or a blouse showing three-quarters or more of one’s back to look good or a dress so form-hugging that nothing is left to the imagination of an onlooker, can one complain if one looks so “good” that one ends up tempting even a male corpse? Look good to whom? If one wants to look good to one’s boyfriend or husband, one should wear such clothes for their benefit when there are no other onlookers. Moreover, a woman who would parade her endowments to look good and make an impression on the world rather than rely on her inherent talents and strength of personality to impress is really not much of a woman to be impressed with.
That a woman chooses to wear such clothes does certainly NOT entitle any man to rape her. But it increases the chance that one might be raped or otherwise sexually assaulted or harassed. The dressing, however revealing, doesn’t make any sexual assault including rape any less an offense and any less punishable. But what does the punishment amount to from a victim’s point of view? Is it any solace or a solution to all the trauma of a rape?
Teach one’s sons not to rape a woman wearing skimpy clothes? Why? If one can’t teach one’s daughter to be prudent, is one fit to teach one’s son not to fall for the temptations of the flesh in the name of egalitarianism and catholicity?
If a woman wants to wear the kind of clothes that vamps and cabaret dancers in the movies of yesteryear wore, so be it. But let her know that even as society, law, and law-enforcers would do their best to defend her right to wear what she pleases, the woman is running a risk, an enhanced risk, of being molested, raped or sexually harassed. The law shall stand by her all the same. The judge who invoked contributory negligence in some remote past in a case of rape is an anachronism today. Contributory negligence of the victim can be rightly invoked only to decide the punishment – not the conviction.
In the same way, I do not see myself eye to eye with women who frequent bars and pubs – particularly late at night. Drunken anybody is dangerous and drunken men can be worse. If one misbehaves within a pub or bar, one might be thrown out by the ushers. But even if one steps safely out of a pub late at night, every inch of the way back home is still fraught with risk. Would a drunken woman be in a position to defend herself adequately? If a woman wants to drink, she can well do that at home. The admonition applies to men just as well.
In any case, I do not endorse students going for drinks under any circumstances. So don’t I endorse students going for drugs. It is parental irresponsibility that gives students the money necessary for drinks, drugs, and fancy dresses.
Remember that one, man or woman, roaming around at night – alone or in company, small or large – can be beaten up and robbed if not raped. Safety is at stake when one crosses one’s limits and the consequences may be anything. One is free to cross one’s limits but the consequences too have no limits then.
Drinks or no drinks, neither men nor women have any business loafing around the streets or frequenting any public places after a certain time of night. Oh, yes, business houses like pubs, bars and restaurants may remain open all through the 24 hours of a day; they have nothing to lose and everything to gain; but that doesn’t mean that people should visit them after a certain hour.
There is nothing wrong in women going to school, college, or work. They are as entitled to do so as the men are. And when they do, they are bound to be in the company of men and mingle with them. Perfectly natural and normal. But what is not normal is the degree of proximity with each other that they maintain. That women mingle with men does not mean that they should touch each other or get into needless banter – which often assumes sexual overtones – with men; oh, yes, women of previous generations did get along pretty well in the work-space while remaining within fairly well-defined limits and ensuring their respect, dignity, and safety. It is perfectly possible to strike a note of balance which makes women safe no matter how smartly (not titillatingly) they are dressed and how highly accomplished they are in comparison to the men around them. It is not their achievements that put women at risk but their comportment.
Today I find girls rubbing shoulders with their male friends in such a way that they rub much more than shoulders against them. Traditionally, no man – be a father, brother, uncle, or grandfather – would touch a woman once she attained puberty and so wouldn’t the woman touch men; nor would a mother touch her sons after they had attained puberty. Once a girl attained puberty, she would maintain a discreet distance from the very boys she had played with till then. The people responsible for such tradition of restrained conduct perhaps knew what we call Oedipus Complex, Electra Complex and the like – if not by those names; they knew much more about human nature than we care to credit them with; they knew that people were men and women first and that the father-daughter, mother-son, or brother-sister relationships came in later and were secondary, and that individuals – mostly girls – had to be protected from the play of natural, primitive, barbaric instincts. No amount of education can obliterate the primitive instincts in us; if anyone tells you otherwise, you can accept it at peril to yourself and those who care for your safety.
Parents today are as irresponsible as their daughters. The other day, I found a mother asking her daughter who frequents public places late at night (as late as 2 AM) to carry pepper spray with her instead of asking her daughter to shut up, be sensible, and stay at home after, say, 9 PM. Pepper spray is surely a good measure of abundant precaution; but can it really stop any concerted assault – sexual or otherwise – as this Delhi gang rape? (To be fair to this unfortunate girl, it must be admitted that she was not out at an unearthly hour.)
By no means do I say that prudent and responsible behaviour guarantees freedom from rape or other assault. A child or an 80-year old woman does nothing titillating but may end up being raped and such rapists are usually of deviant behaviour. Prudent behaviour merely reduces the risk. If one thinks that the safety gained through prudence is not worth the voluntarily foregone freedom or sacrificed fun and enjoyment, let one make a choice knowingly and not cry over spilt milk – though, to repeat, any offenders against one are still punishable under law.
Yes, it all boils down to one thing: prudence. Disregard prudence and be prepared to pay the price. That a woman’s assailant is ultimately caught and punished with castration or hanging does not mean anything of consequence to her; it does not mitigate her suffering.
Punishment for Rape
No punishment, however stringent, can undo a wrong. Part of the rationale behind punishment for a crime is that stringent, timely punishment acts as a deterrent against committing the crime. It works – to some extent, some small extent. The fear of punishment reduces crime to some extent but does not eliminate it altogether. Such is human nature. Neither the reformative theory nor the retributive theory in respect of the nature and quantum of punishment has proved to be satisfactory in eliminating crime.
Yet, stringent punishment should be there in principle and should be awarded wherever necessary and commensurate with the gravity and attendant circumstances of the crime.
Punishment, in any case, does not usually undo the damage done by a criminal. What punishment given to a rapist can remove the unfortunate stigma associated with the victim of a rape? Nor can any punishment remove the emotional trauma of the victim – and the younger the victim, the worse the problem can be. It is this persistent emotional trauma that makes rape a particularly heinous offense.
Punishment, at the most, satisfies a sense of revenge – in the victim and the society. In the case of rape, I wonder whether the victim is ever in a mental condition to contemplate or savour revenge at all. Again, sated vengeance does not mitigate one’s own suffering.
Whenever there is a high profile rape, there is a vociferous demand that the rapist shall be awarded the most stringent punishment possible, or as in the recent Delhi gang rape case, that the victims be awarded death penalty.
Perfectly understandable.
But death penalty has not eliminated murders so far. Nor is it likely, on its own, to eliminate rape.
No matter how stringent the laws be, the law-enforcing authorities should be dedicated, skilled in investigation and absolutely honest. And the judges should be balanced, mature, and Solomon-like in wisdom, and ruthless when called for.
No matter whether the punishment awarded to a rapist is of any consequence to a suffering, traumatised victim, we must have strong laws, for whatever they are worth, in place, and justly administered.
But, as I have been at pains to argue, the really practicable solution is prudence on the part of the vulnerable person. The battles of life are not fought by throwing the books of Law at others; they are fought and won by being prudent and sagacious.
Links to the first part of this two-part article by Susmita Bose:
Rape and Prevention: A Deviant Woman’s Two Pence for Those Who Care – Part I
Rape and Prevention: A Deviant Woman’s Two Pence for Those Who Care – Part I
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Tags: Delhi Bus Rape Case Delhi Gang Rape Case Prevention of rape Rape Rape and Punishment
