‘There is a tendency to blame the victim’: More needs to be done to solve India’s rape epidemic

India is the second-worst hit country in the world when it comes to Covid-19, but there is another epidemic that has proved far harder to contain – and for which there is no simple vaccination. It is one that has become ingrained within Indian society, rooted in patriarchy, fueled by gender inequality, and is infecting the world’s largest democracy without showing any sign of abating. The sickness? Rape culture. This is a social environment where sexual violence is normalised, impunity is widespread, and victim-blaming rife; meaning rape becomes increasingly common.

This is embodied by the story of Jyoti Singh. Almost exactly eight years ago, at 8.30pm on 16 December 2012, the 23-year-old physiotherapy student boarded a bus in the capital, New Delhi, to go back home after watching Life of Pi at the cinema with a male friend. That bus journey would be her last. The six men onboard (including the driver) beat up her friend and then took it in turns to rape her, before brutally assaulting her with an iron rod, while the bus drove round Delhi’s highways. After around an hour, the men left them both naked on the side of the road. They thought she was dead.

For two weeks Singh clung to life, receiving treatment at Singapore’s Mount Elizabeth Hospital, which specialises in multi-organ transplants (most of her intestines had been torn out), before dying of her injuries on 29 December. While lying in her hospital bed she told the police everything, including the names of the men; she said she wanted justice. All six of them were convicted of gang rape and murder, and in March 2020 four of the men were hanged (one of them allegedly committed suicide in jail in 2013, while the other, who was 17 at the time of the attack, was released in 2015 after serving three years in a reform facility). One of the men, Mukesh Singh, blamed his victim for what happened, saying in the BBC documentary India’s Daughter: “A decent girl will not roam around at nine o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night, doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.” He said they did it to “teach her a lesson”.

Singh became known as Nirbhaya – meaning “fearless” in Hindi – as Indian law initially prevented the press from publishing the victim’s name. Her story galvanised the country and the world, becoming a call to arms for women everywhere, igniting anger that had long been bubbling under the surface. Nationwide protests demanded a change to the climate of impunity when it comes to rape, and for a while it did appear as if this case would mark a turning point when it comes to women’s safety in India.

In response, the government set up the Justice Verma Committee, which produced a landmark report with a range of recommendations, such as the broadening of the definition of sexual assault, harsher punishments and measures to speed up prosecutions of rape cases. The then government introduced them only in part, through the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013, missing out several key suggestions, including that the death penalty will not solve society’s problems: what is needed is a change of attitudes towards women. Under Indian law, death is the punishment for the rape of a child under 12 years old and for rape and injury which causes death or leaves women in a persistent vegetative state.

Very quickly this case became not just about rape. It was an overdue conversation about equality between men and women that desperately needed to be had. The country had spoken and demanded accountability and justice, not only for Singh but for countless Indian women who had experienced something similar.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of her death, have those amendments worked?

Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the policies put in place in 2013 were progressive, however, “there’s the whole issue of enforcement and implementation, where there have been huge gaps”. This is reflected in the latest data released by the National Crime Records Bureau, which reveals that India recorded 32,033 rape cases in 2019 – an average of 88 rape cases every day. Campaigners say that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as many more go unreported. The conviction rate for such cases is shockingly low at only 27 per cent, despite charges being filed 85 per cent of the time. While 2019 also saw over 400,000 reported cases of crimes against women (including domestic abuse, kidnapping, sexual assault and rape) up from 378,000 in 2018, and 359,000 cases in 2017.

“There needs to be substantial reforms to the criminal justice system,” says Ganguly, “but to the point where convictions are higher, because when people see that rapists are properly punished only then will there be effective deterrence.”

Since 2012, many violent rapes have continued to make headlines. Most recently, on 29 September a 19-year-old Dalit woman died after being allegedly gang raped and tortured in Hathras district, Uttar Pradesh. Dalits – formerly known as “untouchables” – are considered the lowest in the Hindu caste system and endure regular social ostracisation, despite laws against discrimination based on caste. Out of all the reported rape cases during 2019, 11 per cent were from the Dalit community (almost 3,500).

