“Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I
endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
In the United Kingdom 400,000 women are sexually assaulted
and 80,000 are raped each year (2010/2011).
These statistics do not include rape victims who are male, whose
aggressors are both male and female. The
population of the United Kingdom is 20 times smaller of India’s
population. Yet living in the UK and
reading its media, one could easily think that rape solely existed in India and
that there is only injustice against women in the subcontinent and other ‘developing
countries.’ During the past week I have
had many conversations with friends and colleagues about the
twenty-three-year-old rape victim, now nick-named ‘Damani’ (lighting in Hindi).
A few of these discussions have proven to be productive terrains for analysing
rape as a social problem in the world today. However the majority of these
discussions have served as cathartic moments for the Westerner to express her
disdain for those ‘other countries that do not respect women’s rights’ while
proclaiming her own country’s superiority in this area. Facebook comments as
well have replicated this neo-colonial gaze towards other countries and in
recent days India has been rendered a monolith in human rights abuses; yet the
country in which I am currently living has aided my own country (the USA) to amass
over 1,000,000 Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani deaths. (Of course, nothing is
mentioned about these women’s rights to live in these countries.) As such, I am gravely concerned by the focus
placed by Westerners upon rape outside of their own borders since rape is not a
problem unique to India. Violence
against women is a global problem that needs to be discussed honestly and
without pigeon-holing certain cultures as more culpable.
Certainly women’s rights is an issue to be addressed from
society to society and there are often nuances of difference from country to
country regarding womans’ roles–both
perceived and real–within each culture.
Yet, it is also true that these discussions can only happen candidly
from within each society. As the good
people of India march in the thousands on the streets demanding reforms for
women’s and girls’ rights–from the problems of female foeticide to educational
access to personal safety on the streets of Delhi–it is imperative that we take
Damani’s rape as a call to analyse rape and women’s rights here in the United
Kingdom. For while we can make
comparisons between societies from the UK to India, this does not change the
fact that Facebook is now rampant with postings from women here who use
Damani’s tragic story to proselytise about the ‘evils of’ other countries far
far away, citing that rape occurs every 20 minutes in India and ‘Let’s not
forget Africa. And let’s not forget the women who are raped in warfare.’ The imperative here, of course, is that ‘we’
understand that it is worse ‘over there’.
Honestly, I am most uncomfortable with such arrogant brush strokes of
judgement, especially made by people whose knowledge of India (or ‘Africa’ for
that matter) is often limited to the media or at best, several months spent in
ashram, yoga courses in Rishikesh, various beach hangouts in Goa and/or the
‘volunteer’ stints with NGOs which are riddled with all the appurtenances of
Orientalism. (And I will not delve here
into my thoughts on the vulgar classification of independent African nations
under the nomenclature of this monolith ‘Africa’ with zero differentiation made
between societies and clearly no knowledge of the actual countries’ names and
unique histories and cultures.) What is
clear to me is that years after the lesson’s
of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized
is that in the West we learned very little from the colonial heritage which
implores the other to resemble us, to mimic our cultures as we perceive them to
be superior. Memmi writes: “The first ambition of the colonized is to
become equal to that splendid (European) and to resemble him to the point of
disappearing in him.” Yet the inverse is
also true: that the European expects this disappearance to occur because she sees
herself and her culture as far superior to the other and the other’s
culture. Hence Western subjects seem
drawn to take up the case of ‘women’s rights’ each and every time a travesty is
mediatised (not that they don’t happen daily here and abroad) in order to
cathect a personal issue onto the world terrain of human atrocity. The neo-colonial era of burqa from 2001 is now transformed to the
rape victim of 2012 who elusively escapes all media critique back home.
Yet, if we are to play the statistics game, we might as well
do it properly and analyse not the rapes that occurs every 34 minutes in the
United Kingdom, but the per capita offences per 100,000 which reveal a quite
different statistical field of information.
As recorded by the police registries of each country rape offences in
India show 1.8 rapes for every 100,000 versus 28.8 rapes reported for every
100,000 in the United Kingdom. Of course
we could then analyse what percentage of rapes are actually reported and
deconstruct the pool and statistical methods, etc. My point here is to underscore the importance
in understanding that these figures are simply terrible when it comes to
speaking comparatively for women’s rights in the world today–be it London or
Delhi.
In one of my discussions this week about rape, one of my
interlocutors questioned me about my experiences living in India and other
countries outside Europe and North America asking me if I encountered
‘problems’ while traveling. I was quite
honest and spoke of an attack I suffered last Spring on a bus in Karnataka,
India, where a man insisted on sitting next to me on a bus that was 60%
empty. Given that I had ridden next to
groper on the way to the temple, a one hour journey, I decided to inform the
man that the empty seat next to me was for women or children only. He
immediately started to hit my head and as I put my arms up to protect myself
from this drunken human, I was rather shocked that nobody on the bus did
anything to help me. I likewise noted to
the women who asked if I experienced ‘problems’ that I had experienced the
greatest aggressions as a woman while living in the West. For instance, in Montreal, Quebec when 8
months pregnant I was physically assaulted by a man for ‘standing too close to
[him]’ in a queue for a public telephone and while seven months pregnant I was
not only run over by a drunk driver but to this day I am still fighting for the
SPVM (Montreal Police) and the province of Quebec to proceed with an
investigation. I was also told minutes
after being hit by the car, when trying to press for charges against this drunk
driver this: “Madame, you are not hurt enough.”
