Full text version of what Kavitha Krishnan said

The YouTube video’s doing the rounds but here’s the full text (translated) version of what Kavitha Krishnan, Secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA), said while protesting outside the Delhi Chief Minister’s residence:

“Today we protested outside Sheila Dixit’s house…and demanded that she should resign [over the inability of the govt to provide safety for women in Delhi streets]. It is important to understand why we are asking for this in more depth, and also to explain to them [the administration]. Sheila Dixit has said that since the rape happened in a private bus, not on a DTC [public service/Delhi Transport Corporation] bus, how is she responsible? So we have come to educate her, that if there are buses in which iron rods just lie about, where monsters travel around the city in these buses, where there are no rules or regulations for the operation of these buses, where they can do anything, for this you alone are responsible, no one else. Today, if that girl is fighting for her life, you are responsible. Why was that iron rod lying in that bus, this answer only you can give us, no one else. You cannot blame anyone else for this.

But there is a further, more important issue here, that we came here to protest today but have also been doing [for the past few days]. When journalist Soumya [Viswanathan] was killed, Sheila Dixit had said that she was out and about at 3 in the morning, she was too ‘adventurous’. So we have come here to say that women have every right to be adventurous. We will be adventurous. We will be reckless. We will be rash. We will not do anything to secure our ‘safety.’ Don’t tell us what to wear. What time at night we should be out, how we should be out during the day, how many people we should have with us – don’t tell us any of that. When Neeraj Kumar had just become Police Commissioner, he held a press conference in which he said, what can the police do in cases of rape? First he said that most often it is people who are well known to the woman who rape her. He is right, this is a fact. But then, shouldn’t this make it easier for them to be caught? After all, if she knows who has raped her, then it should make it all the easier to catch him. We are not asking the police, why didn’t you stop it. But we are asking them this: the conviction rate, which has gone from 46% in 1971 to 26% now, who is responsible for that? This tells us that there is a frightening gap, a lack in the police’s investigations…there is no procedure on how you must proceed in cases of rape. There is only one procedure that I think all women and girls standing here are familiar with. If you go to a police station and say that you have been the target of sexual violence, the first thing they will tell you is not to file an FIR [First Information Report]. People will come from all over, even from outside the police station to explain to you, “don’t file a complaint.” Until you go up the chain of command and say that you are from a students’ group, or a women’s group, nothing happens. This is so ordinary, there can hardly be a woman in all of Delhi who doesn’t know that this is the normal procedure that the police follow, not written in any rule book, it’s regular practice.

There is yet another thing that Neeraj Kumar had said in that press conference – that women shouldn’t travel alone at night, they should have someone with them. If you are out at 2 in the morning, how can you expect that we [the police] will come to save you? Now in this rape that has occurred, it is clear – it was neither 2 at night, and there was someone with her. Now if a woman wants to be out and about at night, there should not be the need to justify that she has to be out because she is working, she is returning from work. If she wants to be out, if she wants to go get a cigarette, if she wants to take a stroll, this desire should not be made into her crime. We don’t want to hear this defensive argument – that women only leave their houses for jobs, poor things, what can they do, they are compelled to leave their homes. We believe that women’s freedom – whether it is within the home or outside it, at night or in the daytime, whatever she is wearing – is an important matter and this freedom to be, a freedom from fear, must be protected. That is what we are asking for. I am saying this also because I feel that the word(s) security and protection in relation to women are thrown about a lot – because this word security, and all of us women have heard it from our families, our communities, from the principal, the warden, we all know what it means. Security means – you behave yourself. You get back into the house. You don’t dress in a particular way. Don’t live on your terms of independence, that is what they mean by being safe. All the patriarchal norms and rules of society are gathered up and given to women as ‘protection’ and we reject this entirely, we are saying this is not what we want.

