Saturday, 05 Oct, 2024
By: Anisha Gupta
Source: Unsplash
The tragic rape and murder of a Kolkata doctor underscore the ongoing crisis of sexual violence in India. Despite reforms following the Nirbhaya case, rape cases persist with low conviction rates, revealing systemic flaws and the urgent need for both legal and societal changes to ensure women’s safety.
A recent tragic incident involving a 31-year-old trainee doctor in Kolkata has brought into focus, once again, the ongoing and serious problem of rape in India. On August 9, the body of the doctor, bearing multiple injuries, was recovered from a government teaching hospital in Kolkata. The hospital authorities initially informed the distraught parents of the deceased that their daughter had committed suicide. An autopsy confirmed the worst; she was brutally raped and murdered. Her incident has brought global outrage yet again and compared to the deplorable Nirbhaya case in 2012, it has engendered the question of women's safety in India and how effective the reforms brought in by legal amendments in the aftermath of such crimes have been.
The Criminal Law Amendment Act, of 2013, was brought in response to the public outburst, which aimed at more stringent punishments for sexual offenses and fast-tracking the judicial process. The amendments went on to include a broader definition of rape and new crimes of such abominable acts as stalking and voyeurism; provisions for the death penalty were also carried in rare cases. However, notwithstanding these legislative reforms, the data on rape cases in India suggests that a lot more must be done towards the protection and ensuring that justice is done for women.
Data from the National Crime Records Bureau depicts that though the number of reported cases of rape varies from year to year, the trend remains deeply troubling. This is due to an increase in sensitivity and awakening in society after the Nirbhaya case took place. Even though the laws have become more stringent, the similar and sure rates of rapes are still very high, which is evidence that there is more than legal reformation that is required. The conviction rates of the rape cases are another example of how getting justice for the victim is made difficult. Contributing to these low conviction rates are factors such as inefficiencies in the legal system, bad investigations, the social burden on victims, and slow trials even in the fast-track courts. Setting up fast-track courts to deal with cases of sexual assault notwithstanding, the reality remains that many such cases are dragging on for years. The process is just too long and goes on to add to the trauma of the victims and their kith and kin while it serves to undermine faith in the system. More than anything else, investigations often leave much to be desired.
One of the major reasons for this poor rate of conviction is the societal stigma and backlash that rape victims often face. Most tend to undergo much scrutiny and stigmatization from society at large, which might deter them from seeking legal redress. Additionally, patriarchal attitudes that still prevail in many parts of Indian society sustain this culture of blaming the victims for crimes committed against them. Not only does such an environment prove toxic for a survivor, but it also affects the police and the judiciary in charge when overseeing cases.
The Kolkata doctor's case has manifold resonances with the Nirbhaya case, where failure exposes a system in desperate need of review in India—a system that, despite adopting numerous legal reforms over the past seven years, has proven toothless in the face of a burgeoning human rights crisis of sexual violence. The latter, of course, are the strides made on the legal front over the last ten years; legalization has rendered the writer's persistence on the part of rape, in forms as savage as these, ever the more obvious, the need for an all-comprehensive approach to address it. A need therefore arises to break and transform these deep-seated patriarchal norms that perpetuate violence against women into an effective mechanism through which justice can be achieved without fear of reprisal or stigma against the victims.
The important elements that make up this entire comprehensive strategy include education and campaigns geared toward creating awareness. This involves teaching issues of consent, respect, and equality between the two sexes to boys and young men, to stop any forms of sexual violence from occurring. To facilitate these educational efforts at all levels, highly reinforced legal provisions must be ensured, along with a good support system for victims. This helps in providing justice to the survivors, avoiding re-traumatization from the legal process, thereby creating a system of protection and support for the victims.
In conclusion, the fight against rape in India must be multi-pronged with a marriage between administrative and societal change. The strengthening of the legal structure must be tight and effective, reined in by societal change in the form of gender sensitization and respect for women. This is such a painful reminder of how far there still is to go. India must rise to the challenge—the cause not only to reiterate the memory of Nirbhaya, among many other women and girls but to set the pace of its safety towards all women in this country.
