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Let's Talk About Sexual Violence

SlutWalk: Challenging Rape Culture Over four years ago, back in 2011, the world witnessed the global rise of the anti-rape and anti-victim blaming movement called ‘SlutWalk.’ Although the movement has a controversial name, organisers are determined to point out that the movement fights for an uncontroversial message – to smash ‘rape culture’ – or a cultural context in which rape and sexual assault are seen as inevitable, normal, justified and even desirable in some contexts.

Despite the fact that feminists have been challenging rape culture since at least the 1970s, SlutWalk is important because it inspired a new generation of women and men to put an end to the ways that victims are often blamed for either ‘provoking,’ or not doing enough to prevent their own assault.

Theo Leigh @1000DaysOfRain Don't be anywhere.

100% of rapes happen in places and locations. #safetytipsforladies

When victims of assault come forward, they are often asked what they could have done to prevent their attack. As a challenge to this, the movement encourages society to stop focusing on what people can do to avoid being raped, and start teaching people not to rape.

Although SlutWalks no longer attract mainstream media headlines, there is no doubt it helped pave the way for the contemporary resurgence of feminist activism. Women and men around the world are starting to both recognize and speak out against a range of practices, beliefs, laws, policies and rulings which promote or uphold rape culture.

And they are doing this in a number of ways. While protests such as SlutWalk witnessed tens of thousands of people take to the street, others are harnessing the power of social media.

In recent years, we have witnessed a number of feminist hashtags emerge which either challenge rape culture or offer a space where people share their experiences of what it’s like to live in a rape culture. As one person contributing to the hashtag #rapecultureiswhen noted: #RapeCultureiswhen you speak out about being raped and subsequently receive more rape and death threats

Dr. Kaitlynn Mendes Lecturer in Media and Communication University of Leicester Athor of the book, SlutWalk: Feminism, activism & media, out on 1 July.

What’s remarkable about this rise of feminist activism is that it’s not just adults who are participating. Over the past year, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have witnessed teenager girls challenging the ways that school dress codes shame women and construct female sexuality as problematic or ‘distracting’ for men. In the UK, a group of teens started the Twitter Youth Feminist Army to create an online space where young girls can talk about a range of inequalities they experience in their everyday lives.

So, while SlutWalk might no longer be visible, it no doubt played a crucial role in inspiring a younger generation of women and men to pick up the feminist baton and move us closer in the race to end sexism.

Anahita Mukherji @Newspaperwalli As #MeToo hits India, I’m amazed at the number of times alcohol has been used by med to excuse their behaviour. Isn’t it incredible that when women drink, they don’t turn into raging molesters and rapists. Interesting how alcohol only seems to have this effect on men. #TimesUp

Rape and the artist: Concerning sexual violence, myth meets the body in disastrous ways There are the everyday myths which circulate in courts, newspapers, and common conversation. Myths about who and how and why. Myths that clutter up the passages to justice and recovery.

A defence barrister in Belfast, 2018: Why didn’t she scream? ...There were a lot of middle-class girls downstairs – they weren’t going to tolerate a rape or anything like that.¹ There are also poetic myths, those first myths, which run somewhere deep in our representations and stories. These are more ambiguous than the former kind. They configure a knowledge; and yet they can lie unrecognised, curdling in the unexamined spaces of the collective mind. They can grow sly and violent. Or they can connect one human’s pain to another’s.

Julius Goat @JuliusGoat Women: We live in a constant state of vigilance because men pose a constant threat to us, here are literally millions of corroborating stories.

Men: What a scary time for men this is.

These myths are telling us. These texts are writing themselves into the flesh.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue so that she cannot speak of the violence he has done to her.

In 1988, a woman tells her interviewer: I wouldn’t have been able to verbalise what had happened to me anyway because I didn’t know what had happened to me.² Trauma steals words. What’s more, words suddenly fail to mean what they should - they fail to produce justice, or recognition in the minds of others. The line falls silent. ...Philomela picks up the thread: She weaves a tapestry depicting the violation and sends it to her sister who races to save her.

Quasim Rashid, Esq. @MuslimIQ To people complaining these sex abuse cases have created a world where man now have to think 10 times before they touch a woman.

Yes, that’s the point. It’s called consent. Welcome to human decency. #BelieveSurvivors

Shakespeare’s Lavinia, without a tongue and without hands, turns the pages of the Metamorphoses.

“Titus: Soft! See how busily she turns the leaves! / [...]

What would she find? Lavinia, shall I read? / This is the tragic tale of Philomel ...”³ Lavinia points to Philomela’s tale so that her father may know what has happened to her.