The Delhi Police has been running a campaign against violence against women. You might have seen the hoardings up near ITO…in an ad campaign regarding violence against women, there is not a single woman! There is a male film actor, Farhaan Akhtar, who is saying, Be a Man, join me in protecting women. So I want to ask, the brother who cuts his sister’s head off because she marries into another community, is he not fulfilling his duty of being a man, of being a brother? Is evoking masculinity part of the solution of violence against women, or is it the very root of it? It is very important to think about this. In the entire country, this is what we see outside the women’s movement, whether it is in government, police organisations, political parties, the judiciary…whenever they talk about the protection of women, they are talking specifically of a patriarchal protection of women. They are not talking about a freedom without fear, an unqualified freedom for women. Our work is this – the work of these agitations on the street which have been going on and I hope they continue – that the answer to such events does not lie in CCTV cameras, in the death penalty, in chemical castration. Our anger is legitimate, but I am fearful of “solutions” like this. If the problem is the conviction rate, how will the death penalty help? The conviction rate is low because in your entire procedure relating to rape, you don’t take the complainant seriously. It is another matter that the rape legislation is bad, it’s weak – rape by objects used to penetrate the woman’s body does not even feature in the definition of rape. A significant part of what happened on that bus in Munirka, which was so deadly, so dangerous for the girl, does not even qualify as rape under the law.

Here there is one more thing I would like to stress – Sushma Swaraj gave a speech in parliament in which she said something that I found utterly disgusting. Highly condemnable. She said, even if this girl lives, she will be a living corpse. Why? If this girl lives, I believe she will live with her head held high. She has fought. She fought, and that’s why, to teach her a lesson, the rapists beat and raped her. There can hardly be a woman here who hasn’t fought in Delhi’s buses, who hasn’t stood alone in her fight against this violence. Who hasn’t felt utterly alone in these situations. I read in the papers, I don’t know if it’s true, but I read that when she gained consciousness, she asked whether the rapists had been caught. Her desire to fight is still strong, it is not over. We salute that desire to fight, those who survive rape are not living corpses. They are fully alive, fighting, striving women and we salute all such women.

The last thing I would like to say is this: There are plenty of people who say in times like this – let’s not politicise the matter. But there is a need to talk about it, and politics is not cheapened by it. The culture of rape, the justification by people from up high – like KPS Gill who said that rape occurs because women wear tight clothes – the vast number of people who say these kinds of things…if we want to change this then we must make rape a political issue. We have to talk more about what women are saying about the violence that is done to them. And the government will have to listen. Shedding some crocodile tears in parliament isn’t going to be enough. By shouting about the death penalty you won’t be able to solve this problem. I find it ironic that the BJP is the loudest when it comes to asking for the death penalty, but states where they are in power, their own goons run about harassing girls wearing jeans, girls who have Muslim or Christian boyfriends, and warn them that girls have to be the carriers of Hindu culture and values, or else. We have to respond to these thugs with a counter-culture, a counter-politics of our own. One that demands women’s rights to full freedom, fearless living. We have been attacked by water cannons here by the police, and I have to say I have been really surprised by that. There are demonstrations all over the city, and surely the government should have some sense that this anger that people have is not going to be beaten back by water cannons and lathis. It is shameful that the government and police are ever-ready to attack those who fight for women’s rights, while presenting arguments oh behalf of the rapists.”

English Translation by Amrita Ibrahim (sourced via Facebook)

Why I haven’t stopped thinking about Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz

Crossposting from The Blue Pencil, our media watch blog:

Why I haven’t stopped thinking about Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz

Since I read Eli Sanders Pultizer-winning feature, ‘The Bravest Woman in Seattle‘, published in The Stranger, I haven’t stopped thinking about Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz. I read right through, and I’m not ashamed to say that I had to stop and take deep breaths on occasion. But at the same time, I could not stop reading.

Honestly, I do not have the words to describe why this is one of the most beautifully written pieces I have ever read in my life. But suffice to say that Eli Sanders has not just told the horrific story of what happened to Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz on that July night in Seattle, but he has told it with immense respect, upholding every possible standard of high-quality, ethical, long-form journalism.

As a friend whom I emailed the link to just said to me: How can a piece about something so horrific be so beautifully done. But it is.

Please also read the follow-up, in Jennifer Hopper’s own words: I would like you to know my own name.

