A wave of sexual assault cases in the national capital and other parts of the country has stirred the sociologist and academicians to look into the psyche behind this social evil. Though rape has always been there in the social consciousness to subjugate women but the current trend is alarming and needs a through scrutiny, say experts.
“Exposure to sex and sexually implicit material has sky rocketed in the last one decade,” said Rajesh Gill, Chairperson Department of Sociology, Panjab University. She said earlier sex was a closed subject but after the electronic revolution it has come out in the open which is having a negative impact on the social psyche.
If National Crime Record Bureau statistics are to be believed there has been a steady increase in number of rape cases since 2006. There has been a 9.2 percent increase in rape cases in the year 2011 over the year 2010 and the trend is only increasing.
Gill said, “The social stigma attached to rape is the main deterrent. A family views the girl child as their property and the typical patriarchal stereotype attaches the modesty of the whole family with that of the girl. Violation of a girl sexually, implies that the modesty of the whole family has been violated and hence people avert reporting such cases. However the exact statistics of such unreported cases are very hard to trace.
Recently in PGI a seventeen year old girl, delivered a male child, who was brought for an abortion when she was five months pregnant. However when the doctors refused to abort the child she was abandoned by her parents who accompanied her all the way from Uttar Pradesh. later she was rescued by a local NGO, where during a counseling session she revealed that she was raped by a local businessman. This shows the apathy that the society has towards rape victims. Most of the time it is the victim who becomes the accused and vice versa.
A lawyer on condition of anonymity said, “Even the evaluation of rape in the Indian Penal Code values the Patriarchal mental setup. Having sexual intercourse with a girl after falsely promising marriage to her is a very arbitrary way of looking at rape. Rape is about violation and not consent.”
She further adds, “To protect women first we will have to remove the stigma attached to sex especially when it deals with a woman in the society. Having sexual intercourse is not a crime but forcing someone to have sex without the consent of the women is a crime. But in Indian society a girl is treated as a commodity and her sexuality is her price that determines her position in the society.”
“Current trend of rapes are very disturbing. This implies that certain perversion has crept into the mind of the males who are looking for cheap entertainment here and there. All the more serious is the trend of gang rape in which the most vulnerable are been targeted, mostly children,” adds Gill.
Out of 24,270 reported cases of rape 10.6 percent (2,582) of the total victims of rape were girls under 14 years of age, while 19.0 percent (4,646 victims) were teenaged girls (14-18 years). Also there has been a 30 percent increase in rape against children. Offenders were known to the victims in as many as in 94.2 percent (22,549) cases according to NCRB data of 2011.
Experts say that parenting is amajor issue these days. In both higher and lower strata of society both parents are working in most of the families. In cities the condition is worst as most family are nuclear in nature and the child is left unprotected in absence of the parents which make them vulnerable to abuse. So the disintegration of joint families does have a negative impact on Indian Society.
However in rural society the problem is different. It is way of subjugating women and most of the time it is used as a tool to subvert a family and in the Indian context the victim is mostly from a caste which is supposed to belong to the lower echelon of the society said Sarvar Abbi, a budding sociologist doing her M.phil research on the topic.
She says that at times rape is an apparatus to show masculinity which is attached with power. Rest is done by the social stigma which forces the victims’ family to the brink of suicide. Even the popular sources of entertainment in India portray rape in a very negative manner. Most of the time a rape victim is either killed or forced to commit suicide and seldom a rape victim is portrayed having a normal life.
“It is not rape that kills but the social psyche attached to rape is what forces one not to report the crime or commit suicide. Sadly the successive governments talks about stringent laws but no one talks about rehabilitation and acceptance of a victim in the society. The demonstrations that followed after the Nirbhaya case that happened in Delhi to an extent subverted the stigma in an urban society but not in rural India,” said the young sociologist.
“People still laugh on us and pass lewd remark at our family members when in public. My girl named four people out of which only two got punished but the punishment that my family got is eternal,” said Raja Ram, father of a dalit rape victim in Jind district of Haryana. Congress President visited the house of Raja Ram last year after his daughter committed suicide following rape.
He adds, “My school going children are ostracized by the society but we are helpless. The whole country knows about my girl and what happened to her but nothing can help us.
We will have to live with this stigma all our life. Even the visit of Soniaji has failed to deter the people from calling us names