Why rape victims are killed
Jisha was a young, Dalit law student in Kerala. Being poor, she lived in a hut; inadequately fortified against the aggression that prowls at night. She did her best to defend herself. She used to sleep with a hatchet under her pillow. Jisha was overwhelmed at night. Against the lust-maddened predators who pounced on her, vulnerable in sleep, she was hopeless in self-defence. They gave her no chance even to reach the hatchet.
Jisha is a symbol of the vulnerability that poor women everywhere, have to live with, and may be, die of. Their names make fleeting appearances in the press. We forget them in quick time. Be that as it may, these events compel us to ask a basic question: Why are rape victims killed with growing frequency?
One obvious answer is the increasing severity of punishments - devised with an eye on deterrence. The harsher the punishment, the greater the compulsion on the rapist to destroy incriminating evidence, of which the rape victim is the riskiest.
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| Jisha is a symbol of the vulnerability that poor women everywhere, have to live with, and may be, die of. |
Human conduct is necessarily complex. No event can, hence, be explained in terms of a single factor. What, then, are the additional factors that imperil the survival of victims today?
To unravel this, we need to reckon the socio-psychology of killing, which has a pretty ancient history. Killing is a sort of ritual. It is so even in war. In tribal contexts, those who killed and ate an animal were supposed to acquire the potency of the victim.
From a ritualistic point of view, it was not enough to kill. The killed victim had to be consumed, to make it securely one’s (or the group’s) own.
This idea was borrowed by religion, as in human sacrifices. (Stray instances of human sacrifices, with vulnerable children as victims, are reported even today.)
In the famous Nithari killings in Noida - which snuffed out the life of 47 children - each killing was, reportedly, accompanied by cannibalism. In the Jisha murder case, referred to at the outset, there is ambiguity if the victim was raped and killed, or killed and raped; making it, in the latter case, an instance of necrophilia.
The anthropological pattern embedded in all instances of murder is that of taking away what belongs to someone else (life) in order to make it one’s own. Every murder is, fundamentally, an act of robbery - irrevocable, irreparable robbery.
Murder is the ultimate expression of greed. Rape is its deepest psychological counterpart. Rape is symbolic murder. The distance between rape and murder is wafer-thin.
Our response to greed is ambivalent. We despise it. We also value it. Everything depends on the context and who the beneficiary is. If a mighty country attacks a neighbour and despoils its land and people, it is admired. The conqueror is celebrated as a hero.
If a pickpocket, perhaps compelled by hunger and sickness at home, relieves a person of a few hundred rupees, he is despised as a criminal. The difference between the two is, fundamentally, not one of scale but of mythology and mass psychology.
Ours is a covetous, greed-driven society. We have, of course, created sanctioned templates for exercising this brutal instinct. If a multinational corporation, for example, degrades a whole village - as in Plachimada, Kerala, by Coca-Cola - it is debated if what the company has done is criminal.
Admittedly, such options are open only to a few. The fact remains, nonetheless, that murderous greed is the very stuff of our social and psychic structure today.
The affluent can afford unlimited, indiscriminate sexual promiscuity. The poor are "under-privileged" or starved. (Sure, this is an illusion; but the poor did not create this illusion. They simply imbibed it.)
What makes this all the more dangerous is the fact that this architecture of "inequality of opportunity" is rendered provocative by our paying lip-service to equality. How are the poor, deprived economically, culturally, sexually, to exercise equality in the moral jungle we have created?
Fortunately, a vast majority among them stay - for various reasons that include lack of opportunities and restraints imposed by domesticity - within the confines of sexual repression. A few - socially unhinged and personally degraded - break lose. They have - or, think they have - nothing to lose.
The psychology of killing the rape victim kicks in via rape itself. To rape is to subdue and to conquer. It is hormonal and psychological one-to-one war. It is the modern counterpart of the medieval joust. The better, stronger combatant wins, and wins all. That psychology is punctured by the survival of the rape victim; for the aggressor hasn’t got all.
In point of fact, he has got nothing. He is poorer for what he has plundered. The victim remains as a bleeding piece of evidence for his aggravating degradation. The rapist does not rationalise it in this fashion. He feels it so, below the level of consciousness.
That given, the conclusion is inevitable. A single-point legal or legislative response to this alarming sign of social illness will not do. The brutal greed and murderous covetousness woven into the fabric of our society need to be reined in.
Social respectability must yet again become something more than the smartness of not being caught or found out.
Rape and rape-related murder denote a social illness. The remedy has to be also social, and not exclusively legal. Law must be seen as a part of our response; not the only remedy or our final refuge.