 

What do we do when its the ‘Same Old, Same Old’

A very thoughtful – and timely – column in Open Magazine (19 May 2012) by Aimee Ginsburg, the India correspondent for Yedioth Achronoth, Israel’s largest daily. In ‘Same Old, Same Old‘, Ginsburg goes back 25 years, to when she was part of a fledgling campaign called ‘You are not Alone’ and the fight for Tel Aviv’s first rape crises centre.

Same Old, Same Old

How do you make a new story every time out of a problem that just won’t go away?

TL, a young colleague who writes for a daily in north India, was in touch the other day through Facebook (God bless Facebook). She has been trying to come up with an original way to cover the frequent rapes and the misogynist attitude of police in the National Capital Region (NCR) “and everywhere else”. Her editor has refused, saying it has been “done to death”. “But everything is still the same,” she told him. “Sorry, the story is old,” was the reply. TL feels a deep need to add her voice for change (‘the reason I became a journalist,’ she writes), and asked if I might have an idea on how to report one of the oldest stories in the world.

This takes me back 25 years, to when I took part in the birth of the first rape crises centre in Tel Aviv. We’d had enough. It was clear the police were never going to change their blame-the-victim attitude; that left to themselves, they would never change the abrasive, intimidating, humiliating protocols they invoked when it came to crimes involving ‘sex’. Police officers, politicians, judges, all voiced this well-worn opinion: it’s the women themselves who ask for it, and therefore deserve what they get. We were fed up, and started an awareness-raising campaign called ‘You Are Not Alone’.

I was a radio journalist and a columnist of feminist affairs (a pioneering venture at the time). I asked many women, some VIPs and celebrities among them, to share their experiences. Everyone had a story—about the guy on the bus or movie theatre; their boss, army commander, professor; their uncle, brother-in-law, father. Some did come out and speak on air, but many more stayed quiet, ashamed. For all my pioneering spunk, I was part of the latter lot.

If I’d had the nerve, this (of many such) is the story I might have told. Once when I was relatively junior, I did a late night radio interview with G, a superstar journalist, bohemian, radical leftwinger, cool guy. I had admired him immensely, for years. After the show, he and S, a friend of his, pulled out a bottle of cheap cognac and we drank and smoked right there in the studio. I was thrilled, obviously, and so glad I had worn my Mao hat and Nicaraguan hoop earrings. It must have been 3 am by the time S drove us all home. When we stopped to drop off G, he insisted I come in to see how great his house was, “just for a sec”, while S stayed in the car. The moment I walked in, he locked the door, pinned me to it, yelled out to S to drive away, and started sending his hands everywhere. I was trying to break free. He was surprisingly strong. I was really scared. I was yelling to S “Don’t go! Don’t go!” and G was yelling “Go! F—k off now!” Finally, I kneed him, opened the door, and ran to the car. “Thanks,” I said, trying to catch my breath. G drove a few blocks, to where there were no houses or streetlights, stopped the car, and jumped on me, my head banging on the window. When I managed to push him off and get out of the car, I realised I would have to walk 7 km through a very dark Jerusalem. I agreed to let him drive me home, my hand tight on the door handle. I stayed in bed for three days, small, ashamed.

Three years later, I received a journalism award for my ‘work to improve the lives of women’. The new spokesperson for the awarding (feminist) organisation called to give me the news and congratulate me. He introduced himself. It was S. I reminded him of that night. Silence. “So that was you,” he finally said. “Yup,” I answered. I fantasised about outing him at the award ceremony, but did not.

(I just learnt while writing this piece that S, a leftist and sympathiser of the Palestinian cause, was shot and killed several years ago by Palestinians during a terror attack. Should I hold my peace? What is the equation here? I am lost. I’ve changed his initials to deepen his anonymity, and send my prayers to his family.)

Twenty-five years later, what started as a noisy ‘You Are Not Alone’ campaign, has led to profound improvements in protocol and attitudes to this issue—the conviction and imprisonment of the country’s ex-president on charges of rape and sexual harassment not the least of them. Stick with it, I told TL. This is our news, old or new, and we can tell it any way we want.

