Naming anti-rape law after victim: Act of empty symbolism

What is in a name? Would an anti-rape law, by any other name (or number for that matter), not be half as tough?
Shashi Tharoor’s proposal to name the anti-rape law after the Delhi gang rape victim, if and only if her family agrees, has sparked a bit of a row. Tharoor wonders in his tweet “what interest is served by continuing anonymity of #DelhGangRape victim.”
Now that the family has said it has no objection, the other question to ask is what interest is served by naming a law after her.
Kiran Bedi, in supporting Tharoor’s idea, tweeted “This has been done in USA: Brady, Megan, Karly, Jessica Law etc…”

Delhi rape protests. AFP.

She is right of course. Megan’s Law is named after a little girl who was assaulted and killed by a sex offender who lived across the street. Megan’s parents had been clueless. Brady’s law for handgun checks is named after Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was permanently injured in the assassination attempt on the president in 1981. Karly’s law in Oregon helps children remembers a three-year old who died after allegations of abuse went unchecked.
There are plenty of others. Some are named after the famous such as the Lindbergh Law after the abduction of Charles Lindbergh’s son or the Donda West law after Kanye West’s mother who died after her plastic surgery. Some are named after ordinary people who became famous as victims – Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming college student who was tortured and left tied to a fence in the middle of the countryside. Or Ryan White who became a poster child for HIV  discrimination when he was kicked out of school because of his infection. There’s even a law named after a cat – Buster’s Law about animal cruelty remembers a cat that was doused in kerosene and set on fire by a hoodlum.
Sometimes the name of a law honours the lawmaker but mostly it’s about memorializing the victim. In that sense Tharoor’s suggestion is entirely on the mark. This was a victim whose plight really galvanized the country. She was not a special case but she became a tipping point. Enshrining her name in the law would force a public with a notoriously short attention span to remember why this law was urgently needed.  Tharoor’s proposal is radical, perhaps in ways he did not intend. In a country where naming things after people is usually an exercise in sugary sycophancy (Indira Gandhi this and Rajiv Gandhi that), finally a politician is recognising a very ordinary person, a victim.
But the real motivation behind the spate of laws named after victims in the US is much cloudier than just honouring their struggle. Sometimes it’s because that victim is regarded as the final straw in a festering problem. But as Andrew Karmen writes in his book Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, it’s also often motivated by politicians who want to capitalize on national outrage to build support for a piece of legislation and also advance their careers. Changing a law or making one is a messy business and bound to attract opposition. But by attaching a name (and thus a personal story) to a law, lawmakers know that “the strong feelings evoked by a recent tragedy make it difficult for opponents to question the wisdom of implementing the reforms proposed in the name of the victim”.
Victimologists warn that you first need to see whether the law would actually help someone else harmed in that particular manner. For example, in the Mathew Shepard case, his killers had not been charged with a hate crime because neither Wyoming nor the  federal government recognized sexual orientation as a reason for hate crimes. The fight to allow that to happen was a long and bitter one. It needed a face. Shepard died in 1998. President Obama signed the law finally in 2009. In that decade it helped to have a name that would keep reminding activists that the cause for which they were fighting was not a hypothetical one. It was real. It had left a young man so pistol-whipped, and battered that the cyclist who discovered him thought he was a scarecrow.
In other cases, naming a law after a victim is  a way to change perception of an issue. Until young Ryan White came along, AIDS was regarded as largely a gay male disease. The plight of the hemophiliac White helped soften the opposition to funding for a disease that had been regarded by conservatives as the wages of sin.
In some sense that’s at work here as well. No politician will want to name an anti-rape law after a sex worker who was raped and  killed. The Delhi gang rape victim is the perfect innocent victim for a crime where authorities usually aren’t shy about blaming the victim for the way she dressed, the drinks she had had or the men she was consorting with. Kiran Bedi tweets that naming her could help “remove the stigma” of rape. But the stigma of rape is much too real and the price of naming is borne by the victim and the family not activists like Bedi. Ten years after she went public with a brutal assault on her in a government hospital a destitute woman in Kerala regrets it.

