“Go to a pub in South Delhi. Go to Greater Kailash where there is free entry for girls. Jinhone 1000 rupaiye me wo karna hai wo wahan jati hai. Daru bhi peeti hai aur aapke saath sex bhi karti hai… Jis din koi thok dega rape ho jayega.”
(In these places, you’ll find girls who want to do it for Rs. 1000. They’ll drink and have sex with you. The day someone uses force, it becomes rape.)
-Sunil Kumar, SHO, Ghazipur, East Delhi
“Aasaan nahi hota uske liye. Bezzati se sabhi darti hai. Akhbaar baazi se bhi darti hai. Asliyat main wahin aati hai jo dhande main lipt hoti hai.”
(Its never easy for the victim. Everyone is scared of humiliation. Everyones wary of media and society. In reality, the ones who complain are only those who have turned rape into a business).
- Yogender Singh Tomar, Additional SHO, Sector 39, Noida
The brutal gang rape of a 23 year old woman in a moving bus at a decent hour was a blow to our collective conscience. We, as a nation, were forced to look for the root of this insensitivity; ingrained into the minds of a sizable proportion of our population, so deep-rooted into their psych that its repercussions ripple across the entire country.
Gripped by the ghastly crime as we were, around the same time, Tehelka exposed the shockingly insensitive views of the ‘law officials’ on rape. The Tomars and Kumars of ‘Bharat’ threw light on the toughest barricade a women faces in her quest for emancipation – the ardent belief of the society in the fact that ‘good’ girls don’t get raped.
If we are to combat this huge barrier the society poses, we have to effectively focus on three key areas. The law, the institutional structure of the police organization, and the judicial system.
Justice serving, today, is a long drawn and cumbersome process. There is a need for increasing the number of courts, and introduction for fast track courts for certain cases. This particular sentiment has been repeated again and again throughout the various debates in the media itself, but the importance of this one step is paramount in restoring the faith in the judicial process of our country.The law, presently, is not as much of the demon it is made out to be. The major problem area today is the collusion between failure to understand the laws by the police and blotching up the investigations due to shoddy training, minimum incentive to work, combined with haggard and delayed justice (if at all). However, we DO need to define ‘rape’ better, address the issue of marital rape, also making the laws gender neutral, all of which, among some other useful suggestions, have been recommended by Criminal Law Commission reports, and have failed to make their way into the amendments. Or in the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill 2010. There needs to be a stronger law, agreed, but a more pressing need right now is to focus on the police structure and judiciary. Any law overhaul would be ineffective without a corresponding improvement in accountability and fastrack delivery of justice.
Presently, getting justice has higher costs verses minimal benefits. It needs to change.
| *Defines as the number of convictions as a percentage of the total number of completed prosecutions that year. |
According to State Crime Records Bureau, in 2011, a total of 1,864 cases including those reported earlier were referred to courts. Eighty per cent of the cases are pending trial in various courts, and of the remaining 20 per cent cases, only four per cent ended up in conviction. In all, 74 accused were convicted, while the accused in the rest of the cases were acquitted.
Right now, we face an imminent danger. Danger from self professed moral brigade serving as police barging into the very very *spirit* of the women. Apart from a gross violation of human rights these sad statistics report, the ugly patriarchal views threaten the very bases of our democracy. We want to change the mindset of these people, but that is a long-term process.
Right now, just the fulfillment of the duties of our police and judiciary would do.
(The opinions reflected in this article are completely subjective to the author and do not represent the opinions of TIE as an organization)