“What is the Meaning of a Woman?”: Rape Culture and the Mind of a Rapist

*Trigger Warning* The following piece contains graphic descriptions about sexual assault which may be triggering to survivors.

“Many people grow up thinking girls are less important than boys.  And because she is less important, you can do whatever you like with her.” – Sheila Dixit, Delhi Chief Minister (1998-2013), in her explanation for the prevalence of rape in India

I’m finally catching up on all the TV shows I PVR’d while I was studying for my bar exams.  That included watching India’s Daughter.  It is a documentary discussing the rape of Jyoti Singh as well as societal views of women in India.

Jyoti Singh was a 23 year-old medical student when she was raped and murdered on a bus in New Delhi.

On December 16, 2012 at 8:30 pm, Jyoti was on her way home from a movie with a male friend when she and her friend boarded a bus and were brutally assaulted.  Her friend was badly beaten and she was gang raped by six men as the bus drove on.  The attackers finally threw the bodies of Singh and her friend into a ditch and left them for dead.

The driver of the bus, Mukesh Singh, his brother Ram, gym instructor Vinay Sharma, 20, bus cleaner Akshay Thakur, 28, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta, 19, and an unnamed teenager launched the savage attack. They kicked her, they beat her, and they bit her.  There was penile penetration and then she was penetrated with an iron rod, resulting in fatal internal injuries to her genitals, abdomen and intestines.  One of the rapists held a piece of her intestines in his hands before throwing it away.

Upon arrival to the hospital, one doctor said that in his 20 years of practice, he had never seen such horrific injuries.  They told her parents that the systems by which the body functions were gone.  Doctors didn’t know which parts to join together.  Jyoti survived for two weeks before succumbed to her injuries.

Inspired by the harrowing incident and the ensuing protests, director Leslee Udwin filmed India’s Daughter.  It’s a documentary that “examines the values and mindsets of the rapists whom the filmmakers had exclusive and unprecedented access to interview between their conviction and expected hanging. It exposes a skewed patriarchal society in which an institutionalized view of women as second-class, and even undesirable, citizens leads to such heinous crimes against women. It makes an impassioned plea for change and reveals the deadly price one young woman and her family have paid for the continuing tragedy of violence against women.”

According to the documentary, a woman is raped in India every 20 mins.  That means that by the time you finish reading this piece, at least one woman would have been violated.

“In death she has lit a torch that not only this country, but the whole word got lit up.  But at the same time, she posed a question. What is the meaning of ‘a woman?’ how is she looked upon by society today?”

The problem is not only localized to India, however.  In response to India’s Daughter, filmmaker Harvinder Singh made a film entitled United Kingdom’s Daughters which reveals that the situation is similar in Western nations.  According to her film, 250 women in the UK are raped daily and 10 per cent of UK women said they experienced sexual victimization.

One wonders what goes on in the minds of these men.  One wonders what kind of person thinks it is okay to rape.

When I read that the lack of brides in India is correlated with an uptick in the amount of (reported) cases of sexual assault, I had to ask myself why.  At the risk of sounding ignorant, I asked myself: What is it about the male sex drive that if they can’t get married (i.e. find a socially-acceptable expression of their urges/outlet), they feel that they can (and must) take it any way they can get it?

Then I realized that I partially answered my own question.

These men feel like they can take sex.  These men feel entitled to it.

It then begs the question: “What is the reason for this sense of entitlement?”  Answer:  The objectification and commodification of women.  I had to remind myself that sexual assault is less about sex and more about power, control, subordination and domination and a “putting her in her place” so to speak.

An example may be the widespread rape of Black female slaves during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Because they were purchased property (aka chattel slavery), because they were considered subhuman and less than a person, because they had no protection, slave owners felt that they could do whatever they wanted with them.  The idea was that they bought them, thus they are entitled to their bodies.  As will be argued later on, anything that can be bought can be stolen.  Perhaps to them it was a buffet to which they invited themselves and sex was there for the taking — by any means.

Dr. Mary Ann Layden says that pornography is partly to blame:

“‘Men are not born rapists, but for some reason, many are increasingly justifying sexual violence. Why? Because pornography has turned the bodies of women and girls into a commodity. It is shaping the way men see women,’ says Dr. Mary Anne Layden, director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program in the Dept. of Psychiatry at UPenn.  “As soon as you say, ‘This [is] something you buy,’ then this is something you can steal. Those two things are hooked … So the sexual exploitation industry, whether it’s strip clubs or prostitution or pornography, is where you buy it. Sexual violence is where you steal it – rape and child molestation and sexual harassment are where you steal it. So these things are all seamlessly connected.