The Hathras case sparked outrage not only for the horrifying crime but because of the serious mishandling by the police. They repeatedly denied that the rape took place, despite the victim telling them what happened and naming the four perpetrators who were her upper caste neighbours. After she died, the police cremated the victim’s body in the middle of the night without the family’s consent or letting them perform the last rites. They also reportedly barricaded the family’s village, preventing them from speaking to the media.

The narrative surrounding the case rapidly turned to blaming the victim for what happened; there were suggestions that she knew the perpetrators, maybe it was consensual, maybe it wasn’t rape at all. Under Indian law, police officers who fail to register a complaint of sexual assault face up to two years in prison. So far, five senior police officers who handled the Hathras case have been suspended and the four men accused of the crime arrested.

The state government still deny the rape took place, alleging that it is simply part of a conspiracy to spread caste conflict, despite an ongoing investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation. They cited a forensic report which found no trace of sperm in a vaginal sample taken from the victim, and have even enlisted a PR firm to help push this line to journalists. However Dr Azeem Malik, chief medical officer at the hospital where the victim was treated, told The Indian Express: “The samples were collected 11 days after the woman was allegedly raped, while government guidelines strictly say forensic evidence can only be found up to 96 hours after the incident. This report can’t confirm rape in this incident.” Dr Malik was reportedly sacked at the end of October for publicly contradicting the government.

Uttar Pradesh is governed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), known for its Hindu nationalist agenda. “The Hindu Varna means that society itself is constructed by the caste hierarchy. So caste bias exists throughout society – including in the police and judiciary,” explains Dr VA Ramesh Nathan, the general secretary for the National Dalit Movement for Justice. The state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, who is also a Hindu priest, is the same caste (Thakur) as the four men accused of the crime – his party colleagues reportedly held a rally in support of them. Dr Ramesh Nathan says that the general attitude of the police is to “be in favour of the ruling parties and the dominant caste”. He adds that there are many cases, not just the Hathras case, where the police say they haven’t received a rape complaint against the dominant caste, even if they have, and then file a counter-complaint against the victims. “It was only because the case got a lot of media attention that [the police in Hathras] started acting on it,” he says.

There have been several high-profile cases in the past involving BJP politicians. In 2018 a BJP lawmaker was charged with raping a 16-year-old girl, whose complaint wasn’t taken seriously until she tried to set herself on fire. This was also around the same time that an eight-year-old girl from a community of Muslim nomadic shepherds called Gujjars was raped and murdered in Kashmir. The alleged attackers were a retired government officer and local police officers who wanted to terrorise the Gujjar community into leaving the area. They were defended by several BJP ministers at a rally in support of the accused.

In the same year, over 630 scholars from India and abroad, including Noam Chomsky, wrote an open letter to prime minister Narendra Modi, to express their anger over the undeniable link between the ruling party and the growing violence towards minorities in the country – particularly Dalits, tribals and women. In the letter they pointed out that these attacks mostly happen in states where the BJP is in power and highlighted a pattern of protection for perpetrators.

Radhika (whose name has been changed) is a Dalit activist and an advocate in India’s Supreme Court who believes “Indian society is rotten with casteism and sexism”, she says over the phone. “It’s clear that the state government, the police, the law enforcement, and the upper caste groups all join hands together just to humiliate this one family [in the Hathras case], because they don’t want this Dalit family to seek justice.” She adds: “Dalit women are the oppressed among the oppressed in this country. Especially in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Dalit rights are invisible.”

But the Dalit community will not remain silent. “We’ve started raising our voices against all forms of injustice committed against us, because for so long we have been oppressed, for so long we have been slaves,” says Dr Ramesh Nathan. Members of the Dalit community are now demanding rights over the land and for an end to the untouchability practices of exclusion (despite this being in Article 17 of the constitution, it is still not properly implemented), as well as claiming political space and equal opportunities for education. “Today, the new generation, especially the girls, they are going to colleges and universities,” he says. This is one of the reasons behind the spate of attacks against Dalits in the last couple of decades – it is a backlash against their demands for liberty and equality. And often, it is the women who are targeted, with rape being the weapon of choice. “Upper caste groups want to teach the Dalits a lesson, so they are committing sexual violence against Dalit women – and it is seen as a violent act against the entire community and brings shame on the community,” says Radhika.

