India's Rape Culture

My opinion about India’s rape culture might sound like an unpopular one owing to the fact that we are all hypocrites here. We all live in a constant denial about everything close to reality, and like to lay the blame on something else rather than admitting what is really wrong with us and our society. I see people demanding more and more severe punishment for the rapists all the time. They think that capital punishment, and more strict laws would be able to reduce the number of rapes happening in the country or even stop it altogether.

To be very frank, I don’t think so. Have you ever seen even an iota of shame or remorse on the rapist’s face. No, you would not. On the contrary, rapists are often proud of what they did. Are rapists not aware of the fact that raping someone is a crime in the eyes of law? And moreover, a crime against humanity? Do they not know the amount of pain and trauma a rape victim has to suffer? Believe it or not, every rapist knows all of this. And all of them must have shown concerns about the safety of their female family members at least once in their lives. 

Rapes do not happen because we don’t have strict laws against it. For instance, everybody knows murder is a crime, still there are plenty of murders happening each and every minute in every part of the world. Laws do not and can not prevent anything from happening. Your son/daughter/husband/wife/mother/father can slit your throat while you are sleeping. Would law be able to prevent that? No. All it can do is to punish the murderer after you are already dead. Would that stop someone from killing someone else? No.

No matter how strict the laws of this country become, it would never be able to scare off even a single rapist. Rapes do not happen because the law does not punish the rapist severely, nor it is upon the law to stop someone from turning into an animal. The onus is on the society. And we live in a society that is rotten to its core.

This could be unsettling for many of you. Rapes happen because it has full acceptance in our society. It happens because we, as a society, have been appreciating violence against women since time immemorial. Society aids and abets violence against women. A man who has committed some serious crime against women, like setting his wife on fire for dowry, is never ostracised from any of his circles. Even a rapist is not ostracised. No matter what the law says, it is completely acceptable to kill a girl child also. And whether you are ready to accept it or not, there are boys,, like too many of them, who look up to the criminals around them ‘who have shown women their place’ according to them. Then there are rape apologists among us, who blame the victim, and justify everything. And if you are a man reading this it might hurt your sentiments, but almost every man is a rape apologist. Some will do it directly by saying things like if a woman is wearing a certain kind of dress, she deserves to be raped. Some will say she should have known it’s not safe out there. And my favourites, the ones who complain about the separate women’s coach and reserved seats in metros. There is a video on youtube by Quint in which old men can been seen saying that once a girl is fourteen or fifteen, it is no more a rape, it is all consensual. There were school girls and boys in that video saying it is also a woman’s fault if she gets raped. That video was from Haryana but I don’t think there is any state where people would have a different view.

There are rape videos on porn sites and people masturbate to it. There are corrective rapes where the men in the family rape the girl to 'cure' her of homosexuality. Marital rape is not even considered a crime in the eyes of law.

And it is not even about education or the lack of it. I had a classmate in my graduation, whose father taught her that somewhere a girl is also responsible for her rape, and she not only believed in that, she repeated it without any hesisation whatsoever on many occasions. She was a child of english speaking parents, and one of the toppers of that class. What do you think she is going to teach her child if she ever decides to have one? I cannot even tell you what the boys I grew up with think about women, and how they behave in public when some random girl is passing by. My M.A. classmate who acts all intellectual in the company of Bengali women used to grope women in crowded metros and then tell me about it without any shame.

Do you really think any kind of law can change the way we think about women?

Rape is a hate crime. It is a weapon that men think they have against women. It happens because someone feels that it is incumbent upon him to show a woman her place in this society. And this hatred against women is rooted very deeply in all of us. Men are jealous of the progress women have made despite all the hurdles men put in their way. Men have only been acting like they have left all their primal urges for violence and have become civilized. No, they have not. Nothing from our everyday lives suggests anything even remotely close to men being civilized. There are school boys who want to kill each other. There are men who are war-mongers. Many men who are demanding capital punishment for the rapists now were shamelessly talking about having kashmiri mistress after 370 was scrapped because they wanted to remind Kashmiris of their position and value in the Indian democracy. And they would never come to terms with the fact that soldiers in the army also rape.

There are millions of examples to prove that men hate women, and this society teaches them do so since the very beginning of their lives. And rape is a crime resulting from that hatred itself. But since you all are hypocrites, none of you would agree to anything because that would mean to put the blame on yourselves, but then you would go on to put Kabir Singh’s DPs in your WhatsApps anyway.

We men have been raised in a wrong way. And that is the reason why rape and other hate crimes against women have become a culture here. But nobody wants to even recognize it. All social media outrages are meaningless if you are not willing to recognize the root cause behind it and start working on it. People outrage against rapes one day and then normalise something extremely misogynist the next day. Just accept the fact that you are also part of the problem.

I think shouting for capital punishment comes from an state of extreme anger or a mind incapable of rational thinking. Instead of investing your little intelligence on coming up with new ideas for punishing the rapists, use it to do some introspection and try to unlearn the problematic things this society has taught you; use it to raise your sons right. Making the society you live in a safe place for women would stop rape, not having strict laws against it.