There isn’t a way to draw a bright line of demarcation between rape and prostitution and pornography and child molestation. There are not bright lines of demarcation. The perpetrators are in a common set of beliefs, and when we look at the research, we can see some of those common beliefs, so that we know that individuals who are exposed to pornographic media have beliefs such as [thinking that] rape victims like to be raped, they don’t suffer so much when they’re raped, ‘she got what she wanted’ when she was raped, women make false accusations of rape because it isn’t really rape … no one is really traumatized by it. All of these are part of the rape myth. People who use pornography accept the rape myth to a greater degree than others. So we have a sense that pornography is teaching them to think like a rapist and then triggering them to act like rapists.

When you cheapen sex and you cheapen women’s bodies, when you treat people like things, there’s a consequence — and one of the consequences is sexual violence…”

In her book Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, journalist Pamela Paul states that:

“Sometimes the fantasy world of pornographic women provides a negative image rather than a positive one.  Thomas, a tech-support staffer from Seattle, [says], ‘There’s a lot of strange stuff out there.  Bestiality, child porn, rape.  I never seek that stuff out but occasionally they appear.’

…”Men who view a lot of pornography talk about their disgust the first time they chanced upon an unpleasant image or unsolicited child porn.  But with experience, it doesn’t bother them as much — shock wears thin quickly, especially given the frequent image assault on the Internet.  They learn to ignore or navigate around unwanted imagery, and the third time they see an unpleasant image, it’s merely an annoyance and a delay.’

“For years, experts and communities debated whether or not viewing rape as depicted in pornography can cause men to rape women.  The research data on this question have been notoriously unreliable.  However, how men perceive men who rape is demonstrably affected by their consumption of pornography. [In a study with college students,] men who had viewed massive amounts of pornography recommended significantly shorter sentences for the man who [raped].” (pp. 88, 89)

While pornography is problematic, the reasons for rape go far beyond just porn.  Rape is part of a larger culture that makes violence against women permissible and sometimes laudable.  It is a culture that insists on blaming the woman for any ill that befalls her, a culture that tells her she is “asking for it,” a culture that blames her for her own victimization and sometimes a culture that tells her that she is worth nothing.

When asked about the rape, one of Jyoti’s rapists, Mukesh Singh said, “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape… Then [we’d] have dropped her off after ‘doing her’, and only hit [her friend] the boy.

“A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night.  Boys and girls are not equal.  Housework and housekeeping are for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night, doing wrong things and wearing wrong clothes.”

The mentality is more ubiquitous than we realize.  It is insidious, and is not only harboured by lowly laypeople but, frighteningly enough, by educated people alike.

“When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape… Then [we’d] have dropped her off after ‘doing her’, and only hit [her friend] the boy.

“A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night.  Boys and girls are not equal.  Housework and housekeeping are for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night, doing wrong things and wearing wrong clothes.”

One of the defense lawyers for the accused, AP Singh, said that if his daughter or sister “engaged in pre-marital activities… in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight…”  Another lawyer for the accused, ML Sharma, said, “You are talking about man and woman as friends. Sorry, that doesn’t have any place in our society. We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman.”

Moreover, many of the rapists grew up in poverty, witnessing domestic abuse, both sexual and physical, as well as prostitution all around them.  This may have desensitized them to violence.  In India particularly, there also exists a socio-economic dimension to rape, and the idea that “what I do to you doesn’t matter because you don’t matter.”

A telling example is in the interview Leslee Udwin had with another rapist.  Udwin says,

“One of the men I interviewed, Gaurav, had raped a five-year-old girl. I spent three hours filming his interview as he recounted in explicit detail how he had muffled her screams with his big hand. He was sitting throughout the interview and had a half-smile playing on his lips throughout – his nervousness in the presence of a camera, perhaps. At one point I asked him to tell me how tall she was. He stood up, and with his eerie half-smile indicated a height around his knees.

“When I asked him how he could cross the line from imagining what he wanted to do, to actually doing it – given her height, her eyes, her screams – he looked at me as though I was crazy for even asking the question and said: ‘She was beggar girl. Her life was of no value.’

