Never ending Nirbhaya's

Every day when I open a news paper and read there is always another story of a woman, girl or child raped and I again think to myself … Is this the one that’s going to change everything? Is this the one that’s going to keep me up for days contributing to the news media’s coverage? Or is this just another rape?

There is no such thing as “just another rape” for a victim. Beyond the sexual violation, there is the torture. Nirbhaya who was raped on a bus in New Delhi died as the result of not just rape but brutality beyond description. Everybody knows this, and everybody got angry, but anger runs out.

Between then and now, there have been many reports  about rape incidents. Which one was going to be the big one? Is it  that of a five-year-old girl in east Delhi,  a neighbor kidnapped her, raped her and tried to kill her. Then the police tried to bribe the parents 2,000 rupees to not talk about the case or a six-year-old girl assaulted in Delhi, five-year-old girl rapped and killed in Ranchi or another 10 year old girl raped and than locked in jail:

Hindustan Times wrote an article about a study by the Asian Center for Human Rights. It said this: “48,338 child rape cases were recorded during 2001-11, which was an increase of 336% in such cases since 2001 when only 2,113 child rape cases were recorded. The number rose to 7,112 cases in 2011. With 9,465 cases, Madhya Pradesh was on the top of the child rape table, followed by Maharashtra (6,868) and Uttar Pradesh (5,949), while Daman and Diu (9), Dadra and Nagar Haveli (15) and Nagaland (38) reported the least number of child rape cases during 2001-11.”

My question is, are we fit to be called a civilized society? Reading such stories makes my heart say ‘no’

In a more mature and educated world, conversations like ‘don’t let your girl out after dark’ and ‘don’t let her wear that’ don’t happen. Most certainly, people with public profiles do not make statements over microphones and megaphones that make growing boys even more acutely aware of the seemingly barbaric privilege of being a man. It’s the one thing he has over a woman that she can never have. The power to hurt her deeply with his own body.

Our laws allow us to let off the so called juvenile rapist in the Nirbhaya rape and murder case. This man went way beyond his hormones and used unthinkable actions to cause her grievous pain and lethal harm. What sexual pleasure could he have possibly derived through an iron rod gouged into Nirbhaya? And where had he learnt this behavior? I suspect he had seen it done before, and perhaps even tried it before and someone in his society negotiated a fair deal on the victim, left with a bleeding body and a soul damaged beyond repair. The budding rapist probably paid his way through his ‘bad behavior’ and came out for an encore.

If members of society condone rape as “a mistake sons make”, and believe their daughters can be bought off, married off and even disposed off at will, then the fault lies singularly with those of us who know better than to let them. Please don’t tell me that our rape laws are understood by every Indian in every language or that they even take it seriously. It’s a rape, not a piece of meat you are entitled to negotiate over.

Awareness spreads through conversations at home, education in school, what we see in movies and most certainly what we see every day on the news. When was the last time there were serial public debates in every language about the price a rapist should pay for rape?

We are publicly outraged by a censor board disallowing a kiss in a Bollywood movie. It’s time we accept that neither public display of affection nor premarital sex on celluloid teach a boy or men how to rape. Watching other men get away with it does. We don’t need the moral police and khap panchayats and more morons for ministers. We need rape laws that can actually let a common man distinguish the value of right from the price of wrong.