The artist seeks to make the flesh talk, to make the myths apparent so that we may read them, and not be merely subject to them. There is much work to be done. The artist becomes the teller so that another may say, yes, it happens like this.

1 Quoted by Susan McKay, “How the rugby rape trial divided Ireland”, The Guardian, 4 Dec 2018.

2 Kelly, L. Surviving Sexual Violence, 1988, p.142 3 Shakespeare, W. Titus Andronicus, Act IV, Sc.I

#Myth: Rapes are committed by a stranger. #Myth: A husband #Truth: cannot rape his wife.

Most victims are raped #Truth: by their Rape within partner or an acquaintance. marriage is a serious criminal offence.

#Myth: Victims will suffer physical injuries during a sexual attack. #Myth: Women lie #Truth: about being While rape raped. is an act of violence, in #Truth: There are no most cases victims will not more false show any signs allegations of rape than there of physical injury. are for any other crime.

#Myth: Rape victims resist and fight during the attack. #Truth: Many victims freeze and are too scared to resist or fightback.

#Myth: Sexual crimes are reported immediately. #Truth: Many rape victims do not tell anyone about being attacked.

#Myth: Male rapists are gay. #Truth: Male rape is most often committed by heterosexual men as a means of asserting power and dominance.

#Myth: A woman’s clothing or behaviour encourages rape. #Truth: The perpetrator is solely responsible for his behaviour.

#MeToo in India: Sordid link between casteism and assault must be addressed to prevent sexual violence I was no older than 12 when I first read about Phoolan Devi in an old copy of the Outlook magazine.

“They passed me from man to man.”

“Say it!” shouted Shri Ram. “Tell them what happened to Vickram.”

Admit it, bloody b****! Admit you killed him.”

Those were Phoolan Devi’s words from I, Phoolan Devi, the only first-hand account of the gangrape of the dacoit-turnedpolitician. In the weeks that followed, I shrunk inside myself, trying to make sense of what I had read. Space that emptied, as I shrunk inside myself, got filled with fear. Sexual abuse is ubiquitous, yet no one talks to women about this, we are just socialised into accepting this as usual. We feel it, sense it, and intuitively know it long before it ever touches us. We change, transform and constrict ourselves to fit into categories, labels, and expectations. Like fluids, we learn to take the form of the oppression that contains us.

A decade later, in my 20s, I saw the movie Bandit Queen amongst a mostly white audience. By then, Phoolan Devi had been gunned down at the age of thirty-seven. The controversies and critique had withered, and the film had gone on to win awards and universal acclaim. In the postfilm Q & A, a sociologist and a political scientist held court, without ever once mentioning the word “caste” or how its violence plays out in India’s rural and urban landscapes.

Instead what preoccupied this elite gathering was whether “violence begets violence”. “Whether Phoolan Devi’s killing the men who raped her made it inevitable that she would one day suffer the same fate.” Two things have been central to the stories about Phoolan Devi, her gangrape in the village of Behmai and her subsequent return to the site of her “greatest violation” for revenge. Where she is alleged to have lined up 22 men and shot them.

Representational image. Agencies When alive, Phoolan Devi objected to the film, its portrayal of her and the reduction of her agency. She said that the film showed her “as a sniveling woman, always in tears, who never took a conscious decision in her life.” She fought to have the film banned. Arundhati Roy in 1996 wrote, “Private screenings have been organized for powerful people. But not her.” In the post-film discussion, no one debated the morality or the ethics of directing and performing the real-life rape of Phoolan Devi when she was alive and had openly denied and disputed the portrayal.

Phoolan Devi spoke, we just never listened.

There was no consent, yet Bandit Queen director Shekhar Kapur felt that he had the right to retell it. When Seema Biswas, the actress who played Phoolan Devi in the film, initially expressed discomfort with the scene, Kapur told

her: “I am showing the height of humiliation, it is the ugliest moment...It should be like a woman suddenly mowed down by a speeding bus, people watching it should be so brutalized that they wouldn’t want to look at it again.” Kapur’s response and his gaze capture everything that is wrong with how we think about women, caste, and sexual violence. But more importantly, how silence, erasure, and apathy work together to not hear women.

Women are brutalised all the time, and Dalit women are brutalised because they merely exist. What Kapur forgets is this — when women are mowed down — it’s never sudden.

The pleasure derived from the brutalisation drives almost every act of violence against women. It’s a performance that the patriarchy enjoys, a woman’s body is also the society’s Colosseum, it is here that the most brutal of violence is enacted, and played out as a spectacle sport.

