Are You Even Worthy Of Rape?

Are You Even Worthy Of Rape?

The question is outrageous, and rightly so.

What goes through the mind of an eight-year-old girl, when she is kidnapped and gang raped for days? What is an eight-month-old infant thinking when a teenage from neighbourhood sexually assaults her on the pretext of safeguarding her while her mother is away for work? Or what is an eighty-year old woman thinking when she is raped by a boy?

Were they worthy of being raped?

As most men have defined it, a woman wearing fitted or short clothes is worthy of being raped, a woman eating Chow Mein is worthy of being raped, women using mobiles and social media are worthy of being raped and apparently, bad stars too make a woman being worthy of rape.

To put it into context, Surendra Singh, BJP¡¯s MLA from Bairia in Uttar Pradesh, recently said that to the media that his colleague Kuldeep Sengar, the MLA from Bangarmau, is unquestionably innocent of the charges of raping a 17-year-old girl in Unnao.

He, categorically said: ¡°I am speaking from a psychological point of view, no one can rape a mother of three children. It is not possible, this is a conspiracy against him (Kuldeep Sengar). Yes, maybe her father was thrashed by some people but I refuse to believe rape charge.¡±

Did he mean that a woman of three children is not appealing enough to be raped?

Millions of women, like me, spend most of their lives thinking of dos and don¡¯ts that may lead to molestation or rape. We think what we should be wearing, or how we should be talking or how we should be behaving to not let out a ¡®signal¡¯ that we were asking for ¡®it¡¯.

In 2014, before Manohar Lal Khattar became chief minister of Haryana, he told an election rally: "If a girl is dressed decently, a boy will not look at her in the wrong way. If they want freedom, why don't they just roam around naked? Freedom has to be limited. These short clothes are Western influences. Our country's tradition asks girls to dress decently."

We all have read sickening theories about what leads to rape. But what is not being as discussed as those theories is that what men think when they decide whom to rape. As revealed to us by Singh, ¡®rapeability¡¯ of women is something men do think about. To Singh, the idea of raping a mother of three is as absurd as a man going to the Sun. Out of question.

The grotesque sexual assault on an 8-month-old baby in Delhi in January prompted serious soul-searching. The child's parents had gone to work leaving their daughter in the care of their sister-in-law. It was the sister-in-law's son who raped the child. When the mother returned from work, she found her daughter lying unconscious in a pool of blood.

Was that eight-month-old baby asking for ¡®it¡¯ or was she ¡®rapeable¡¯?

¡®Modi: A Medical Textbook Of Jurisprudence And Toxicology¡¯, a textbook used for teaching in hospitals, and as a reference book in courts, is considered a bible in forensic medicine and reigns supreme in its field. The book states that it is extremely difficult to single-handedly rape a grown woman.

It is the same book that prescribed the two-finger test to establish rape as a must and, for years set the tone for rape trials.

Another book, Krishnan¡¯s Handbook of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, defines ¡®rapeability¡¯ of a woman. It says: ¡°As far as women from the low class [sic] are concerned, it is impossible to rape her because she is stronger.¡±

How many times have you heard your male friends discussing, ¡°Who would even date her? Look at her teeth¡±, or ¡°She is so fat there¡¯s no chance anyone wants to sleep with her¡±, or ¡°She is so dark, can¡¯t be molested.?¡±

It seems, for some, looks play a significant part while determining who is worthy of a date, molestation or rape, and apparently, men do spend a significant part of their lives thinking whom to date and whom to rape.

Also, how often have you heard your female friends or colleagues vehemently discussing another female jo us ladke se kaise chipak ke baat kar rahi thi. Aise mein rape nahi hoga toh kya hoga? Baad mein royegi.

For instance, I was once discussing the recent spate of rapes in the country with my male friend. As we started talking about the mindset of rapists, he said, ¡°When we were in school we would think about rapes as a thing that excites you. Our movies show it like that. They turn it into a fantasy by sexualising it and it is no longer perceived as a crime. Back then, we did not have enough brain to understand what rape actually is.¡± I had no reply but of course yes, our cinema culture does glorify rapes.

As the conversation moved to extracting revenge by raping someone¡¯s daughter, mother, sister or wife, as is the fashion, I remarked that as a woman, no matter how upset I am with someone and that I may have killed that person a hundred times in my head, I would not think of going out and raping their son or brother.

My words sounded exceptionally awkward and were followed by a long ¡°Hmmmmm¡±.

According to a Human Rights Watch report titled ¡®Attacks On Dalit Women: A Pattern Of Impunity¡¯, ¡°Singularly positioned at the bottom of India¡¯s caste, class, and gender hierarchies, largely uneducated and consistently paid less than their male counterparts, Dalit women make up the majority of landless laborers and scavengers, as well as a significant percentage of the women forced into prostitution in rural areas or sold into urban brothels.¡±

Hence, caste too is a determining factor in ¡®rapeability¡¯ of a woman.

Bhanwari Devi¡¯s case is a typical example of the influence of caste bias on the justice system and the inability of lower-caste women to obtain redress.

On September 22, 1992, in the presence of her husband, Bhanwari was gang raped by members of the Gurjar family in retaliation for her intervention in the child marriage. Upon approaching the police, Bhanwari was told, however, that she was too old and unattractive to merit the attention of young men. In 1995, a trial judge acquitted the accused on the reasoning that, ¡°rape is usually committed by teenagers, and since the accused are middle-aged and therefore respectable, they could not have committed the crime. An upper-caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower-caste woman.¡±

The court here was purely motivated with the disbelief that such crimes could actually take place.

In the well-known Suman Rani custodial rape case, the Supreme Court refused to apply the minimum ten-year sentence to the police officers charged because of the victim¡¯s ¡°questionable character.¡± The court¡¯s opinion quoted a medical officer who testified that the ¡°victim girl [was] used to frequent intercourse and parturition and there was no mark of violence of sexual assault on any part of her body.¡±

F***ability and rapeability go hand in hand here.

No matter how crude and frightening it may seem, for the virile, rape has merely become a pastime where they can pick, allot a percentage of rapeability and sexually abuse a woman.

So, after profoundly considering the criteria of rapeability, was that infant asking for it? Was she dressed inappropriately to invite rape? Or did that elderly woman give out a signal? Going by all the factors as listed out here, I am not quite sure what happened there.