Planet KHOJ

More about Pinky here

There's been much debate over the proposed amendments to how Indian law views/considers 'sexual assault'. Here's a bit from Kalpana Kannabiran:

Broadly, rather than viewing ‘sexual assault' as a mechanical substitute for ‘rape' under Section 375 of the IPC, the effort of rights groups has been to think through the feasibility of formulating a chapter on sexual violence/atrocity that will define a range of such violence in a manner in which the focus shifts from the penetrative logic of definitions hitherto used to the assaultive nature sexual violence.

That article here.

To contextualise what's happening in India within the context of international debates, we've invited our first Guest Post! It's from Megan Hjelle who's been researching this issue for the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore.

Gender-Neutral Sexual Assault Laws - A Brief Summary

Since the 1997 Writ Petition filed by Sakshi regarding amendments to India’s penal code regarding rape, gender neutrality has emerged as a lingering controversy. As currently written, India’s rape laws recognize the male/perpetrator - female/victim as the only framework within which rape can occur and regards penile-vaginal rape as the only “real” form of rape.

When the draft bill for amendments to the rape law was introduced with the intent of updating and expanding the laws into a spectrum of sexual assault offenses, few could have known that the topic would be such a lightning rod, pushing to the forefront fundamental contestations of the nature of gender itself. In an attempt to understand why the issue of gender-neutrality has been so uniquely contentious within the Indian context, the developments of gender-neutral sexual assault laws in other countries may provide some insight.

Rape law reform in countries such as the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, and Australia produced, among other legislative developments, gender-neutral sexual assault laws. This note seeks to provide a brief summary of gender-neutral sexual assault laws along the following lines of inquiry:

- When did the shift to gender-neutrality occur?
- Why did the shift occur?
- What, if any, were the feminist stances in opposition and counter-responses?
- What impact, if any, have the application of gender-neutral laws had?

As most of the relevant data on the topic comes from research focused on the U.S., this summary will use the U.S. reform as its point of departure, with relevant comparisons to other nations with gender-neutral sexual assault laws as well.

Under the U.S. Model Penal Code, adopted by most U.S. states, rape was originally a crime that could only be perpetrated by a male on a female. The early Model Penal Code sex offenses were drafted under the influence of Kinsey’s research on sexuality. As well as creating a sexual offense hierarchy of severity, at the top of which was penile-vaginal rape, the drafters also required evidence of force in order to establish a rape. The drafters, fearing unfair prosecutions of defendants during a time when rape could still result in capital punishment, thought the evidence of force requirement would protect against false charges. Instead, it made successful rape convictions rare and re-victimized rape survivors by putting them on trial.

In the 1970’s, however, on the heels of the “Sexual Revolution,” the crime of “rape” was changed to “sexual assault” in an effort to de-emphasize the sexual elements of the crime and re-cast it as a crime of violence. The Michigan 1975 Criminal Sexual Conduct Statute served as a national model for implementing many of the rape law reforms that have now been adopted to some degree by most of the U.S. states. The reforms were largely a result of the feminist movement, which had as one of its fundamental objectives, the goal “to change peoples’ awareness and perceptions of violence against women.”

In comparison, Canadian rape law reform began in the early 1980’s and, in the U.K., sexual assault was not recognized as gender-neutral until 1994.

The development of gender-neutral sex offenses within the U.S. and elsewhere, is marked by a lack of direct discussion. This seems to be due to a confluence of factors relating to the goals of the feminist movement. At least one researcher has posited that “some extension of the coverage of rape laws was implicit in feminist objectives.” Feminists set out to “challenge the stereotyped assumptions about male roles and female sexuality” by “achiev[ing] comparability between the legal treatment of rape and other violent crimes, prohibit[ing] a wider range of coercive sexual conduct and expand[ing] the range of persons protected by law.”

Because feminists hoped to put an end to the phallocentricity of the laws as written and to emphasize the victim’s experience of violation, shifting the focus “from bodily harm to the protection of autonomy,” a gender-neutral law seems implied since, theoretically, it would capture more violative acts and would topple the hierarchy of penile-vaginal rape. Even at the time the Model Penal Code sex offenses were created, the drafters recognized the possibility that a gender-neutral approach “could also help to abrogate certain sex stereotypes that our society is appropriately beginning to address.”