On 23 October, 13-year-old Dalit girl Rajalakshmi in Tamil Nadu was beheaded in front of her mother Chinnaponnu because she refused the sexual advances of the 26-year-old Kumar, belonging to the Mudaliar community, the dominant caste in the region. “Kumar arrived with a sickle. He abused them by targeting their caste and beheaded Rajalakshmi, in spite of Chinnaponnu trying to protect her. He took Rajalakshmi’s head and went home, where his wife Sarada advised him to discard it elsewhere.”

While newspaper reports have trickled in, Rajalakshmi’s gruesome murder remains seen but not acknowledged, heard but not listened to. Singer Chinmayi’s #MeToo story received nauseating coverage in Tamil Nadu, but Rajalaskhmi’s story has not. Reporting around #MeToo, even when the women have the privilege of caste, class, and visibility, has been reduced to salacious slut-shaming. The murderer Kumar is already being portrayed as “mentally unstable”. This silence and untruths around Rajalakshmi’s death is not an aberration.

It is merely violence reproducing itself over and over again.

In a photograph published since her death, Rajalakshmi’s mother Chinnaponnu and her father stand on a dusty road.

Both look exhausted, stare into a lens with glazed eyes.

Chinnaponnu looks small and frail. In another video on Twitter, Chinnaponnu is rudely questioned by journalists from the Tamil paper Dinakaran who asks : “When police first called you, did you go to the station?”

“Why didn’t you tell them this happened to your daughter?”

“Why are you speaking today?”

Chinnaponnu, still in shock, tries to speak, the father says, “We did.”

The journalist responds: “No. No.” “No. No. She didn’t tell them about the sexual advances then.”

Just as Chinnaponnu breaks down, student activist Valarmathi intervenes: “She saw her daughter’s headless body the day she went to the

station…it has taken her a day to get to a place where she can speak…what would you do if this was your child? You wouldn’t be standing, you would have died…She is speaking now, listen to her.”

Victim of some form of sexual offence since the age of 16

20%

Gayatri Spivak in her classic essay Can the Subaltern Speak? says, “And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever.”

The woman is never mute. She is never silent, she screams, cries and speaks. The easiest way to silence her is to shift the burden of proof on her, demand that she first prove her humanity first. Even as she struggles to articulate the violence, we demand that she prove herself “worthy” of being heard.

of women

3,4oo,000 female victims in total.

The argument is violent in its simplicity; we don’t see Chinnaponnu or Rajalakshmi as the proof of the violence they endure. Their words are never enough to articulate the justice they seek. We demand footnotes and annotations even for their lived experience. We refuse to see them as full persons. We refuse to listen. As activist Jason Jeremias says, “Rajalakshmi was 13 years old. She said no, and she was killed because she was resisting sexual assault by an adult. She spoke up, and the man returned executing her in front of her mother.”

Local activist Kausalya, whose husband Sankar was killed by her family for being Dalit, speaking to The Wire, made an important observation that this was a caste crime and a sexual crime, one doesn’t exist without the other. Sexual violence against women, particularly Dalit women, has become a socially and culturally acceptable means of asserting power. Acts of violence against them are considered not just normal, but completely acceptable within the norms of the community. Here, violence and caste are inexplicably linked to each other. In ‘Good laws, bad implementation’, political scientist Vasundhara Sirnate writes about “judgments from non-constitutional bodies like khap panchayats and kangaroo courts” that sanction extrajudicial sexual violence against women.

The social contract between the Indian state and its most marginalised is unequal. Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills referred to it as the “racial contract.” Applying Mill’s analysis to India, it becomes amply clear that like race in America, caste is the organising principle of the Indian state.

This caste-based contract becomes the building blocks of the republic — casteist polity, a casteist bureaucracy, and a casteist juridical system. In this system humanity, justice, and even freedom, are granted not by the Constitution but where one resides within this caste hierarchy.

4% of men

631,000 male victims in total.

Source: ons, 2018

Unreported Crimes

Roughly 1 in 6 sex crimes are reported to the police.

Of all reported rapes, only approximately 7% of those accused are convicted of the offence.

Student activist Valarmathi, in the same video, says, “This is violence upon violence. Is this how you question a mother who witnessed the brutal murder of her daughter? Even if you don’t have journalistic ethics, where is your humanity?”

Where is our humanity indeed?

Suchitra Vijayan Barrister-at-law and the Executive Director of The Polis Project

Source: ons, 2018; cps, 2018

She was drunk, this rape is her fault.

He was drunk, this rape isn’t his fault. #StopVictimBlaming

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