A for Apple, B for Ball... R for Rape The rape epidemic and how to stop it!

By Ranjan Yumnam *

One Billion Rising: Imphal - To stop violence against women at Near BOC on February 14 2013
Pix : Deepak Oinam

Don't get squeamish, dear readers; I am not going to write here a manual on rape or anything remotely like that. In fact, I am making it a point, at the outset, to acknowledge that the burning issue of crimes against women is a very sensitive one that needs to be dealt with utmost care to prevent any sexist prejudices to bear upon its discourse. Rapes should be condemned and culprits swiftly brought to justice whenever women's rights over their body are violated without their consent.

Especially when a male writer like me writes about it, there is more reason to raise the guard against patriarchal attitudes or vocabulary creeping into the copy, albeit unwittingly. If you remember, Honey Singh, the Punjabi pop star, was boycotted for crooning numbers containing innuendoes derogatory of women in the wake of the national outcry against the recent rape of a paramedical student in a moving bus in Delhi. Therefore, it is with some trepidation that I have written this column after a long slumber.

For women, these are not great times. It is as if there's no escape from rapes. Rapes have suddenly become a hot topic in the media and acquired the distinction of one of the fastest growing crimes in India. Now this phenomenon is showing its naked depravity at our own backyard. I am not a certified psychologist or a sociologist studying the trends of society, but I think it won't be out of context to put forward some of my lay theories on the alarming surge in the crimes of passion against the fairer sex.

The first question that needs to be asked is this: Why in Manipur? To an extent, we can understand crimes happening in a big city like Delhi, a melting pot of migrants, which offers anonymity by its lack of a shared cementing bond among its denizens. Manipur, however, presents a stark contrast to a metro city. Ours is a small and very conservative society.

Respect for social ethos, relationships, cultural identity, kinship and tradition are the hallmarks of our existence. We have always placed ourselves at the high pedestal of moral spectrum, avoiding skirts for phanek, banning bars and discotheques, closing our markets before dusk, ridding our films of the barest signs of skin and so on. This perception still holds sway but one factor has single-handedly changed the social and cultural sensibilities of our society: the advent of technology, and in particular the smartphone revolution. Allow me to elaborate below.

Titillation via technology

Mobile telephony and availability of the internet enabled smartphones have narrowed the individual space-metaphorically and literally- between members of the opposite sex. Though closer and more frequent interaction between men and women is not harmful per se, it has also exposed women to enhanced risk of potential abuses, betrayal of trust and exploitation from some male partners who may have ulterior motives.

Thanks to ubiquitous smartphones that can capture, store and disseminate images and videos through MMS, bluetooth and social media, girls and young women are not even totally safe in their bedrooms where private talks are conducted through webcams and video calls, often at the behest of their boyfriends. It is anybody's guess that such digital trysts may have led to more salacious adventurism, overstepping limits of decency and indiscretions-and resulting in leaks made widespread by technology. Which is to say, mobile phones play a great role in preparing the groundwork and luring the female victims to the devious plans of the would-be rapists.

Porn has gone mainstream

What has fuelled the moral turpitude of the young generation is the easy availability of pornographic materials. With internet as the vehicle, porn is so ubiquitous that it literally flashes before us while trying to do even the most innocuous of daily chores like checking email, for example.

(I am just wondering whether people, in the past, may have died without encountering any pornographic material in their lifetime before internet was invented. But this is for certain that internet has marked the end of innocence).

Talking of the end of innocence, consider this: according to surveys, kids as young as 10 year olds are exposed to porn by way of accidental discovery in the net.

As the penetration of internet has also increased in this part of the world, our youth consume pretty much the same popular media content that their counterparts in America do. A significant portion of this is the XXX rated content. And to think that almost all smartphones in the hands of our boys harbour some explicit pictures and video clips in hidden folders is alarming. In the pre-smartphone age, the rites of passage for the boys and girls used to be some harmless flirting and coquetry, now it is sexting. What a meme we have inherited!

To cut this narrative short, I am surmising that many rapes may have occured with inspiration provided by blue films. If this is true, the future portends lingering danger for women and calls for extra caution on their part. The bad news is: instead of going underground, porn has actually gone mainstream and is competing for eyeballs with wholesome entertainment. The acceptability of the culture of smut has also meant that even porn stars have become celebrities in their own right and they are welcome with open arms in the mainstream films with some bits of clothes thrown in-think Sunny Leone.

I have nothing against porn-some are even educational- it is the underlying theme of domination, abuse and violence by men on the women performers that have irked feminists. Most acts depicted are unrealistic and even impossible; it gives the impression that pleasure inherently lies in insulting, denigrating women and causing harm to female partners.

