Cross Posted at HereShe
Stories like these defy the very basic code of being human, of feeling any kind of sentience. I am enraged and immensely saddened as I write this and much as I try to piece together this torturuous puzzle, I remain utterly anguished by the rapid depletion of our ethical and spiritual values.
A man rapes his daughter for 9 years at the behest of some demented priest (?) while his wife plays a mute witness to this unspeakable violence. The story has been flaming across all the broad-sheets and TV channels; unfortunately some of them have chosen to sensationalize it a tad too much leaving very little to the imagination. The continued breaking of codes of conscientious journalism needs a whole different post and a very different sort of rant dedicated to it. At present, my heart is bleeding for this young girl; such ordeals don’t leave you unscathed. I can vouch for that. Experience has taught me my own hard to digest lessons.
Apparently, in this case, the male progenitor (calling him a father is almost abusing the sanctity of that term) was faring poorly in his business and raping his daughter was the antidote recommended by the said tantric. God! Can you imagine the sheer brutality of such a proclamation? But wait, for there will now be an increment in the quota of disgust you are experiencing: the girl’s female progenitor, her mother (sigh), watched her husband assault her daughter: she was brainwashed by the tantric. Ah! I can almost hear the sound of fury circling my stomach right now.
This is a very twisted tale of sexual extremism and blind beliefs. One could almost risk oversimplification here but on the surface this smacks of sexual repression – a psychologist has claimed that the perpetrators were accustomed to orgies – and in their hapless child, they found an easy release. How much of this is undiluted truth is anyone’s guess. I have known of so called “babas” and “tantriks” who channelize their own heinous intentions through their followers. However, I don’t want to assign apparent stereotypes yet. It’s difficult to believe the mumbo-jumbo about being brainwashed, you don’t stand naked and watch your husband ravage your child and if you do then either you are equally emotionally corrupt or you have had a lifetime of being conditioned to let go of your humanity. Whichever precedes.
I will not get into that rather cyclical debate of whether the mother was an equal partner to this crime or was she just a taciturn contrivance. My stand on this subject is fairly simple: abetting rape is as good as participating in it. And there is no such thing as a silent observer of a rape. That’s the ultimate lie. Man, woman or beast, I have no mercy for anyone who allows for something so terrible to occur and worse still, sits on it for 9 years. However, I also recognize that there may lie at least a few slip between the known and the assumed. So instead, I will focus on what I know and what infuriates me.
I wonder about smaller things though, how did this family conduct itself in say social gathering knowing fully well the incredible brutality that went behind the closed doors of their home? The girl is almost 21 now and must have been 12 when this started, how did she manage to get through all these years? Did she confide in someone at her school, a teacher or a caring friend perhaps? Did they ask her to shush about it? Did they hold her hand when she cried her pain out? Why did she have to wait for 9 years to see the smallest sliver of justice?
These are questions that are gradually clouding my mind and are threatening to swallow my faith in the Universe.
Rape is a four lettered curse of women everywhere. The language of rape is as offensive as the deed. It’s an act of ultimate degradation and violation and yet, somehow, for all the media attention it receives, I am appalled that a colossal amount of it is purely aimed at the “sexual” aspect of the act. When will the world wake up and realize that Rape doesn’t only tantamount to a very obvious physical defiling but more importantly – because so little is said and discussed about this – leaves the worst kind of emotional and psychological imprints?
I cannot and will not subscribe to those widely circulated – and extremely repugnant to the core – theories about it being the end of life and how the “victim” is forced to live in a shell of some sort because of something she didn’t even do. Such anneurysm inducing patriarchal nonsense we can do without in this day and age. No, my concern is more focused on how will this young person view life henceforth if she is not provided the right kind of support system and much needed therapy. Why isn’t anyone talking about this yet? There arises a sense of cavernous depersonalization in the aftermath of a rape that can turn a person into a skeleton. I have seen this from very close quarters. Emotionally and psychologically. The constant harassment at the hands of cops, lawyers et al, with their cold-blooded questions and clinically inured perspective can sometimes become a greater abyss from which the so called “victim” finds it difficult to climb out. The worst blow is the unholy conversion to a statistic. To reduce someone’s ache to a number in an inconsequential file that is left to eat dust on some rusty shelf.
On the flip side, there is often this rather unfortunate glamorization of a sexual assault; girls become women after such humiliation. I call bullshit! This is not a rite of passage, no it’s not the sexual equivalent of getting inked, smoking your first joint or your eponymous drunken binge. It’s an ugly and perverse thought to equate something that is perhaps intensely scarring (and personal) to speak of them in the same breath. Women don’t always become heroines in the aftermath of such debasement (they don’t need to), it’s a very coarse mind that can device and perpetuate something so entirely vituperative. A burgeoning social need to turn survivors into icons or martyrs is equally dangerous. Here I must make room for some clarity that I am in no way rejecting the empowerment that accompanies a strong woman’s ability to transcend her personal sadness and loss (post an assault), stand up and let the world hear her voice, however to expect every survivor to pen their autobiography and spew quotes is not only unfair but also undesirable. It’s excessive, to impose wants of heroism on someone who, herself, needs strength and support to first get her life back in order. Also, it is important to stand back and be prepared to hold them when they crash. And they do. I have seen it closely. I have known it even more closely.