“These offences against women and girls are a part of the story, but the full story starts with a girl not being as welcome as a boy, from birth. When sweets are distributed at the birth of a boy, not of a girl. When the boy child is nourished more than the girl, when a girl’s movements are restricted and her freedoms and choices are curtailed, when she is sent as a domestic slave to her husband’s home… If a girl is accorded no value, if a girl is worth less than a boy, then it stands to reason there will be men who believe they can do what they like with them.

“Gender-inequality is the primary tumour and rape, trafficking, child marriage, female foeticide, honour killings and so on, are the metastases.”

Before we turn our noses up to India and the United Kingdom, you should know that rape culture is here too.  It is alive and well in Canada (and really in any part of the world where women exist).

The documentary listed the following statistics:

• Canada — 1 in 3 women has been sexually assaulted. Only 6% reported to the police
• Australia — 35% of women has been sexually assaulted.  Only 15% reported to the police
• South Africa — A woman is raped every 26 seconds
• USA – 17.7 million women have been raped

Just like India, in Canada the problem is not lack of laws.  In Canada we have many codified laws against sexual assault and a broad definition of sexual assault that encompasses everything from molestation to penetration.  If there is no consent and it an assault of a sexual nature, it is sexual assault.  The problem is not the law.  The problem is the implementation of it and the prevalent social mindsets in spite of it.

The government of India commissioned committee to investigate sexual assault.  The findings of the committee resulted in the Verma report, which encouraged changes to the criminal code including broadening the definition of sexual assault and removing language of shame and modesty.  But that’s not enough.

There needs to be a fundamental shift in how we view women and their bodies.  There needs to be a change in mindsets.  This is an issue that should incense everyone.  I’m surprised I don’t see more women getting up in arms about this, especially since sexual assault is so unspeakably ubiquitous.  I speak out about this because what happened to Jyoti could very well happen to me here in Canada.  It can happen to any one of us, because we are women, especially if we are women.  The constant possible threat of sexual violence looms over my day and the days of women worldwide.  The fear consciously and unconsciously affects what I wear, where I go, when I go, to whom I speak etc.  Any of us could be a victim of sexual violence.  It is far too easy to be a victim of sexual violence.  As long as I am a woman, I live in a society in which I am vulnerable, and thus I will always be in sexual danger.  I’ve always noticed that when a woman is found dead, she is often raped and then killed.  Men are, more often than not, just simply killed.

What do we do?  We do what we can.  We call out misogyny where we see it.  We educate one another – our brothers, our fathers, our sons, our uncles, but also our sisters, mothers, aunts and our friends.  We educate all humans.  We write.  We speak up.  We protest.  We engage in conversation.  We challenge backward thoughts and the men (and women) who think these backward thoughts.  We call out slut shaming and condemn victim blaming so that women feel comfortable about reporting rape.  That’s what happened in India with the ensuing protests.  According to the documentary, since Jyoti’s rape, reporting of sexual assaults has increased by 35%.  What happens after one reports a rape is another story, but at least it’s a start.

In effect, we raise hell the best way we can.  Like cancer, rape culture has to be cut out.  Identify it when you see it and stop it in its tracks before it starts to spread and do further damage.

Don’t underestimate seemingly asinine exchanges with people.  A five minute conversation, a witty retort can change a life. We know this.

Towards the end of the documentary, Jyoti’s father, Badri Singh, explained the meaning of his daughter’s name.  Jyoti’s name means “light.”  Her father, “Jyoti has become a symbol. In death she has lit a torch that not only this country, but the whole word got lit up.  But at the same time, she posed a question. What is the meaning of ‘a woman?’ how is she looked upon by society today?  I wish that whatever darkness there is in the world should be dispelled by this light.”

What is the meaning of a woman?  She is more than just the sum of her parts.  She is not an object.  She is not property.  She is a human being.

What is the meaning of a woman? Like Jyoti, she is a person with thoughts and dreams, goals and ambitions.  She deserves to live.  She deserves to thrive.  She deserves to be respected.

She deserves not to be raped.

Photo Credit: http://www.abplive.in/india/2015/03/12/article524481.ece/High-Court-refuses-to-stay-ban-on-BBC-documentary-India%E2%80%99s-Daughter

Note: I don’t dispute the fact that women can rape too.  However, given the focus of the India’s Daughter documentary and the fact that rape perpetrated by women occurs to a lesser extent than rape perpetuated by men, I decided to focus on the latter.  Admittedly, it would be interesting to investigate whether and how the mindset of a female rapist differs from that of a male rapist…