Women: Trapped in honour & shame

The gangrape and death of the 23year-old medical student in Delhi has led to nationwide protests. Women are protesting against sexual violence, reclaiming the public space and the right to dress as they find appropriate. There have also been calls for better policing of the public space to protect women, speedy and swift justice in rape cases, naming and shaming convicted rapists, and chemical castration and/or death penalty in rape cases. Rajya Sabha member Jaya Bachchan has argued, for instance, that sexual assault should be treated on par with attempted murder.

So what is the problem? Why am I left with a sense of foreboding rather than uncomplicated jubilation that, at long last, sexual violence against women is being taken seriously, not only by feminists but by ordinary women and men?

There are three reasons for this. One, that the support for rape victims is often expressed in relational terms. As President Pranab Mukherjee put it, “We are ashamed. A nation must respect its mothers, sisters and daughters. If it can’t, the country is not civilised. This is a fundamental principle on which every civilisation is based.” Second, the discourse of equating rape with death is a part of wider attitude of honour and shame associated with and invested in women’s bodies. And finally, implicit in some of these demands is a strong element of vigilante activism, which could be counterproductive in protecting the rights of women.

To take the first issue: the subtext of the populist injunction that women should be respected as mothers, sisters and daughters is that women who don’t easily fit into these familial roles don’t matter. While theoretically any and all women are someone’s daughter, not all women may be wives or mothers, and even in the case of daughters there is an unstated assumption that there are good daughters who need to be protected, and bad ones who have rejected the family and are not worthy of respect.

This is further complicated in the Indian context by constructions of the ideal woman as sexless, or one whose sexuality is confined within marriage. Within this context, non-marital sex, whether coercive or voluntary, is problematic and is seen as potentially shaming the family and, in a communitarian country like ours, the entire community (the community may be understood in terms of religious, caste or regional identities).

Rape, therefore, is not seen as violence against the bodily integrity of individual women, but as dishonouring and shaming the members of the wider community of the victim. In cases of sexual violence against minority women in communal riots, for example, as in the case of the Gujarat riots in 2002, it has been persuasively argued by historian Tanika Sarkar that the nature of violence against Muslim women — stripping, beating, throwing acid, raping, burning, killing of pregnant women, and killing of children before their parents’ eyes — went beyond collective dishonouring. It was meant to destroy or punish the fertile Muslim female body and to destroy future generations.

Ideas of honour and shame are also rampant in the legal arena, where “honourable” women are believed, even in the absence of corroborative evidence under the Indian Evidence Act — often reduced to physical injuries or witness statements ( Naravan vs the State of Rajasthan, 2007). Following the rape law amendment in 1983, in a case of custodial rape, the judges said that to disbelieve a woman, especially a “young girl”, was to insult womanhood, and that Indian women are unlikely to lie about rape. The judges stated: “Ours is a conservative society where it concerns sexual behaviour. Ours is not a permissive society, as in some of the Western or European countries... Courts must also realise that ordinarily a woman, more so a young girl, will not stake her reputation by levying a false charge concerning her chastity ( State of Maharashtra vs Chandraprakash Kewalchand Jain with Stree Atyachar Virodhi Parishad vs Chandraprakash Kewalchand Jain 1990).”

Thus, some of the more extreme responses to the Delhi gangrape case are aimed to protect “honourable” women. Take, for example, the call for the death penalty for perpetrators of rape. The discomfort I feel about this is at several levels. One, I oppose the death penalty totally and without exception. This position is based on the principle of unalienable right to life, and the belief that the death sentence when imposed is often based on ideas of retribution, and not justice. Second, looking at the history of the death penalty in India, it is imposed in the “the rarest of rare cases”, and has been carried out only thrice since 1995, most recently in the case of Ajmal Kasab. The call for death penalty in rape cases equates, as Ms Bachchan said, it with death, and is closely tied in with ideas of honour and shame. It is not clear whether death penalty is seen as a deterrent — there is little evidence that it works as such for any crime — or as a vigilante response to protect the honour of women. Or, at least, avenge the loss of it.

The complex public response and rage against the horrific incident in Delhi can truly work to protect women from violence only if a woman’s body is not constructed as repository of familial and community honour, and the continuum of violence against women in the home and the public sphere is acknowledged. Otherwise there is a danger that misogynist views will use this incident to push women back into the home. ( This is the final part of

a two-part series) The writer works at the Centre for Gender Violence

and Research, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. She teaches, researches and writes on genderbased violence and the law

in India and the UK.