In the news: Facing up to Rape

An editorial in The Hindu today (18 May 2012) on poor conviction rates and delayed justice for those who report rape in India. ‘Facing up to Rape’ points out that increased reporting of gender and sexual violence (up from 2919 in 1973 to 20,262 in 2010) has not been matched by an increase in conviction rates (in fact, down from 37 per cent to 26 per cent in the same period).

This is something all of us at Prajnya always worry about, as we think up and organise programmes, workshops, etc. We urge women to be bold, to assert themselves, to report crimes, to end the silence. But it sometimes does seem like we’re creating the demand without any supply to meet it. And somewhere, that doesn’t seem right. No easy answers of course, but this seems as good a time as any to voice our concerns.

Comment: Should a child rapist get a reduced sentence…

…because he was living away from home and therefore ‘lost control’ as his lawyer argues. Should we look kindly on him for losing control due to these extenuating circumstances and overlook the fact that he has sodomised a 10 month old baby?

Read what Indian Homemaker writes and sign the petition if you feel this reduced sentence is ridiculous.

We need stronger laws against Child Sexual Assault, not this random leniency.

We need a website which tells us exactly where convicted child sexual offenders are living after their release from imprisonment so we, as parents, can watch out for our kids.

We need a lot of awareness on the part of parents to get serious about Child Sexual Abuse.

We need a strong refusal to accept such ridiculous arguments and we need to protest against this.

Everyone’s take on women, clothes, rape

Postscript:

Two wonderfully nuanced and sensible responses to this whole furor:

Kalpana Sharma, ‘On wearing ‘obscene’ clothes‘  in The Hindu, 8 January 2012

Harini Calamur, ‘Lulling women into false sense of security‘, DNA, 9 January 2012

——————-

Sometimes I search for tactful ways to describe people’s stupidity. In this case, it isn’t really possible.

The story so far:

First, the Director General of Police of Andhra Pradesh said this.

Top quote:

“When you are taking food which gives good josh, you tend to be more naughty as time passes. I am giving you down-to-earth facts. Rapes are not in the control of the police … Even the villagers from coastal Andhra are wearing salwar-kameez (as against traditional dress). All these things provoke”.

Next, the Minister for Women and Child Welfare in Karnataka had this comment, when asked about what the AP DGP had said.

Third, and absolutely unforgivably, KK Seethama, former Head of Dept. of Women’s Studies at Bangalore University and head of the committee against sexual harassment had this to say:

I’m against women wearing obscene clothes. With such clothes, they tempt men and that’s why they get raped. Even when one wears saris , long-sleeve blouses must be worn. I tell my students they must wear long kurtas when they wear jeans,” she said.

“I advocate a dress code for women for their own good. What’s the use of wearing short tops and showing off their tummy? Women look pretty when they are well covered. Many women lecturers in BU wear salwars and jeans. What respect can they expect from boys?

Finally, voices of sanity:

Read Shilpa Phadke And Sameera Khan on ‘The 21st Century Politics of College Clothing’ here on Infochange India

Samar Halarnkar in today’s Hindustan Times on the ‘rash of stupid comments from officials about clothes, rape’ that ‘reveals why indian women struggle to advance’. Read his response here.

The rape of men

People (both men and women) often say to us, sometimes accusingly, sometimes defensively, occasionally in a matter of fact manner: ‘but men are also affected by violence’. And we always agree, because of course its true: men are affected by many different forms of violence, both directly and indirectly. And when we ambitiously say that we’re working to end sexual violence, naturally we mean violence directed at all/any human beings, whether male, female or transgender.

On a more personal note, one of the things that always worries me is that we tend to construct relationships and equations in shades of black and white. So if you like dogs, you must hate cats. If you work on gender issues, you must hate men. In other words, we must choose whom/what we support, and there’s never room for more than one. Anyway, this rant deserves its own time and place, but not right now!

To get to the point. The Guardian has a powerful, distressing and rare story on ‘The rape of men” (17 July 2011). Will Storr travels to Uganda, to speak to male survivors of sexual violence and finds out about the stigma they face and their reluctance to share their trauma even with their families for fear of rejection.