“Every time there is a rape there is a tendency to blame the victim and also the families who have lodged the complaint. Social stigma and also the humiliation that they could face after lodging the case can sometimes prevent them from doing it because of the social stigma around sexual violence,” she explains.

Victim blaming and shaming is still prevalent in most parts of the country, whether Dalit or not. Gunjan (whose name has been changed) experienced this firsthand. She was 13 years old when she was raped by the security guard of a local college near her home in Madhya Pradesh in 2018. Her mother was out and she had just put her younger brother and sister to bed. “I couldn’t go to sleep, so I went outside to stroll in the courtyard. I was very near my house. Then someone came from behind, placed a handkerchief on my face and I lost consciousness. I don’t remember what happened after that.”

She didn’t realise she had been raped until seven months later when she found out she was pregnant. “There was another time, when I was ill, and in the house alone. The guard from the college came to our house and started making inappropriate, obscene comments towards me and I told him to go away. But after that, I felt that something bad had happened and he had been stalking me.” Her family filed a complaint to the police.

“People in the community were goading my older brother telling him things like ‘just kill her’. But my brother didn’t do anything like that,” she says. “They were constantly abusing me and my family. When my sister used to go and fetch water from the nearby hand pump, they used to pass snide remarks like ‘oh, your sister has done this, your sister has done that’.” On one occasion, the police had to be called when a fight broke out between her mother and one of their neighbours.

“The people around here don’t believe in supporting people to get justice if something bad happens to them. They are not of that mindset. Instead, they just wanted to get rid of us,” she says, adding: “It never occurred to them that none of this was my fault.”

Luckily, Gunjan got help from a one-stop crisis centre in Bhopal, a city in Madhya Pradesh, run by the international charity ActionAid, which helps survivors of gender-based violence. Established in 2014, the centre – called Gauravi, which is Hindi for “pride” – is the first of its kind in India and provides temporary shelter, medical, legal and counselling services under one roof. “If Gauravi wasn’t there to support me, I don’t think I would have been here, or even survived,” she says.

The centre helped Gunjan get medical care so she could give birth safely and encouraged her to continue with her education. “I didn’t want to give up the baby, my heart wasn’t in it. But there was the matter of my education and I had to think of my family.” She ended up giving her baby up for adoption. Gauravi also helped her find a lawyer and a counsellor, who briefed her ahead of the trial. Her attacker was jailed for a minimum of 10 years, which Gunjan was happy with. “Death comes easy … But if he’s staying in the prison for life or a long sentence, he will be suffering more and maybe he will be thinking about what he has done.”

Sarika Sinha agrees – she is director of policy, campaigns and communication at ActionAid India, where she was instrumental in the setting up of Gauravi. “We say, increase the conviction rate – it’s not about hanging, because the moment you accept hanging then you’re equally stigmatising the crime. The line we take is, yes, if you’ve been raped then there has been physical violence, you have felt humiliated, but a woman’s entire identity doesn’t lie in her vagina.

“We don’t think a person who has perpetrated a rape should be hanged. With the state that these men are leaving women in [after rape], we think that [with the death penalty] they will certainly murder them now,” she explains. “The moment you say you must hang the perpetrator, you are saying that rape is equal to murder and hence you’re actually acknowledging that once sexuality is lost then a woman is almost dead.”

The survivors also get help with training and finding jobs, and Sinha tells me that many go on to challenge gender stereotypes by becoming plumbers, electricians and auto-rickshaw drivers. Now 15, Gunjan says her dream is to join the police force. “During my case procedure I met a lot of female officers and I was really inspired and motivated by them,” she says.

Gauravi also looked after Divya (whose name has been changed) from Bhopal. The 17-year-old was raped twice by a man who stalked and harassed her for two years, as well as holding her captive for 11 days. She says he told her: “Now you have nothing. How are you going to show your face to your parents? No one will accept you. No one will keep you. I am your last hope.”