Some researchers also identify as a factor changing social and sexual norms. For instance, one researchers posits that, social acceptance of oral and anal sex contributed to the shift toward gender-neutrality, while another attributes it to increased tolerance of more and difference types of sexual activity.

A researcher of Canada’s rape reform goes even further to identify gender-neutrality as merely a result of more primary reforms, rather than an end in itself.


Because, as suggested above, gender-neutrality may have seemed like a natural step in the feminist agenda rather than a focal point of the reform and as a result of practical reasons, the shift to gender-neutrality seems to have encountered little direct opposition in the U.S.

For instance, as previously mentioned, feminists had several linked objectives behind the reforms. Because of this, the rape law reforms were significant and numerous, with variations between states. So, states like Michigan made changes to remove the resistance requirement, remove immediate reporting requirements, shift the burden of proof, legitimize the victim’s testimony without corroboration, remove the marital exception, enact “Rape Shield” laws, provide an entire continuum of acts to be included under the term “sexual assault,” with gender-neutrality often being just one part of this array of reforms.

The single point of contention against gender-neutral sexual assault laws represented in the feminist literature seems to have developed retrospectively, rather than concurrently with the reform. And, in fact, that argument is best distilled and articulated by a recent argument in opposition of any gender-neutral amendments in Indian legislation:

There seems to be a presumption that if women can be framed as violators, then the trauma of rape for women as victims would be reduced and the stigma attached to the offence would peel off.

The response to this contention pivots between the arguments that gender-neutral terms do not preclude a gendered response to sexual assault, nor does it erase women’s experiences of sexual assault to include men. In also highlighting research indicating the trauma experienced by male victims of sexual assault, one researcher succinctly counters:

A principle of criminal law is, surely, that all persons should be protected equally from harm of like degree.... The case for treating crimes of like heinousness similarly appears to be stronger than that calling for a distinction to be made between penetration of the female body and penetration of the male body, whatever the sex of the actor.

Although some have tried to argue that gender-neutral laws have impeded the progress of rape law reform in combating sexual assault by introducing male victims, this argument does not seem corroborated by significant research. In fact, the majority of research shows that introducing gender-neutral laws and the rape law reform in general, have not had either a significantly positive or a significantly negative impact on sexual assault in the U.S. as of yet.

In conclusion, gender-neutral sexual assault laws were brought about during a period of intense legal reform initiated by feminists during the 1970’s to 1980’s in numerous nations and states as an attempt to trouble gender stereotypes and biases. There is an ongoing debate regarding the benefits and detriments of gender-neutrality to feminist goals, but research shows that the rape law reform has had little significant statistical impact on sexual assaults.

Megan is a second-year law Brooklyn Law student committed to providing advocacy and representation as a public interest lawyer. Her work is rooted in an interest in the ways globalization, migration and gender perpetuate and subvert each other. Megan has worked with the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in Los Angeles, where she helped match trafficking survivors with services and coordinated trainings to promote the identification and referral of trafficked individuals. More recently, Megan has worked at the Safe Horizon Anti-Trafficking Program. There, she developed and implemented a media outreach plan, helped maintain and strengthen international partnerships, coordinated trainings and worked on clients’ T-Visa and Asylum applications. Megan hopes to combine her background and legal education to facilitate a holistic, community-centered approach to advocacy for underserved populations and is currently pursuing these goals in an internship at the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore.

Blank Noise presented our short film, Moments of a Long Pause, at the Georgia State University conference titled ‘Better Safe Than Sorry’. Organized by Faces of Feminism, an undergraduate student organization affiliated with the Women's Studies Institute of Georgia State University, "Better Safe Than Sorry: A Query into Notions of Security," addressed issues of public safety, citizen rights, police action, the surveillance state and so on, on April 24th, 2010.

We* presented the film just after the lunch break, and people gathered around with their food in the foyer where the film was shown on two screens, aligned at an angle to one another. In case you haven’t seen the film, it was shot in several Indian cities (Amritsar, Delhi, Kolkata etc.) and features men and women on separate screens, describing their experiences on the streets. The interviewees cut across classes and include school and college students, a rag-picker, shop-keepers; most interviews are conducted on the street, but some are in homes. The film is especially fascinating for me because of the number of themes it touches upon: violence vs. wooing/flirting on the streets and how this is perceived across class; who ‘asks for it’ and the confinement of sexualized behavior to certain bodies and certain spaces (sex districts); and what is sexualized behavior anyway - The male perpetrator’s “cool cheez” is the woman’s refusal to accept that – “this is not the sex district,” she says; ideas of nation and ideas of respect altering between nations; female agency/power vs the resignation that “even a corpse can be sexually harassed”… the range of debates that stem from this film are pretty extraordinary.

