Rape: It's the mindset, stupid!

The latest figures of the National Crime Records Bureau are out and I am proud to tell you that for yet another year, I am a woman who has survived the country’s most hostile city.

It’s a city that is not just the rape capital as the headlines may have already informed you, but also where almost a quarter of the total rapes reported from across the country take place. And rapists aren’t the only ones that are out to get the capital’s women. Delhi women are also blessed with a very high percentage of kidnappers looking for vulnerable female victims and if you escape all these threats lurking outside your door, then do take care to ensure you are safe at home. Apparently, Delhi also has a high incidence of people looking to burn their wives or other female relatives or just beat them up.

These figures of misogyny have only confirmed what many of us may have already known — the reason why law enforcers fail so miserably in tackling crime against women is because there is something very wrong in their approach to such crime. Let me illustrate with some instances.

On Sunday, there was a case of rape reported from Mahipalpur, South Delhi, very close to the rather upmarket Vasant Kunj residential area. The basic facts that reporters found were that a 30-year-old man working for a multi-national company in Gurgaon raped a 26-year-old woman in a local hotel. The case was lodged at the Vasant Kunj police station but when reporters wanted more information, the police, on condition of anonymity, said these allegations were probably false. They said that the two were already in a relationship but had had a fight which is why the woman was being vindictive and slapped rape charges.

Now, I am not in a position to tell you whether the complaint is genuine or not, it’s obviously something a court will determine. But, I wonder if, like me, you are outraged at what the police have done in a single, calculated, malicious move. They violated a Supreme Court guideline that says that you have to go by a rape victim’s word. They have undermined her case right at the start and used their familiarity with the media to kill any public pressure that may have got them to do any real investigation. And, of course, it seems that the Delhi police are yet to wake up to the fact that forcible sex within relationships — even a marriage — is still rape. The police didn’t care about all this and thanks to the ‘off-the-record’ information they shared with crime reporters, not many filed this story.

My outrage is not at a single incident. As a crime reporter, I’d find it humiliating to talk to police officers about crimes against women because it seemed that instead of looking for clues to find the perpetrator, they’d look for whether the victim was ‘asking for it.’ How was she dressed? Did she have a boyfriend? Why was she out at that time in the night? All this was speculated and shared with friendly crime reporters who could be trusted to put in a considerable degree of ‘scepticism’ to the case in their own reportage. The victim would be maligned but the cop with the dirty, twisted mind would always remain anonymous.

For a long time I thought that the key was just to increase the level of education and awareness of investigating officers. I thought if you have urbane officers who did not immediately compartmentalise independent women going to bars as women of ‘loose’ character, you might see a change in mindset. But I knew I was wrong when I met a young female IPS officer who had travelled all over the world and seemed to be very successful.

She had investigated a high profile case of sexual harassment and long after it faded from the headlines, I wanted to know the real story.

“You know, she wasn’t all that innocent,” she said of the teenage victim. Why, I asked, waiting for some never-been-told-before clue to emerge in that puzzle of a story. “We asked her own relative about her and she told us how that girl, from a very young age, liked to wear short skirts and high heels.”

I waited for this nugget of information to lead to something bigger but it didn’t.

The sad fact was that this otherwise pleasant, educated, senior police officer had made a decisive judgment about a case based on the fact that a teenage girl liked to wear short skirts and high heels. That case, like the Mahipalpur rape case that never got reported, went against the victim. They won’t be the last of a long line of women who’ve been judged unfairly by a hostile city and its troop of cops.

I don’t have the answers but maybe the NCRB in its next report can make a little bit of an effort and go a little beyond the figures, maybe they can work at fixing the mindsets a bit.

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/
reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News
On Twitter: @sunetrac