This wasn’t helped by the reaction of the nurses when she went to hospital for an examination after the rape. “They were saying ‘how could this happen? Girls have too much of a desire to do it (have sexual relations) with boys willingly and then they just trap the boys.’” Shivani, a woman from Gauravi, arrived and began to help Divya. “Since everyone was blaming me, Shivani was the first person to say that it’s not your fault.” She put pressure on the police to find the attacker (he was eventually jailed for seven years in 2018) and arranged for her to see a counsellor.

“Men have to change their mindset,” says Divya. “They think that they can destroy our honour, our reputation, our dignity, and think that our parents now will not take us back [after rape], [and that] we are hopeless. They use this tool of dishonouring to exploit us.” However, she says society “needs to realise that it’s nothing like that; [men] cannot take away our honour and dignity.”

Divya is continuing with her studies, and she says that, thanks to Gauravi, her confidence is growing. In the future she hopes to become an accountant. “I want to be successful in life so that I can show them that my future is not dependent on my virginity or what has happened with me. It is much more than that.”

There are now over 680 one-stop crisis centres in India – the government’s initial plan was to have one in every district (there are over 700 districts in India). Many of these are funded by the central government using the Nirbhaya fund – a pot of 30 billion rupees (£305m) – which launched in 2013 to better protect women in response to the Delhi gang rape. However, there have been several reports of a lack of infrastructure at the centres, as well as delayed funding. At the start of the year a parliamentary panel found that only 36 per cent of the Nirbhaya Fund had been utilised over the past seven years. The Ministry for Women and Child Development – the government agency in charge of distributing the fund – did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Gauravi is funded by ActionAid and the Madhya Pradesh government. So far the centre has supported 39,777 women and girls. “We’ve helped many Dalit women, as well as Tribal and Muslim women who are our priority in Gauravi. So we deal with the most excluded women there.” She says she’s seen many Hathras-type cases and the centre has been under a lot of pressure. “Gauravi has had physical attacks and some of us have also been attacked, which is something that we’ve now learnt to take in our stride.” Sinha herself has been groped and almost been raped twice.

She recalls a shocking conversation with a man who attended one of her gender equality workshops seven years ago. “I still remember it, a man said to me: ‘If you’re f***ing a woman and she doesn’t have tears in her eyes and blood in her vagina, then you haven’t f***ed her well enough.’ So how do you change that? Not by introducing a law,” says Sinha.

Changing the mindsets of men is the first step to addressing the rape crisis. “We have to work with boys and men. We have to have education around gender in schools,” she says, adding that a lot of Indian customs need to be questioned. “Girls are a source of impoverishment, because when you bring them up and then she gets married and then there is this patrilineal world so then she moves away. You can’t give her land because your land is going to get divided. You give her a good education and spend your money and then you give money again for a dowry.”

It’s not just economic impoverishment. As the mother of a son, Sinha says her social citizenship is much higher than if she were the mother of three girls. “That is the very deep-rooted, hegemonic masculine patriarchal culture – we need to change that.”

Has Narendra Modi’s government done enough for women? The answer appears to be no. Five years ago he launched the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (save daughters, educate daughters) scheme, which aimed to improve gender equality through education, as well as increase India’s child sex ratio (the number of girls born for every 1,000 boys). Despite this a government survey in 2018 showed that there are 63 million women statistically “missing” across India. Many think this is down to sex-selective abortions due to the preference for sons, as well as better healthcare for boys. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020 found that India continues to rank third-lowest in the world on Health and Survival, remaining the least-improved country in this category over the past decade.

On top of this, Prime Minister Modi’s silence on the Hathras case is deafening. But this is not surprising: the populist leader is known for his poor record on human rights, from crushing freedoms in Kashmir to the controversial citizenship law which critics say discriminates against Muslims. In September, Amnesty International announced it was halting its work in India after the government froze its bank accounts in an act of reprisal for the organisation’s human rights work. Campaigners say this continued harassment and arrest of journalists, peaceful protestors and human rights defenders is more reminiscent of an authoritarian state than a democracy.

Sinha concurs: “We’ve been living under a fascist regime for quite some time now. A fascist Hindutva regime.” She adds that India is becoming increasingly xenophobic, a place “where identity politics is very closely related to exclusionary politics and violence happens in that name”. The people who bear the brunt of that are those who have historically been oppressed; the women, the minorities, the Dalits, and the indigenous people.