I want to write about what it was like screening a film about dynamics on Indian streets to an audience who need not necessarily have experienced them. The audience was very alive, sensitive and involved and their reactions allow an in-point to discussing what kind of context we need to have when discussing street sexual harassment in India to an audience situated outside of it, even maybe within India.

The audience was involved when the film was being screened, and laughed at the “right” places: where women said that they would take off their shoes and beat perpetrators with it, for instance, or when they said vehemently that they would brook no nonsense and fight off men who harassed them.

After the film, I began with an explanation of Blank Noise – how it began, when etc. and followed that up with a link to the conference themes – a bit about police apathy after the violence against women in March- April 2009 in Bangalore and a mention of different relationships with the street, for instance for a queer person, the street might be a site for pleasure-seeking, although simultaneously a site of violence and danger, but it might be significantly different from a heterosexual middle-class woman’s relationship with the street.

I don’t remember all of the questions exactly, but here is the gist of some of them, as well as the gist of my answers:

1. Is there a clear understanding of what constitutes eve-teasing?

I talked a bit about the wide range of activities recognized by different people who we interviewed as constituting “eve teasing”; the opinion poll about harassment that’s on our website and some debates that we have had in the past over, for example, whether ‘staring’ was “eve-teasing”.

2. You talked a bit about the class dynamics in the film which maybe people who weren’t familiar with might not have been able to pick up on. Could you elaborate?

To this I talked about the kinds of people present on Indian streets, in terms of hawkers, shop keepers and so on, and how this led to a classed dimension in cases in which the lower class man is attempting to engage with the middle-class woman shopper. Also that middle-class men might have a more purposeful relationship with the public sphere using it to get from place A to place B rather than flaneuring on the street. This doesn’t take away from instances of harassment by middle class men in airports.

3. What is the significance of “friendship” as discussed on screen?

There are soundbytes in the film which show men saying they wanted “friendship” from women. I talked a bit about the lack of spaces for meeting people of the opposite sex and as this request for “friendship” being a way to initiate contact which is interpreted differently across classes. Also at this request being not entirely benign, for instance, it is likely that even if you say no, the initiator will persist. The idea, from Bollywood films perhaps, that a ‘no’ by a woman is said in coyness: it actually means a ‘yes’.

4. The idea of the split screen was interesting; sometimes when both screens spoke at once it seemed overwhelming but perhaps that it how it was meant to sound, since the experience itself is overwhelming.

I talked a bit about the genesis of the name, Blank Noise- which comes from feeling a mix of noises in your head and still a silence when you have experienced harassment.

5. What is the impact of religion on street sexual harassment?

I talked a bit about some traditional neighborhoods where being an outsider and dressed conspicuously differently from those who lived there could lead to a friction – for instance, what is the difference between wearing shorts in the Jama Masjid area where some interviews were shot and in Defence Colony?
I also mentioned the clothes project – ‘I did not ask for it’ – with the addendum that the challenge lay not in being defiant about you wear because “you never ask for it”, but in recognizing how dressing in particular ways interferes with the circulation of ideas about appropriate/inappropriate clothing in a particular context. Therefore although women get harassed in burkhas as well as in school uniforms, this does not mean that what they wear makes no difference to how they/their bodies are received.

