Why castration is not a solution to address child sexual abuse

Castrate the rapist, solve the problem of child sex assault — the Madras high court’s recent recommendation to the central government is not just naïve and simplistic but also blinkered and dangerous in its assumptions, ignoring the fact that rapes are not so much about physical sexual urge but about exerting power. If that were not so, there would be no digital rape or children — and indeed women — being subjected to other forms of sexual violence like penetration by foreign objects.

Moreover, Justice N Kirubakaran’s assertion that castration for child rapists would produce “magical results” takes a narrow view of the extreme form of sexual violence that is rape and ignores the horrifying spectrum of crimes related to sexual assault and abuse. It is in keeping with the view that death penalty for rape is necessary and acts as a deterrent. As experience has shown repeatedly, putting extreme punishment on the statute books without addressing societal and foundational reasons for the crime can not only be ineffective but counterproductive too. 

Dismissing the petition by a British national who had set up a childcare institute in Tamil Nadu and is accused of sexually abusing an 11-year-old, Justice Kirubakaran admitted that “though the suggestion of castration looks barbaric, barbaric crimes should definitely attract barbaric modes of punishment”. With this, the very thought of the punishment should deter the culprit. Interestingly, he also confessed to the helplessness of the judiciary.

“When law is ineffective and incapable of addressing the menace, this court cannot keep its hands folded and remain a silent spectator, unmoved and oblivious of the recent happenings of horrible blood-curdling gang rapes of children in various parts of India,” he said.

In delivering his strongly-worded ruling, the judge should perhaps have kept in mind John Wayne Bobbitt, whose name entered the dictionary as a synonym for castration and emasculation when his wife, who said she had been subjected to years of abuse, severed his penis in the 1990s. More than 20 years later, a clearly unrepentant — and undeterred — Bobbitt proudly claims to have slept with 70 women since and has even appeared in an eponymous porn film.

The judge should also perhaps have remembered the victims and survivors of rape subjected to torture with foreign objects. If the 23-year-old physiotherapy whose insides were torn out with iron rods on the night of December 16, 2012 in Delhi did not fit the parameter, then perhaps he should have recalled the case of the five-year-old who was held for two days the following year and was found with “foreign objects”, including a candle and a bottle, inside her. Was it just about libido for the men behind these crimes that horrified the entire nation? Would the child have been spared had they been castrated?

These are sobering questions that stress the point that women’s groups have long been making — for rapists, it’s not just about the body but the mind, it is not about libido but power, not about satisfying a sexual urge but about controlling your victim. 

The legal template is already there. The Justice Verma panel, formed after December 16, had ruled out chemical castration saying that it failed to “treat the social foundations of rape which is about power and sexually deviant behavior”. In its view, mutilation of the body is not permitted by the Constitution.

In making the absolutist assumption that castration would be the “magical” wand that would at one swish erase the child rapist from the man, the Madras High Court does a disservice to those — lawmakers, activists, parents and ‘victims’ — grappling with issues of aggravated sexual abuse and their ramifications. 

Medieval, barbaric forms of retribution can never be an answer. If that were so, Saudi Arabia would be a country free of any crime. It will also make courts across the country chary about pronouncing judgments, thereby delaying justice in an already creaking system. What is needed is sober analysis and an empathetic, efficient judicial framework in which justice is swiftly delivered.