Ganguly from HRW says “proper governance is failing” when it comes to protecting human rights in India. “The truth is the BJP has now been in power since 2014, that’s a long time. It came into office with a number of very significant promises and it is time to deliver those – ensuring the protection of rights of every citizen. When Prime Minister Modi took office this was in fact one of the things he said.” She adds: “If India wants to be respected as a democracy, all of this [discrimination] needs to stop.”

Increasingly it seems that individuals, grassroots organisations and NGOs are doing a better job at striving for gender equality than the people at the top. In early 2019 I visited India and spent two weeks volunteering on a women’s empowerment programme with an international charity, which works with women’s groups in Kerala, a state on India’s southern tip. The programme coordinator was Midhu Antony, a kind-hearted local woman who was never afraid to speak her mind – she also made the best chai. She started working for the charity in 2017 as a way to financially support her family. Her role involves training volunteers to teach English and IT classes for women and helping schoolgirls with exam preparation. “It makes me happy to achieve something for my community,” she says.

A lot of the women who attend the classes are independent and have jobs. “I think the women here are getting a lot more chances, as they are getting more education and equal rights. I think men are also seeing this,” says Antony.

I remember a women’s group meeting in Kochi where there was a discussion on how educating the next generation is crucial in changing long-held beliefs that women are the inferior sex. One woman said she treats her son and daughter equally and makes sure her son does his fair share of the housework. They all nodded in agreement; small but meaningful steps in the right direction.

“In the past, men and women didn’t have that much education, but now we have a lot more opportunities in India to learn. Before, women were always expected to work at home – even if they were graduates or could get a job. They had to look after their family, that was their responsibility,” says Midhu, who now believes that is changing. She thinks the south of the country is doing better than the north: “In northern states, women are still not getting many opportunities to educate themselves and have to stay at home to look after the family. But in the south, we have a lot of opportunities, like studying.” Indeed, literacy rates in southern states, particularly Kerala, are the highest in the country.

Although she says many men still need to learn how to properly respect women. Midhu does this through running classes on women’s empowerment for young men and women at an English academy in Kochi (the classes that I helped with were mainly made up of men). “We’ve been working there for three years now. Overall, we’ve worked with about 1,000 people [through the academy],” she says.

During my time there, we ran a discussion on women’s safety. I remember one man in his early twenties saying he was frustrated about India’s reputation of being dangerous for women (a Thompson Reuters poll in 2018 found India was the most dangerous country in the world to be a woman, although this study was criticised as India was placed ahead of countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan), as he believed this was not true. 

He said that an increase in reports of women experiencing sexual assault can be seen as a positive as women now feel they will be listened to and believed, which he claims shows that there is no longer a social stigma around sexual assault. His female friend agreed and mentioned the success of the Pink Police, an initiative in Kerala designed to tackle crimes against women in public places, particularly sexual violence. Although she still admitted to feeling unsafe walking down the street at night and said she would either avoid doing this or make sure someone was with her.

One memory from that trip stands out in particular. To help the women practice their English we wrote out song lyrics and got them to sing altogether. Listening to a group of women, old and young, belt out the song “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy was a moment I won’t forget. They sang with gusto; their voices drifting out of the window, filling the street with defiance.

Progress is being made, but it is slow – and not enough. For many women it is too late.

Jyoti Singh was a young, independent woman, who – like many women in India – had dreams she wanted to achieve. She hoped that one day she would build a hospital on her ancestral land where there were no medical facilities so she could treat the villagers.

She won’t be able to fulfil those dreams, but her legacy lives on through the anger and determination for equality her story stirred in women across India. Nirbhaya was a turning point in terms of shedding stigma around sexual violence and encouraging women to voice their own experiences, sparking India’s #MeToo revolution. Genuine commitments were made after that fateful night in December 2012, but rape culture continues to plague India. It will only be through education, reforming the criminal justice system, and helping the most marginalised women to get justice that the country can begin to solve this epidemic. What it comes down to, says Dalit activist Radhika, is “treating other people with the dignity that we want to be treated”. Indian women have spoken; now they must be listened to.