‘Justice delayed, is Justice denied’
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, India has the highest cases of rape in the world; rape is the fourth most common crime in India. For decades, rape victims in India have been subjected to an archaic, insensitive criminal justice system.
One of the main reasons for this is the lack of adequate laws, and the social culture in India turning a blind eye to rape against women in general. This can be seen with The Nirbhaya Case - an epitome of one of the most brutal rape cases in India.
The History
Nirbhaya. Fearless.
Due to Indian rape laws not permitting using the victim’s name, Jyoti Singh was known as “Nirbhaya”, meaning fearless. The Nirbhaya case occurred in 2012 in Delhi, India. “Nirbhaya'' and her male friend were attacked on a bus and she was beaten and gang-raped repeatedly for over an hour. Over a period of 14 days, “Nirbhaya'' faced complications from surgery and she died in December 2019, 2012.
The aftermath of the case caused many demonstrations and protests in India. The bus driver and the five men were arrested and charged with kidnapping, rape and murder. One of the men arrested committed suicide in prison whereas one of the men was underage, therefore, faced three years in juvenile prison.
However, justice for Nirbhaya was a process long delayed. Though the Indian judicial system is built on the core values, morale and cultural traditions of Indian society, it has a number of loopholes which has increased crime against women, paving the way for rapists and criminals through its existing loopholes. Nirbhaya’s parents fought a prolonged legal battle to get deserved justice for their daughter, with the four convicts sentenced to death in March, 2020, almost 8 years later.
The Opinions
In the wake of events following the 2012 Nirbhaya incident, there has been intense public introspection into the nature of Indian society and the current structures of governance that have failed to keep women safe. The ignorance that follows gender-based crime is compounded by failure of the justice system of the country in securing convictions. Any legal definition of ‘rape’ implies some correlative idea of what is morally wrong with rape: its illegitimate use of force, its disregard of the victim's nonconsent, and so on. Feminist theorists have often sought to articulate a more textured sense of rape's wrongness, and of its distinctive harms, than the law alone can provide.
The deep-rooted patriarchy of Indian society lays exposed when people, including political leaders, type-caste the victims of sexual violence, as possibly having contributed to the perpetration of the crime. Some of the typical characteristics of the victims included women who dressed ‘provocatively’, ‘was out late in the night’ or was ‘behaving in a suggestive way that invited trouble’. Others suggested, in an apparent gesture of sympathy, that the rape victim becomes a living corpse, indicating the life of shame that the victims of sexual abuse are subjected to in the state.
Furthermore, it has too often been assumed that a woman's appearance, clothing, status, location, sexual activity, or relationship to the man in question either function as stand-ins for consent (as “asking for it”) or evince her consent as inconsequential. An important approach on the feminist agenda has been to challenge and discredit such ideas—to deny that what a woman wears, where she goes and with whom, or what sexual choices she has made in the past have any relevance to whether she should be seen as having consented to sex on a particular occasion.
Despite expanding the definition of rape under the Indian Penal Code to include non-penile-vaginal acts of penetration, the definition continues to conform to a gender-specific notion of rape, based on a predetermined characterization of the victim-perpetrator framework on the basis of their genders. The potential for a change in discourse and in law came in the wake of Nirbhaya's case, which saw a heavy increase in national attention directed towards the crime itself. As Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code stands, rape is something that only a man can do to a woman. There is limited recognition for adult male victims, much less female perpetrators. This impulse to view the rape narrative as exclusively that of a man violating a woman does an injustice to those whose own rape stories do not fit the typical mould. There is a growing need to reconsider the characterization of rape under the IPC in gender-specific terms, and to factor in the interests of various stakeholders which were not previously taken into consideration.
The Answer
Gender-based violence in India is a multifaceted problem. Sexual violence has been the hidden pandemic society has managed to ignore. Each day, nearly 90 cases of rape are reported in India, with many more going unconsidered due to the stigma and fear surrounding being a victim. The polarity highlights the plight of India’s women, who, despite the outrage after Jyoti Singh’s brutal rape and murder, still face unprecedented rates of sexual violence.
“Nothing has changed for women at all,” says Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother. Here we are, 8 years after, asking the same questions. The solution lies in practical and bigger changes, including establishment of courts specializing in crimes against women to expedite justice in rape cases, changing attitudes toward women’s roles in society, and erasing the objectification of female bodies.
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