Written by Raakhee Suryaprakash for the 16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women
any sexual act or an attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments, or advances, acts to traffic or otherwise directed, against a person's sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim in any setting, including but not limited to home and work
—
WHO Definition of
Sexual Violence
Patriarchy is a social system in which: males hold primary power; males predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property; fathers or father-figures hold authority over women and children. It implies the institutions of male domination and entails female subordination.
—
Wikipedia on Patriarchy
I
believe that our patriarchal conditioning is the tap root of the weed called
sexual violence against women which is chocking the lives, productivity, and
happiness of women everywhere. It manifests itself in incidents such as the
Bengali Khap Panchayat ordering the gang-rape of a girl by her neighbours in a
tribal village for daring to have a relationship with an outsider. Why this
complicity, tolerance, and indifference to the subjugation of the fairer sex?
Patriarchy Conditions & Condones Sexual Aggressions
On
October 25th Iran hung a 26-year-old woman four years after she was put behind
bars for killing a doctor who sexually attacked her. Appeals, mercy petitions,
and high-profile campaigns to pardon her were all in vain. The eldest son of
the murdered doctor stated that his family “would not even contemplate mercy
until truth is unearthed … Only when her true intentions are exposed and she
tells the truth about her accomplice and what really went down will we be
prepared to grant mercy.”
As
of October 2014, 85 U.S. colleges and universities are under investigation for
mishandling sexual assault cases, leading to the White House launching the
"It's On Us" campaign, an initiative intended to reduce the
prevalence of sexual assault on campuses and raise awareness about the issue
while improving sexual assault prevention and response programs on-campus.
September-October
is India’s festival season where we celebrate the power of the primordial
mother goddess Shakti in her myriad forms over Navratri; prosperity and the
victory of Good over Evil over the festivals of Diwali and Kanda Shasti. Yet even
as we celebrate the supreme goddess and the victory of Good, the plight of
women in our predominantly patriarchal society is blighted by the insidious and
ubiquitous evil in the form of violence against women, particularly sexual
violence against women.
The
same day the hanging of Reyhaneh Jabbari was reported in my newspaper there was
a report in the state news page that an 18-year-old girl was arrested in rural
Tamil Nadu for poisoning her father and his friends, it was reported that the
girl who had just recently attained majority decided to kill her father by
mixing poison in his Diwali-celebratory liquor as he made sexual advances
toward her. Even worse in India’s
financial capital Mumbai there was a disturbing report about the requirements
for passport details. The lady advocate appearing for the foreign ministry of
the Government of India, in reply to a query of the Bombay high court judges
regarding a petition by a woman regarding the passport authority’s refusal to
include her step-father’s name there said, “an unwed mother must file an
affidavit stating ‘how she has conceived’ and ‘if she was raped’ and why she
does not want the father's name included.”
My
own brush with the mindless patriarchal biases of bureaucracy: as part of the
visa application process while planning a European holiday for my mother and
myself (both of us financially independent working women!!) we had to get a
No-Objection-Certificate from my father who isn’t interested in foreign travel
and wasn’t holidaying with us. Terrorists allowed but no unescorted women?
This
past week there was a lot of coverage about how the city of Chennai that prided
itself in a negative growth (–38.6%, National Crime Bureau data 2013) in crimes
against women wasn’t hospitable to single women. Also according to the Centre for Women’s
Development and Research, “between July and November 2011, 73% of single women
living in the residential colonies of South Chennai faced high levels of
violence both sexual and physical, from in the neighbourhood. Many of these
cases went unreported as the women chose not to approach the police, fearing
societal backlash.”
According
to UN Women, “Around the world, 1 in 3 women have experienced physical or
sexual violence, mostly by an intimate partner. About 120 million girls have
been forced into intercourse or other sexual acts at some point in their lives.
In 29 countries alone, 133 million women and girls have undergone female
genital mutilation. … More than 700 million women alive today were married as
children. Almost all of the estimated 4.5 million victims of forced sexual
exploitation are women and girls.” Violence against women is a human rights
violation and a serious impediment to women’s progress in any area of life. It
undercuts women’s health, prospects for education and productive work, and
ability to participate as full members of their societies, among other
consequences. Yet these human rights violations increase every day, hour,
unchecked by society.