Warning: This isn’t an easy read (not that any article on sexual violence ever is) and contains a few graphic descriptions of rape/gang rape.

The Angriest Eye

A powerful first-person essay in Open Magazine (2 July 2011) on many things that continue to bother/anger many of us – how we react to rape, how we write about it, talk about it, don’t write about it, don’t talk about it. Read it.

The Angriest Eye

Sexual assault cannot be explained away by geography, morality, emotionality, causality, and certainly not anodyne reportage that allows you to skim and move on, says A Ranganayaki, who knows

BY A Ranganayaki

True life

One morning, two months ago, I read a horrific news report in the Hindustan Times about the rape and subsequent gangrape of an 18-year-old girl in Delhi. She was first raped by her brother’s father-in-law, who had asked her to his home on some familial pretext; she managed to escape him, found a taxi driver in her catatonic state, and asked to be dropped home. Instead, the driver and his companions took her someplace in Dwarka and gangraped her.

It was the use of the word ‘allegedly’ littered throughout the very short report that I first registered. It made me so angry, for some reason. I don’t think the word has been used or drawn my attention as sharply in reports about other crimes. Allegedly. Supposedly. Apparently. Maybe. We’re not sure.

Perhaps it is to do with my own ghosts, perhaps not. Reportage on sexual violence has, in recent years, become far more prevalent; popular, even. The typical ‘progressive’ response to this is one of affirmation, validation; the willingness to talk about it in public. My response was different. My entire being revolted against the ambivalence of the writing, because if anything, its uncertainty made the monstrosity of the act palatable. It gave me the option of feeling a passing horror at the article, and moving on. Then, there were responses from people on Delhi and its total lack of safety. That appalled me too.

Is geography central to this story? I don’t believe it is. Relevant as an aside perhaps, nothing more. The cab driver and his mates raped her again. Because she told them what happened? Because she was already a tainted, violated body? Did it excite them?

Sexual violence and abuse are primal and unspeakable. It is far more comfortable to denounce them in terms of morality, emotionality and religiosity than to actually engage with them. They defy historicity, context and the narratives of modernisation. They are liminal, suspended, beyond the reach of articulation. Predicated upon cornerstones of morality, anything remotely related to sexuality is always exciting press, but it’s a fine line—you don’t want to offend sensibilities. People ask me if talking about experiences of rape, abuse and violence help “get over” it. “Is it somehow therapeutic?” they enquire sweetly and cluelessly. No, I tell them. You never “get over” violence. The experience of violence is always constitutive of our beings, our identities and sexualities. The reason I speak is because I can; because I want to; because it affords some navigability through a maelstrom which holds no “rationale”, escape or solace.

The one thing that always haunted my own experiences of violence; sexual abuse as a child and as an adult, from familiars and strangers; relatives, friends, men who worked in the house, was validation—a desperate search for a reason, for it to somehow be explained. I realise now that this intellectual privileging of explicability and causality in our societies is almost as abusive as physical violence.

This is why I find the rhetoric of ‘justice’ so difficult to digest; as much as I think it imperative, it leaves no room for ambivalence, guilt, or just unmitigated grief and rage. Pop cinema either kills its raped women by way of suicide, or conjures a bloodthirsty story of vengeance. The real story, though, cutting across borders of class, ethnicity, education and colour, is one of silence, which sinuously metamorphoses into either strength or culpability; narratives of morality. As I read the story of this woman, my own memories bleeding copiously into it, I wondered: how do we transpose the story of our bodies, our corporeality, into the realm of our minds, making it more palatable, an abstract matter of societal morals and justice?

I have for some time now been interested in the exclusion of the body within the ‘intellectual’ strongholds of our societies—politics, law, medicine, culture. I have, in my academic bubble, been reading and writing about the forcibly silenced knowledges, experiences and narratives of the body. The idea that our bodies are systems—perfect, machinic and self-regulating forms—is at the core of our internal and personal definitions. Miracles of science, miracles of God, whichever you fancy.