There is also this absurd assumption that rape is often the victim’s fault, that they encourage such aggression against themselves. If ever there was a more laughable and yet pathetic stance, I have not met it yet. No one wants to be injured and humiliated. No doesn’t mean cloistered yes. It’s sardonic that generally men can’t read between the lines when needed. One person’s intent of causing harm is not a function of another person’s attire or attitude so let’s not even go there. There is nothing ambiguous about not wanting to be raped.
Off the tangent, it is surprising how none of the moralists who find a sense of purpose in attacking hapless girls in pubs find such incidents worthy of even a quick wave of their saffron flags. No one wants to pick up an issue like this though honestly on some level I am thankful that we have been spared some of the unnecessary mileage-gathering by disparaging politicos who usually like to flare their nostrils in public about law and order before getting back to nursing their gin and tonic in their whitewashed mansions with their whitewashed lies.
Rape is a reality. You may choose not to look into the mirror but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have successfully halted the ageing process, poor analogy this, but what I am getting at is this harmful double standard that either lets us perceive it as a somewhat unfortunate incident which must never be spoken about in polite society or a rather detrimental sort of glorification and sensationalizing that mitigates the possibility of actually conducting fearless communiqué on this subject. Tabloids thrive on gory and juicy tid bits, the masses start clamoring for hideous details; the more nausea-inducing, the better the sales. A brief discussion follows each of these gruesome reports (one that usually pins all the blame on victim or paints her an unfortunate victim without sparing a thought for any rehabilitation mechanism) followed by a quick disposal of the issue and the whole look-the-other-way routine regains momentum.
There still exists a primal mentality that raping a woman is essentially aiding her in coming of age process, it make her feel like a woman. Or that you can show a woman where she belongs by forcing yourself on her. As much as I detest pop culture-ish paw-waws I can’t help be reminded of that whole “war is menstrual envy” paradigm that makes turns me red with wrath (puns unintended). So going by that pronouncement, is rape another and much more brutal extension of the pillaging and plundering psychology, like the familiar war chants that resonate in training camps where soldiers make light of raping women. I can’t help but feel that link is missing here.
I feel a subsequent chills run up my spine as I type this because I have been privy to such vicious and utterly revolting sort of logic (?) in upscale bistros, the new age temples of the yuppie puppies as much as in rural chaupals smelling of cheap hair oil and a very morbid sort of masculinity, meting out tribal justice. This frustrates me no end. I have almost come to blows with similar kind of aggressors in both those environments and I felt sick for not finding any voice of support in either of them when it eventually boiled down to pinning the brass stacks. What does it take to really understand that rape is not just a physical act? The course of this much polluted stream of thoughts runs deeper than you can see. When you rape someone, you invade their mind as much as their body. That it takes a lot of courage and heart to be able to not constantly replay that moment, that scream, that pain, shot by shot like a particularly gruesome snuff movie, in your head. It’s about subjugation. When you rape somebody, you intend to make them feel inferior; you want to make them feel guilty of no particular crime except that of being at a certain place at a certain time. Rape denounces liberty. It condemns freedom. When rape occurs over an extended period of time, it’s trauma on wheels. Its a complete collapse of any form of ethical life one may imagine. Can you bring yourself to imagine the sheer agony that a girl has to live through in the moments before and after the act, – anticipating the oncoming attack and then trying to wash off its memory – let alone the actual, monstrous destructiveness of the attack? It’s unimaginable. No comparisons can be drawn, no analogies can be constructed. You will never know that pain unless you live that pain. Yet, one must make an attempt to assist those who did.
Let’s face the facts, people in India are fairly scared to even say the word Rape out loud, as though it might have some sort of acidic after effect that will eventually burn their tongues and gut their innards: a single, mortifying syllable that will burn their being. There are a lot of words we are afraid of – AIDS, homosexuality, child abuse, prostitution, drug usage et al. The irony is that some of them are even interrelated and if we could manage to flash even some light on even one of them, we could possibly engage in conversations about the others as well. But Utopia waits for Godot too. We have a long way to go before we get comfortable in our own duality and the secret lives we lead to actually go out there and seek a confrontation with the injustice that’s permeated out system.
First, as acutely painful a situation this might be, let’s not tut-tut too much and sound the death knells on any future possibility of a stable and happy life for this young girl. This is slightly difficult because the other extreme is that of asking a rape victim (throughout this write up I am continuously reminded of how much I deplore this term and what it represents) to forget it all and move on with life, as though the past has suddenly been discarded to a vacuum.
We don’t live in voids, life is a connected series of events but despite this, it’s not the sum of its parts. That’s the message that rape survivors need to see from us. That the answers won’t rain down on us courtesy some sublime divine entity. We need to stand up, enable a change, speak about it and help collect pieces of a rudely interrupted life. More importantly, we need to reaffirm that there still is life. A life that awaits this young girl, a life that is willing to accept and replenish – without judgment or a sense biased morality – all that broken.
Note: I wrote this after I read two consecutive stories about women/girls being assaulted and that decided the tone and the scope of this article. This in no way represents any prejudice or bias on my part when it comes to the subject of male and transgendered survivors of rape.
Rape is an abhorrent crime irrespective of who it’s aimed at.
