What’s even worse than rape?

Even as we continue to get homilies on Indian culture, appropriate dress code and dangers of “pub culture” from BJP netas, brutal gang rapes of women continue unabated across the country. For Indian women hoping for achche din and better security under BJP rule, the bad news is evident in the form of increasing reports of criminals breaking into women’s homes to gang-rape them.

On July 5, a 23-year-old woman was gang-raped and threatened by three men who broke into her house at Balwakheri village in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh. They took pictures of her and threatened to release them if she complained.

Heart-rending case Then last week, there was the heart-rending saga of a 19-year-old girl ending her life by jumping from a tower in Bina town of Sagar district in Madhya Pradesh. Reportedly, she did not have an inch of clothing and the autopsy report pointed to rape by multiple men over a few days. Her body was full of bruises, including bite marks on her breasts.

This girl had apparently left home to travel about 400 km to appear for a recruitment test for a postal department job in Jabalpur. A report by a local paper said the last call she made from her mobile phone was to her sister three days before her suicide, saying she was in a dark room and in an area which was surrounded by buildings. As she was talking, the call was cut off, obviously by her abductors. We don’t know if an attempt was made to trace the call.

In another bizarre case from a village near Bokaro in Jharkhand, a panchayat president ordered the rape of a 14-year-old tribal girl by a man with whose wife her brother had misbehaved. So right before the eyes of the villagers, and her wailing and pleading mother, the girl was dragged by the “dishonoured man” into a nearby jungle and raped. Shockingly, his own wife stood by and approved of this decision, and her father was the panchayat president!

A revenge tool Once again, we are witness to the spectacle of a helpless, defenceless girl’s body being used to avenge the possible misdeed of her brother. Of course, following the media furore, the legal system has kicked in and the offenders have been arrested. Who can tell what will happen once the media glare is off.

While continuing sexual violence against women is a huge cause for concern, an even more frightening outcome of these heinous assaults on women is the thinking process or the mindset of the woman who has been raped. In the case of the 19-year-old girl, the troubling question her suicide raises is that if she could manage to break free and escape, she felt the only option before her was to end her life.

That is because most of the czars guarding or defining our culture and morals — whether in our personal space >or in the Government — are constantly dinning into impressionable minds that what is all important to a woman is her izzat or honour.

It is infuriating to know that whether it is a sexual assault or a woman making sexual choices in contrast to those laid down by our moral and cultural police, all of them are juxtaposed against a woman’s honour. And sans these medieval values, the woman is considered characterless, and her life not worth living. And so a 19-year-old snuffs out her life, probably thinking that now that she has been raped, she will bring “shame” to her family and there is no further value left in her.

Moral police The most tragic thing is that our lawmakers’ periodic rants against pub culture and skimpy clothing such as bikinis get enthusiastic endorsement on social media platforms such as Twitter. And so we had one Chandan Shukla (@chandan_sh) tweeting, in rather sad grammar, on Sunday: “What wrong if anyone have his or her say against PUB/bars/micro skirt culture? Yes it has roles in some rape cases.”

And he posted this tweet with a picture juxtaposing what are supposed to be Chennai college girls dressed in staid and sombre salwar-kameez, against Delhi college girls wearing sleeveless dresses and short skirts. The tagline in the pic: “Compared to Delhi, the incidence of rape in Chennai is only 0.5 per cent. Why? You can see for yourself.”

Where he got this number from we have no clue. But his twisted reasoning is much worse than his inaccurate numbers.

But even out of a place as culturally different from ours as New York, there was a shocking instance of an 18-year-old fresher who had been on campus for just two weeks, and who reported sexual assault on her by the hallowed members of the college football team.

Guess what? It took the college committee barely 12 days to absolve the accused members of the most popular sports team on the campus. And the girl was left to face the consequences of her dismissed complaint — threats and harassment.

The New York Times reported on July 12 that the student’s friends were worried as she had been drinking and had suddenly disappeared. Around midnight, a friend got a text from the missing girl saying she was frightened and didn’t know what to do. After a search he found her — “bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing. Some had their cellphones out, apparently taking pictures, he said.”

The medical report confirmed “intercourse (that was) very forceful” multiple times and with multiple partners. While the football players denied the rape (apparently they were too tired to get an erection), tests found “sperm or semen in her vagina, in her rectum and on her underwear”, said the report. The newspaper investigation showed a “school ill-prepared to evaluate an allegation so serious that, if proved in a court of law, would be a felony, with a likely prison sentence.”

And now I’ll brace up for comments beginning with… “Why did she drink in the first place…?”

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