Every time I come across an incident of sexual violence in the papers or
on the internet, I have a total breakdown. Every bit of feminist writing I’ve ever read swirls in my head. I try to remember it, hold on to it and be able to articulate it. Everything except a searing shame forsakes me. It’s in my body that this shame is branded. Not in my mind, not in the papers I write, or the endless debates I’ve had and continue to have. None of it abates my increasing terror at the realisation of the Foucauldian nightmare: that we’re either diseased bodies that must be cured, or docile bodies that must regulate themselves. When I choose sexual freedom, I’m almost constantly haunted by the spectre of disease or the nagging doubt of whether I’m complying with the hetero-patriarchal regime. I forget whether I was a desiring body or not. I forget if I revelled in my freedom of choice. I forget if agency had anything to do with it, or if I just needed validation from the fascist, violent, aesthetic laws of a system that categorically elides the stories that bodies tell. And I wonder; if I
can’t tell stories of freedom and celebrate them without fear and shame, because I’m never sure if they are in fact stories of freedom, how will I
ever do it with stories of violence and pain?

After facing unspoken judgement and humiliation at several medical stores in the city, I finally read a news snippet informing me that there was state opposition to the free availability of emergency contraception in pharmacies because it ‘promotes free sex and irresponsibility amongst unmarried people’. I’m still not sure how to respond to this. At every level it invisiblises my body, my agency, my choice. It denies me medical safety, it silences my desire. It tells me that the only reason I should need to have sex is if I was married, or wanted children. Not only must I struggle with the biology of my body, but also with the moral depravity that my society inscribes it with.

Among most women and many men I know and love, stories of violence and abuse are not uncommon. Our minds may hold the narratives, but our bodies bear the scars, memories and stories—a young child in the afternoon, when nobody is home to hear her scream. A teenager in her cousin’s home for the summer vacation, the gardener who came home every week, the cook who lived at home, her father, his sister. All these are stories of silenced bodies. I wonder what will become of the girl—the relentless media, the moral boulders she’ll be made to swallow. The ‘objective’ investigations, the panels, the decisions of arbitrary people about whether or not she’s telling the ‘truth’. Her body will become an altar, dead and unspeaking, upon which ‘justice’ will play out. What of us, you ask? We will forget, and drink deeply of our amnesia until the next time there is an alleged rape. My daughter, my sister, my dearest friend.

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In the news: Peace Corps Volunteers speak out on rape

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, one of very few long-standing volunteer programmes. Over the years, the Peace Corps has fought to remain relevant, despite constantly facing the prospect of its funds being slashed.

Earlier today, The New York Times published a story ‘ Peace Corps Volunteers speak out on rape‘, drawing attention to the number of women who’ve been raped while volunteering around the world. The story highlights the unsympathetic response of Peace Corps administrators, when women have returned to America and shared their experiences.

There are several points of discussion from this news story,  at least from my point of view. First, yes, volunteers do face the risk of rape and sexual assault when working in countries they are unfamiliar with, where they don’t speak the language or know their way around. Then again, they also face several of these dangers no matter where they are, even at home. Secondly, the response of the administrators is a predictable one – women interviewed for this story have reported being made to feel guilty and ashamed. These women speak of the strong ‘blame the victim’ culture prevalent at the Peace Corps.

But most of all, this story illustrates the inadequate training  on sexual violence around the world. Women – indeed all volunteers – must be trained to protect themselves from assault, to respond to violence and to deal with the consequences. Administrators need training to learn the right skills and attitudes in responding to such situations. Local coordinators need training on how to respond in emergency situations, how to access health care and treatment.

At present, it does appear that while sexual assault is included in the initial induction period in the Peace Corps, there is excessive emphasis on the linkages between sexual violence and alcoholism. To paraphrase, the dictum appears to be, ‘don’t get drunk or you might get raped or attacked’.

India does not have a parallel volunteer organisation but the story remains the same. The Police, the army, health care organisations, corporate groups – few institutions offer adequate training on sexual violence. And this remains our biggest challenge. We can organise several one-off workshops, roundtables, seminars. We can talk about this issue endlessly. But how can we get organisations to commit to putting the issue of sexual and gender violence on the table for discussion?