Rape Has Nothing To Do With Love
By Jim Taylor
09 January, 2013
Countercurrents.org
It was just one rape. Just one of thousands that happen every day. But it has galvanized public opinion as no other rape seems to have.
Warning – some readers may find this column disturbing. I certainly hope so.
The available facts are brief. On December 16, a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi was returning home with her boyfriend after seeing a movie at a mall.
Six men on a bus gang-raped her. For an hour. They beat her and her male companion with an iron bar. Then they threw the injured pair off the bus, into a ditch.
After ten days of intensive care in Delhi’s best hospitals, she was flown to Singapore in a last-ditch attempt for a medical miracle. It failed. Her injuries were too severe. She died December 29.
Additional details
My first reaction was to ask, “Where the hell was the bus driver while this was happening? Why did none of the passengers do anything?” Because in India, there is no such thing as an empty bus.
Details were hard to come by. Later news reports offered snippets of additional information. Apparently the couple had been waiting some time for a regular bus. An out-of-service bus came by and offered them a ride. They accepted.
That’s why no one intervened. There was no one else there.
Five of the six men involved have now been formally charged with murder. The sixth claims to be a juvenile. Under India’s laws, persons under 18 cannot be charged with murder.
Protest rallies have demanded the death penalty – a punishment reserved, in India, for only the most extreme crimes.
Personally, I consider death insufficient punishment. They should have to spend the rest of their lives running naked through Delhi with their genitals chained to the back of an in-service bus. Fortunately, for me and for them, I’m not their judge.
Cultural attitudes
But I’d like to think that the protests may mark a turning point in India’s patriarchal culture. Because in that culture, shame attaches to the victim and her family, not to the perpetrators.
No, not just India’s patriarchal culture – the world’s. Because rape is endemic, everywhere.
U.S. police records document over 80,000 rapes every year – almost three times as many as shooting deaths. But like the gun, the penis is employed as a criminal weapon mainly by men. The few rapes committed by women make headlines; male rapes are largely ignored.
Statistics on rape, unfortunately, are notoriously inaccurate. Google searches suggest that Canada has either the fourth highest rate of rape in the world, or the sixth lowest.
The U.S. Justice Department estimates close to 200,000 rapes or sexual assaults a year, with 60 per cent going unreported. In England, a government report similarly estimates “that between 75 and 95 per cent of rape crimes (officially around 15,000 a year) are never reported.”
Statistically, Sweden has the highest rate of reported rape in Europe -- twice as high as the UK, four times higher than other Nordic countries, almost 30 times higher than India.
No female traveller, however, would agree that she’s 30 times more likely to be sexually mistreated in Sweden than in India. In India, it’s taken for granted that men are entitled to grope women. Crowded streets and buses make it easy.
Women hesitate to report such personal invasions, because police treat them as if they had “asked for it” by their clothing or behaviour.
A weapon of hatred
I don’t expect the Delhi victim’s rape and death will end rape. But I hope it might change attitudes to rape.
Because rape is not an act of passion, let alone of love. It is an act of desecration, of vandalism, of domination.
The civil war in the Congo, for example, has cost five million lives – more than any conflict since World War II. Rape has been a primary weapon of this war -- 400,000 women raped a year. Over 1,000 rapes a day. Forty every hour!
A Congolese social worker called rape “a cheap, simple weapon … more easily obtainable than bullets or bombs.”
Rape becomes a way of humiliating the enemy, of expressing contempt for their weakness.
Hospitals report that when soldiers can no longer commit rape themselves, they violate their victims with sticks, pop bottles, even gun barrels.
The hospitals perform surgery to repair abdominal organs ripped apart by repeated assaults. “The savagery is beyond imagination,” a surgeon said.
That’s exactly what happened to the Delhi medical student. After exhausting themselves, the six men rammed their iron bar up her vagina. The victim’s brother told the Indian Express newspaper that damage was so severe the hospital had to remove her intestines.
Contempt. Hatred. These are the emotions that drive rape. Not love. Not even lust.
Nothing will bring back the Delhi woman. But if her death finally forces a few more people to realize that there is no excuse for rape, ever, her death may not have been a total waste.
Jim Taylor is a Canadian author and freelance journalist, with over 50 years experience in radio, television, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of 17 books, and continues to write two newspaper columns a week. write [email protected]
Copyright © 2013 by Jim Taylor.
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