“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.
