India’s Rape Culture-Who To Blame?

Waking up to the news of brutal rapes and murders are things Indians are used to. Sometimes, the news makes it to the front page and the rest of the time, it is contained in the pages thereafter. Interestingly, the amount of brutality inflicted on the victim has been increasing exponentially with every other rape case that makes the headline. It is as if the media has an algorithm in place for judging if a particular rape incident deserves to hit the headlines or not. Most of us would have thought what had happened to Nirbhaya was the worst extent humans could go to satisfy their lust. However, the recent tragedy that has happened to Priyanka Reddy in Hyderabad has proved our assumptions wrong. With every passing day, humans are proving that we are capable of doing terrible things, worse than what we would have ever imagined the previous day.

Stopping these incidents from occurring and transforming India into a haven for women is everyone’s wish. People seem to possess different opinions and ideas to fight the battle against rape. From banning porn to killing and castrating the accused, we hear them every day. Nevertheless, most of these ideas we come across are either inefficient to be implemented or just acts of seeking vengeance and often tend to overlook our ultimate aim of putting an end to the issue for once and ever.

Every debate about India’s rape problem is incomplete without the mentioning of porn. To an extent, porn indeed has a certain relevance to the matter. Interestingly, the argument of porn can work in both ways. If the Delhi incident could be attributed to the lack of access to porn, Hyderabad could be seen as its opposite. Once mobile data prices started to fall in 2016, millions of people got introduced to the Internet. This completely eradicated discrimination based on access to technology from our society. However, a majority of the first time Internet users used this data to watch porn. The porn industry on its own is very huge and they make different genres of porn, most of which we might come across as weird, and some of them even illegal to watch. And the people watching these tend to develop a fantasy around these genres. The fact that “Priyanka Reddy Rape” was one of the most searched phrases in Pornhub the same day the incident came to limelight explains this situation.

But can restricting/regulating porn alone bring about a solution? To begin with, the idea of regulating porn on the Internet is next to impossible. Restricting its access wouldn’t bring forth any positive change either. Thus, we are forced to look beyond the porn narrative. Another thing that gets blamed every time, rightfully so, is our judiciary. The Indian judiciary system has a long tradition of failing to deliver justice expeditiously. People argue that this instigates confidence in the minds of wrong-doers and paves the way for more crimes. The police encounter operation carried out today seems to be justice well served for the majority. Assuming that the encounter was pre-planned which the police deny, would the same have happened if the accused in this case had been a prominent figure? A significant number of cases that involve big guns and politicians are closed even before an FIR is filed, thanks to the corrupt police officers maintaining the law & order.

Irrespective of the benefits a fast and efficient judiciary can provide, a good judiciary by itself isn’t capable of changing things for good. The people who commit such crimes predominantly come from the backward sections of the society and they mostly don’t follow daily news. It is even possible for the accused in the recent Hyderabad incident to have not known about the 2012 Delhi incident at all. They live much simpler lives and they hardly care about the way our judiciary works.

In the end, the placards we display in processions and the hashtags we trend in twitter demeaning our men only end up frustrating them. India’s problem of rape is tied with centuries of oppression and blaming the men for it is unfair. We, as a society, must be held accountable for it. Misogyny has remained closely tied with our culture for centuries. The consent of a woman for sex has seldom ever mattered and women were considered as properties of men at best. Mahabharata, one of the two great epics of Indian literature, explains how the Pandavas gambled their wife, Draupadi away. Even today, our films glorify stalking and harassment of women. The Censor board passes scenes involving rapes and molestations but it censors consensual sex, or even the dialogues about consent and prevents them from being screened.

If the idea of stopping rapes from happening is still around the corner, educating the masses about sex and consent becomes indispensable. Nothing but proper education can put an end to our misery. Our children should be taught what sex is and why it isn’t a taboo; they should be taught what consent is, and why it is necessary. They should be allowed to interact with the opposite gender from a young age. The mystery surrounding their minds about sex should be destroyed. Sex education and not separation can put an end to our curse!