aThis year, India's lGBT community has seen some small successes. But it still has an uphill battle to fight, as the cases of corrective rape show. The Government should issue advertisements to spread awareness about this group]
This year has given Indians many things to boast of. The most recent one is our age-old yoga becoming an international event, which has made it to the 2016 Guinness Book of World Records.
Previously, a transgender person stepped into a college principal’s chair and transgender students were enrolled at the Delhi University — not as male or female but under the category of ‘others’. This will surely help them to overcome the social stigma that they have to face daily.
However, others communities that make up the larger lesbian gay bisexual transgender group seems to have been forgotten. Their status and recognition remains negligible. Meanwhile, we have just heard of a case of ‘corrective rape’ in Hyderabad.
Corrective rape is the use of rape against people to supposedly ‘correct’ the sexual orientation of homosexuals and make them heterosexual. Gays and lesbians are raped, so that they can be ‘cured’ and set straight. The term ‘corrective rape’ was coined in South Africa, where such cases are rampant. This criminal act has mostly been reported in five countries — Thailand, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Uganda and South Africa. Often it is the family members of the victim who facilitate the crime.
According to the crisis intervention team of the lGBT Collective in Telangana, there have been 15 instances of corrective rapes that have been reported to the group in the last five years. “We are sure there are many more cases, but they go unreported”, Mr Vyjayanti Mogli, a member of crisis intervention said in a media interview. “We came across such cases not because they reported the rape, but because they sought help to flee their homes.”
In most cases of corrective rape, the perpetrators are family members because of which the victims refrain from seeking legal recourse.
“Victims find it traumatising to speak of their brothers or cousins turning rapists and prefer to delete the incident from their memories and cut off ties with their families. Which is why such cases almost never get reported,” Mr Mogli says.
In many cases, parents request their young family members to forcibly have sex and ‘straighten’ the sexual orientation of their gay children — in most cases, girls. The parents want their children to become ‘normal’. A gay boy was reportedly forced to have sex with his mother to ‘cure’ his homosexuality.
Many gays and lesbians are silently suffering the pain, fearing to report against their own parents. Those who approached the NGO through lGBT networks preferred to run away from their homes and take shelter with their partners.
Hyderabadi filmmaker Deepthi Tadanki’s upcoming film, Satyavati, deals with the subject of corrective rape. The film is based on some “shocking real life instances” that took place in Bangalore.
“When I was researching on this subject for my film, I came across two gut wrenching stories of corrective rape — one, where a gay girl was raped by her cousin so that she could be ‘cured’ of homosexuality; and another, where family members forced a gay boy to have sex with his mother, in a bid to turn him ‘straight’. I tried reaching out to these victims, but they refused to talk”, Ms Tadanki said in a media interview.
Explaining how difficult it is to find statistics for a topic so taboo, Ms Tadanki said, “I wrote to NGOs who work with victims of such hate crimes seeking help with statistics. But to my surprise, not one organisation got back. Many rapes go unreported in India, and it will take years before something like corrective rape even gets talked about. That’s why I wanted to tell this story. I knew it is a sensitive subject, something that has never been dealt with before. I didn’t even have any statistics, but I had the conviction.”
Satyavati talks about a lesbian couple and their straight friend. “When the family members of the straight girl visit her, they doubt that she is in an ‘unnatural’ relationship with one of the lesbian girls. They plot a ‘corrective rape’ on their daughter as well as the gay girl,” reveals the 27-year old Guntur native, who has turned to crowdsourcing to raise funds for the film.
“Forty per cent of the film is now complete, but I am facing a financial crunch. I have been trying to crowd source money to complete the rest of the film,” she says, adding, “While lot of people said ‘kudos’ and ‘hats off’, very few are willing to make monetary contribution. But I won’t give up because a discussion on corrective rape needs to be initiated.”
Recently the online fashion portal, Myntra, came up with an advertisement titled, ‘The Visit’, featuring two lesbians. The Visit promotes the apparel brand Anouk and shows pure love between a lesbian couple. The advertisement has gone viral in the country and has become a major social media phenomenon. It got over two lakh hits on YouTube in just over 10 days.
The Supreme Court should recognise the lGBT community and the Government must issue advertisements to spread awareness about this group — like it did to fight myths about the human immunodeficiency virus and the acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
