Does India have a rape culture? Pick a newspaper, maybe a mirror

File photo of a protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi | ANI

Are you in the market for a catalogue of human depravity? Just parse the headlines from the last couple of weeks. 

In just under a month, we’ve witnessed bystanders filming a sexual assault in a busy street in Ujjain. We’ve seen the name of the Kolkata trainee doctor who was brutally raped and murdered, become a trending search on pornography websites. When we take a break from news about grievous sexual assault to process the trauma, we face death by a thousand cuts – like the induction of people, who allow multiple furloughs to rape convicts, into the ruling party. But no single party can claim the dubious distinction of excusing sexual violence against women; it’s all parties. A whopping 151 MPs and MLAs in our parliament face cases related to crimes against women. 

These are not isolated incidents. They are not anomalies. They are the visible symptoms of a deep-seated societal illness we know as rape culture. Rape culture is not merely about the act of rape, as the phrase indicates. It is an interconnected system of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours that not only normalise sexual violence, but excuse it. 

At the individual, institutional and systemic level, we exist in a rape culture. 

Here’s how this plays out at an individual level. In the first week of September, a woman scrap collector was sexually assaulted on a busy intersection in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh – the area is a part of chief minister Mohan Yadav’s constituency. The case is distinctively horrific because the assault was not only carried out in daylight, but was witnessed by multiple bystanders, who, in a stunning display of modern apathy, filmed the attack instead of intervening. They later circulated it on social media, from where it went on to achieve virality. The accused, Lokesh, and Mohammad Salim, the man who recorded the crime, were both arrested soon after. 

Voyeurism and desensitisation

There is a term for what happened to the survivor in Ujjain: It’s called ‘the bystander effect’ or ‘bystander apathy’. Psychologists hold that the greater the number of people present, the less likely they are to help a person in distress, either governed by self–interest or confusion. But forget intervening or assisting the woman in Ujjain, witnesses went a step further. They chose to give in to voyeurism, evidence of a societal desensitisation to violence against women.

Voyeurism and desensitisation are probably what guided men to search pornography websites for footage of the assault of the RG Kar Hospital rape-murder victim. You’d think this was an aberration, rather than the rule. But every such public case routinely ends up in the gutter of trending searches on pornography websites – and it doesn’t matter if the victim is a child or an adult. If it happened and involved non-consensual sex, Indian men are determined to unearth it. 

The institutional and systemic handmaidens of rape culture treat serious crimes and criminals with shameless frivolity. Rape culture welcomes those accused of violence against women into the ramparts of the Parliament and announces from the pulpit that “when rape is inevitable, lie down and enjoy it”. 

According to the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) that analysed thousands of affidavits submitted by our current lawmakers, two MPs and 14 MLAs have cases of rape registered against them. In addition, they have been charged with acid attacks, molestation, sexual harassment, stalking, and even “buying or selling of a minor for purposes of prostitution and marital cruelty”. 

When our institutions are not disregarding outright criminality, they’re busy rewarding behaviour that condones it. Meet Sunil Sangwan, who was inducted into the BJP last week and is likely to contest in the Haryana Assembly polls from Charkhi Dadri. Sangwan is not a criminal – he is a former jailer. During his tenure as superintendent of the Sunaria jail, Sangwan granted parole or furlough on six occasions to Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. The Dera Sacha Sauda chief is currently serving a 20-year sentence for raping two of his disciples and murdering the journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati. 

Singh’s releases often coincided with politically significant moments, such as state or local body elections, including the 2022 Punjab Assembly elections and Haryana municipal elections the same year, and the Ayodhya Ram Mandir consecration ceremony, ahead of which he was given a 40-day furlough. The convict was released under Haryana’s Good Conduct Prisoners (Temporary Release) Act 2022, which lets Indian women know that so long as our rapists adhere to a standard of “good conduct” set by other men, the harm they have caused us women is inconsequential. 

Not just a buzzword

Indian men – without a smidge of irony – love to tell women that rape is a reality in the developed world too. And I have to say that this one time, I agree with them. A trial that has left women around the world sick to their stomachs, is that of Dominique Pélicot, 71, who is accused of drugging his wife and recruiting strangers to assault her while she remained unconscious. The French pensioner’s crimes were carried out over a decade and were discovered almost by accident – he is one among 50 other men on trial, even though the evidence uncovered 72 suspects. 

Even now, it is the survivor who is forced to be heroic. She has waived her right to anonymity and has instead called for a public trial, for the world to see and know the several perpetrators. Not one among the 72 men recruited by her husband – or the dozens others who were contacted but did not participate – thought to approach the police to report the crime. 

Time and again, rape culture reminds us that the men who hurt and abuse women are not the deviation from the norm – they are the norm.  

More than 30 years ago, Catharine MacKinnon, a pioneering feminist legal scholar, posited a theory in her essay “Rape: On Coercion and Consent”. She wrote, “From women’s point of view, rape is not prohibited; it is regulated.” This seemingly subtle distinction has profound implications. Societal and judicial systems, instead of outright forbidding rape, merely manage its occurrence, setting conditions under which it is considered more or less acceptable. This radical understanding of rape, is a cornerstone of rape culture, and allows it to persist within the very systems meant to prevent it.

And this is how rape culture will continue to manifest in our societies. Instead of placing the burden of culpability and shame on the perpetrator, where it belongs, rape culture places it on the backs of the victims. Rape culture advises us to not step outside the laxman rekha of our houses, but when rape happens inside the house, rape culture asks us whether we screamed and tried to address our rapist as “bhaiya”. Rape culture demands that we rely on technology to inform a close circle of our whereabouts, but also to not use mobile phones. 

Rape culture shakes its head at men and women interacting freely and suggests that “boys will be boys” and that some rapes “are right”. Rape culture offers solutions like boys and girls should marry early, or marry their rapists, and that women who have sex outside of their marriages should be hanged. But so long as it happens within the bounds of marriage, rape is legal. Rape culture desperately wants to know why women survivors won’t file cases against their violators, and when they do, rape culture will sniff about bogeys like false accusations and perfect victims and how some women just do it for the “fame”.  

Rape culture isn’t just a buzzword for feminists to throw around. It’s the toxic foundation upon which our society is built. It’s the air we breathe, the grotesque cesspool we’re all marinating in. From the streets of Ujjain to the halls of Parliament, from porn sites to prison cells, rape culture is the twisted lens through which men view and police women’s bodies and autonomy. 

Rape culture doesn’t thrive because of a few “bad apples”; it persists because of the pervasive silence and complicity of the many, through action and inaction. It’s not just that we live in a rape culture – rape culture lives in us, shapes us, defines us. It’s the voice that tells women to stay home, stay small, stay quiet, stay submissive, all while excusing the inexcusable actions of men. 

The next time someone asks you what it means to live in a rape culture, just hand them a newspaper. And maybe, a mirror. 

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)