6. Related was a question about state discourses on this issue.

I talked a bit about how the “routine” and everyday nature of street sexual harassment allowed police to absolve themselves of any responsibility for more serious violence against women as in the case where Bangalore Police Commissioner referred to instances of violence against women as being “only eve-teasing” (March 2009). Also a bit about BJP discourses of the virile Indian nation – nuclear power, 21st century modern nation, yet proud possessor of “respectable” women. Finally, a link between discourses of modernity and progress and development linked to discontentment in coastal Karnataka – the Mangalore pub attacks, by the extreme right-wing Sri Rama Sene.
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And then some final thoughts. Through it all, it struck me that there was a way in which the less educated men who were interviewed could be received (to both an urban Indian audience as well as a Western one) as “primitive”, “conservative”, thus naturally aligning the audience with the women who hit them with shoes/slippers – the agential “modern” citizen-subject woman. How does this portrayal set up India (loosely) as a space where men are controlling of women who then need to be liberated? And how does India become the polar opposite of what the West itself is imagined as, or imagines itself as? Looking at this film in the West, how do categories of West and non-West become solidified so that the West is a space of liberal tolerance where women can run on the streets in shorts and wear as they please whereas in India men say things like “if she dresses like that, she asks for it”?

Also how does one contextualize issues like “friendship” and explain, for instance, homosociality, or how men relate to other men, and understand people’s request for friendship as occurring along a longer, historic (thinking of courtly/zenana homosociality) trajectory?

All in all though it was a wonderful wonderful afternoon and I hope Blank Noise has many more such screenings and discussions!

*Thanks to Moyukh Chatterjee for helping to set up the AV.

I NEVER ASK FOR IT
clothes collection drive
bangalore koramangala
bangalore mg road 1, mg road 2
calcutta camac street park street

things to do at home over a hot summer afternoon
reporting to remember

new news:women in revealing clothes blamed for earthquakes

LOVE AND MORALS IN MANGALORE
Tinku Ray for BBC. listen here

The transcript of LOVE AND MORALS IN MANGALORE is available here

Landed in Mumbai yesterday to be faced with the shock of the city under siege. Shook me, after a long time, to write something. Jaded as the pen is, the words still flowed, perhaps all too easily.

My love, hope, peace and support to all who were affected by what hatred and terror of a few.

How To Watch a City Burn

 Land in Mumbai. Complain about the weather.

Make jokes about furnaces and hells and send witty sms to all friends.

Visit far flung campuses, enjoy the bumpy ride.

Make stale jokes about bad roads: “In India you

Are supposed to ride on the left of the road. In Mumbai

You drive on what is left of the road.” Muse about the grim reality

Of the glamour city.

 

In the evening, fan yourself as you wait for a roadside snack.

Look at the thronging masses and wonder

How so many people can be crammed into such little space.

Wipe tears from the eyes as you bite into a chilli,

Feel the grit on the cheeks emerge like a rash.

 

Tread through the small streets,

Feel the shrapnel of ages poke at you through

What you thought were comfortable shoes.

Make your way to succulent titbits

And cheap booze

hidden in the heart of the city

To meet friends, make faces, laugh, exclaim,

Point at people who look at you strangely and wonder what they would think

If they knew about what you did in bed the other night

With that person whose name is on the tip of your tongue.

 

Over dinner, hear about trains and about training inexperienced

Virgins in acts of untold pleasures.  Hear the Mumbaikar

Revel in the double edged consolation of being safe in mediocrity:

“Only the very rich have to worry about the mafia.

For a regular person, it is as safe as your own backyard!”

Hear oft repeated tales about the safest city in the country.

Lament about lack of night-life in Bangalore.

 

Be shocked, as the tele blasts news of bomb blasts

That have seared through the city,

Hitting the partying posh in the South.

Hear the unspoken horror as everybody stares at the flickering screen.

A reporter is relishing remains of somebody dead.

Images hit you, harder than the fried garam masala in the food.

 

Sit glued, unchewing, food congealing, as news starts

Trickling in. People dead. Hotels under siege. The police

Helpless. Think how much it is like a Bruce Willis Movie.

And then tap into the collective terror and feel tears trickle down your cheek.

As people are turned into things.

Things are broken.

Realise that there are people responsible for turning people into things

That are broken.

Call for the bill. Relish the cathartic moment of pity and terror.

Scramble towards your hotel. Hear jaded resignation from the seasoned

Citizen.

 

Snuggle under the sheets and leave the television, on mute,

As you juggle news of hand grenades being flung

With the messages and phone calls bombarding your phone.

Be glad there are people who care.

Realise that there are people who are remains, who must also have people who care.

Shiver at what hatred can do to a city you thought you loved.

Watch, from the safety of your room, smoke and fire.

Wonder if you want to ever bring children in this world.

Make plans for buying island and becoming dictator.