The
perpetrators of these crimes are fearless and they are aware that their
position is stronger for the assertion of rights or use of law by anyone,
especially a woman victim, “is seen as a subversive act,” to quote Vrinda
Grover, a leading advocate in the Delhi High Court.
According
to the Indian Journal of Psychiatry paper
on the links between patriarchy and sexual violence
masculine
identity being associated with experiences and feelings of power and the
incidents of sexual violence involves elements of control, power, domination,
and humiliation. … Fear of sexual violence in women will restrict their freedom
and occupational opportunities and affect their long-term psychological
well-being.
…
Culture determines definitions and descriptions of normality and
psychopathology. Culture plays an important role in how certain populations and
societies view, perceive, and process sexual acts as well as sexual violence… a
continuum with transgressive coercion at one end and tolerated coercion on the
other.
In
rural India, for example, girls have no independent control of their sexuality.
They are expected to get married and produce children, thus shifting the
control of their sexuality from one man (the father) to the other (the husband).
… Childhood marriages amounts to sexual coercion and is considered illegal but
is still sanctioned by personal laws and condoned by Khap Panchayats who decide
on marriage partners in certain parts of North India.
Similarly,
sexual violence is considered legitimate by young men in South Africa who also
believe that mental health is negatively affected by lack of sex.
Local,
regional, national, international – there is synchronous symptoms of the
bred-in-the-bones patriarchy: Rapes, Gang-Rapes, Sexual Harassment, Stalking, Acid Attacks,
Sexual Assault, Marital Rape, Female Genital Mutilation, Domestic Violence,
Honour Killings, Dowry Deaths and Harassments, Female Infanticide and Foeticide,
etc. … a result of discounting women’s importance and contribution to the
economy and society.
REFERENCES:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/For-childs-passport-unwed-mother-needs-to-declare-if-she-was-raped-Centre-to-HC/articleshow/44988057.cms
“Single
Women Not Welcome,” The Hindu,
October 26, 2014, p. 2.
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/girl-arrested-for-liquor-deaths/article6534265.ece
(Sunday, October 26, 2014)
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/marital-and-other-rapes-grossly-underreported/article6524943.ece
(October 22, 2014)
“Beyond Sexual Assault,” October 22, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-ludy-green/beyond-sexual-assault_1_b_6028680.html
Gurvinder
Kalra and Dinesh Bhugra, “Sexual Violence Against Women: Understanding
Cross-Cultural Intersections,” Indian
Journal of Psychiatry, Jul-Sept.
2013, 55(3): 244–249: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777345/
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/patriarchal-society-cause-of-violence-against-women/article4726329.ece (Bangalore, May 18, 2013)
Vandana
Shiva, “Violence Against Women Is As Old As Patriarchy,” Yes! Magazine, February 15, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/shiva150213.htm
*
SOME
ACTIONABLE AREAS:
1. Stand
up for the safety and rights of the woman being harassed near you – Its
everywhere – Be Aware and Act to Stop it.
2. Crowdsourcing
on Rape Laws:
The Guardian
is involved in an effort to collate Rape Laws across the world through
crowdsourcing. The paper is collecting data in the following areas:
Is
marital rape illegal in your country? What is the minimum sentence it carries?
Are such laws actually implemented?
how
different countries define their rape laws. Is rape in marriage illegal in your
country? Does the law forgive the rapist if he marries the victim? Are rape
laws implemented?
3. Bring
Back Our Girls campaign
After
premature announcement of a truce and successful negotiation earlier this month
to free the school girls abducted by the Boko Haram early this year, the outfit
leader now says that the girls are a non-issue – they’ve already been converted
and married off – and there is no truce. The failure to rescue these
girls and the continued abductions indicates how low their welfare is in
governmental, international, and our individual priorities. Misogynistic terror
outfits have the Nigerian and world governments and security forces stumped.
Resources
and will needs to be regrouped to secure the future of these girls. See what
you can do to help our imprisoned sisters.
***