A month later while asking for a report to be drawn up I was told:
“Madame, because of your pregnancy hormones you probably imagined being hit by
a car.” And quite recently in London, I
was stalked and harassed by my landlord during my first two weeks of living in
my flat; yet it took weeks of lobbying the Metropolitan Police Service of
Tottenham to take seriously the gravity of the threat. Apparently this man’s presence in my life as
a landlord was considered a civil issue despite his persistent attempts to
enter my flat daily and sending 18 pages of SMS in three days with references
to his mental instability (ie. ‘I am losing my mind’). Clearly women’s rights are not as fixed in
the West as some of my interlocutors would like to believe and I simply could
not claim that I had suffered greater threats to my person as a woman in India,
Algeria, or Mexico any more I have suffered as a woman in Canada or the United
Kingdom.
Yet in some of these
discussions, I felt pressured to jump onto what I refer to as the ‘burqa
bandwagon,’ a discursive space where Western women assert their societal
superiority and their own country’s excellence in legal jurisprudence. Personally, I am not drawn to such
dialectical arguments and neo-colonial spaces since progress is simply not a
linear development that begins at A and ends with Z, nor is it a demarcation
that can be made from across many oceans to societies that have very specific
differences in how women interact with men and other women. I am also far too aware of the media blackout
that has surrounded the murders of women, children and men in the past eleven
years in this ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan perpetuated by
ostensibly ‘enlightened’ and ‘democratic’ Western nations. The innocent dead see none of this
democracy. Were we to examine honestly
the place of rape in the global sphere, the UK and the US would have to
shoulder a huge amount of blame for having rendered unstable these countries
they have invaded and occupied lending a greater vulnerability to women and
children specifically as the link between women’s rights and economic
development and literacy is well documented.
As I have lived much of my life in various countries throughout Latin
America, the Maghreb, the Middle East and in Asia, I have come to learn how
societal inflections on the human experience do not reveal facile notions of
oppressor/oppressed. I have witnessed
how the oppression of women is often effected–as it is here in the West as
well–by other women and that hand in hand with oppression of women is the
oppression of men, albeit an entirely different form of oppression. Such discussions that polarise women against
men and the ‘modern’ against the ‘backwards’ only end up reaffirming a certain
Western superiority and linearity of thought which ends up reaffirming Western
paradigms of power and predispositions for framing the ‘savage, misogynist
culture of India’ as the backdrop for our paradisiacal projections of a
fictionalised equality.
As war crimes in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo
have highlighted rape over the past fifteen years, so did the pervasive Bosnian
‘Rape Camps’ of the 1990s remind us of the power of rape as a weapon of control
in conflict situations closer to home.
Yet, rape goes much further back than the US soldiers’ war crimes in
Viet Nam of the 1960s and 1970s or the Nanking rapes by the Japanese forces in
1937. Rape is found throughout history as it is well documented and cannot
simply be linked to x or y spot on the planet.
Moreover, media incursions into post 9/11 Afghanistan have highlighted
the need to understand rape in a larger context wherein women are not the only
victims: what was uncovered by many journalists post 9/11 is that boys and
young men were also the victims of the Northern Alliance. Likewise, revelations such as the Zimbabwe
female gangs who have been raping male soldiers has recently come up again in
media focus demonstrating the power of women to be sexually violent. When one
Facebook poster writes about Damani, stating, “As long as there are men on this
planet it will never end…,” I reminded her of the rape of men and the problems
facing these men in terms of reporting the violence and of having these reports
being taken seriously. The stigma for men to report rape today in any country
is most humiliating as these men are basically told that it is impossible for
them to physically be raped or that he should ‘consider himself
fortunate.’ Recent research into the
rape of men is revealing that there are far more male rape victims than
previously estimated and that many of the perpetrators are women (most often
mothers, aunts, nannies, etc). In the
United States of America 10% of all rape victims are men. And in another rape case in India this week
which has received far less Western media attention, a seventeen-year-old girl
from northern Punjab committed suicide after being gang raped by men with the
help of a female accomplice. To
demarcate rape as a unidirectional domain whereby only women are raped by men
(or that only men can possibly be rapists) is a disservice to undertaking any
honest discussion about rape today. Likewise, to discuss rape purely within the
confines of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘third-world nations’ is to diminish the
reality of rape right here in the United Kingdom and other Western nations.
What is going on with the need for Western subjects to
highlight Damani’s death as somehow endemic to India and other ‘third-world’
nations alone? I suspect that there is
something much deeper going on in this growing problem of armchair Facebook
‘advocacy’ which reveals myriad humans who click and ‘like’ an article about a
truism. For it is self-evident that a
tortured puppy or a raped Indian medical student is ‘a bad thing’, yet these
are the items of vast interest for people to idle away their days on
Facebook. There is a huge disconnect in
my fellow Londoners who post about the travesty of Damani whilst espousing the
superiority of their own culture. On the
one hand there is something incredibly violent about casually posting, sharing
and liking an article about a rape without the deconstruction of similar events
in our own political landscape. On the
other hand, this growing trend of armchair Facebook advocacy falsely simulates
a political action–as if ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ such articles is actually doing
something other than objectify a rape and a death which is for Damani’s family
and community alone to experience. All
the rest is cultural fetishism.
Let us learn from India and get off our computers to engage
in real political dissent speaking against all forms of rape here and now.
Julian Vigo is a scholar, film-maker and human rights
consultant. She can be reached at: julian.vigo@lubellule.com