Porn industry commoditises the female body. It creates and panders to the male fantasy treating women as mere Barbie dolls with flesh and bone. This impression gets drilled into the minds of the avid consumers of porn who actually come to believe that women are willing and dying to act out any perversions of the men's fantasies and are asking for it. And rapes happen.

End of men

Well, I may be overestimating the dirty picture angle as the cause of rapes, in which case may I hazard another guess on the epidemic of rape. Let me think loudly: are the rapes a backlash by men against the progress of women in all spheres of life, society, politics and economy? If you ask Hanna Rosin, author of the End of Men, perhaps the answer would be in the affirmative. Jobless men are a frustrated lot, their blood pressure rising especially when they see their female contemporaries doing well hopelessly ahead of them. The backlash theory suggests that by raping women, men are reclaiming their supremacy and keeping the women in their place.

The rape gene

You may pooh pooh the backlash theory as implausible. Then you may like to believe this best kept secret: some men are mutating to X-men and they have a weakness for women and they won't take no for an answer from the subjects of their lust, else a lesson has to be taught to these women who spurn their advances. Let's hope that you and I don't get enlisted by Natural Selection to be mutants of this sort.

Whatever reasons that we may trot out to explain for the increasing instances of rape and murder of women, the effectiveness and rigour of law enforcement will always be called into question. Every time a high profile rape occurs, the nation bays for the blood of the culprits and for sterner laws to be framed to punish the wrongdoers. Amendments may follow and a retired Justice may be asked to submit a report on ways to prevent the occurrence of such heinous crimes.

What we forget is that the existing laws have enough teeth to tackle rape cases. The only weakness is the lack of will, a climate of urgency and institutional support to enforce the existing laws. In my view, death penalty for rapes is a retrogressive idea. It isn't the severity of laws but the certainty of conviction that deters a potential criminal, whatever the nature of crimes. In liberal societies where human rights are respected, death penalty is considered to be grotesque freak of law-making.

Family matters

In the final analysis, it is not the glut of porn, not male backlash, not mutation and not poor legislation which are entirely to be blamed for the surge in crime against women. It is at the individual level that major accountability has to be fixed. We live in the same society under the same set of circumstances, cultural norms, environment and laws, but all of us don't become sex offenders. Rapes happen because some individuals become deviant due to psychological and sociological reasons.

And families are best informed and capable of detecting the tell-tale signs of a troubled character in the family and getting professional help and counselling early on before the person commits anything grave. Parents should teach their children to respect women and demonstrate to them by example the primacy of human values above hedonistic and materialistic pursuits. Women should also pick up the cues from the incessant stream of news of rapes and crimes and should always try to extricate themselves from situations that can put them in the harm's way.

The great pecking order

Having said this, I see a prejudice redolent of caste system in the way media reports and society reacts to different instances of rape happening across the country.

First, media tends to overplay rapes happening in the metros-this is an unabashedly location bias. Civil society also calibrates the intensity of its outrage in direct proportion to the social background of the rape victims. Rape victims in Delhi get more government and media attention than those equally or more brutal rapes happening in the second-tier locations of the country. This pattern also fairly accurately predicts that if a victim hails from a backward region or caste or class, media will ignore it or relegate it to a one liner somewhere buried in an obscure page.

This pecking order gets played out in other issues of great import other than rapes. Let us throw our ropes further and look at the recent Boston Marathon bombings and the breathless coverage by the US media that followed and which was faithfully relayed word-for-word by the regional media over the world. The casualty of the Boston bombings, by Manipur or Afghanistan standards, was not so high as to warrant that kind of feverish attention.

The bombing claimed 3 lives. During that many days of reporting by the world media on the Boston incident, in Manipur, a driver was killed, a security envoy was attacked and an ambush was laid on a central paramilitary force. BBC didn't report these incidents; New York Times didn't notice and national media didn't think it necessary to carry the news on the front page. Who decides the allocations of sympathy and quota of media attention?

This hypocrisy. The ism of Us and Them. Disgusting.

It is said that God created men equal, but some are more equal or less equal while they live. That's why some rapes are more important. And some gets forgotten.

So my friendly advice is: be safe and be extra cautious because we are in the forgettable category.

N.B: Chastity belts on sale. Contact me at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com



(Views expressed are personal and do not represent official position)

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam , a frequent contributor to e-pao.net, wrote this article for The Sangai Express. The writer can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com
This article was posted on April 29, 2013.