I lost out on life. I think I should not have complained against the rape. The incident left me and my father isolated. Since then, not a single relative has visited us. Their attitude has ensured that I am stuck with the stigma of being a rape victim.

In this case the family has come out and said that they would be honoured if the anti-rape law was named after the victim.  That should end the privacy argument right there. And more power to them.
But the bigger fear is that the name of the law, and the hoopla around the act of naming, could trump its content. No one knows yet what is actually going to be in this law, what loophole it will plug, whether whatever shape it takes would have actually helped a woman like the one who boarded that bus that December evening.
BJP spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain makes a lot of sense when he says, “This is the time for making a strong law against rape without any delay. Naming or keeping the victim’s identity a secret is not the main issue here.”  Is our biggest problem even the lack of a “strong law” against rape or the fact that we have a law enforcement that does not take the existing laws seriously enough?
Tharoor says he wants to name the law after the victim because she was “a human being w/a name, not just a symbol.” But as a society we are terribly susceptible to the power of symbolism and naming a law after the woman could ironically be the ultimate act in empty symbolism.
“I want to live,” the young woman had told her mother.
Let’s get a law that’s worthy of her fierce struggle to live first. We can worry about its name later

Rape protests spread beyond India

Activists in Dhaka, Bangladesh protest against rape. Photograph: Rehman Asad/ Rehman Asad/Demotix/Corbis

Protests against sexual violence are spreading across south Asia as anger following the gang rape and death of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi courses through the region.
Inspired by the rallies and marches staged across India for nearly three weeks, demonstrations have also been held in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh – all countries where activists say women suffer high levels of sexual and domestic violence.
In Nepal, the case of a 21-year-old woman who says she was raped and threatened with death by a police officer and robbed by immigration officials, prompted hundreds of demonstrators to converge on the prime minister's residence in Kathmandu. They called for legal reforms and an overhaul of attitudes to women.
"We had seen the power of the mass campaign in Delhi's rape case. It is a pure people's movement," said Anita Thapa, one of the demonstrators.
Bandana Rana, a veteran Nepalese activist, described the ongoing protests in Delhi as "eye-opening". "A few years back, women even talking about sexual violence or even domestic violence was a very rare," she said.
Sultana Kamal, of the Bangladeshi human rights group Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), said the protests in Delhi had given fresh impetus to protests against sexual violence.
One incident that has provoked anger in Bangladesh was the alleged gang rape of a teenager by four men over four days in early December in Tangail, 40 miles north-west of Dhaka. The men were said to have made videos of the attack before leaving their victim near a rail track where she was eventually found by her brother.
On Friday a teenager who was said to have been repeatedly raped in a hotel died in hospital in Dhaka of injuries sustained when she subsequently tried to take her own life.
But despite the widespread anger, the social stigma attached to rape victims remains a major problem throughout the region.
Although Bangladesh police arrested suspects in both the cases and investigations are under way, activists fear that corruption as well as deep-seated misogyny among investigating officers and the judiciary make convictions unlikely.
According to ASK's statistics, at least 1,008 women were raped in 2012 in Bangladesh, of whom 98 were later killed.
Khushi Kabir, one of the organisers of a "human chain" in Dhaka to protest against violence to women, said its aim was "to show that people are not going to just let this [movement] die down".
Kabir said although previous demonstrations on similar issues were largely dominated by women, men were now protesting too. The protests had also drawn people from a broad range of society. "We had lawyers, schoolchildren, teachers, theatre activists and personalities, industrialists," she said.
One week after the Delhi rape victim died in a Singapore hospital, the widespread grief and outrage have moderated, but a fierce debate still rages over the country's sexual violence and attitudes to women. One politician from the opposition BJP party was forced to apologise after stating the women who did not stay "within moral limits … paid the price". A senior official in a hardline Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation provoked controversy when he claimed that westernisation was responsible for rapes in cities.
The Delhi rape case is being heard in a special fast-track court inaugurated last week to deal with such offences in the capital. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Saturday. Protests however continue, albeit at a lower intensity than in previous weeks.
The Indian media continue to give prominence to news items that would barely have received attention a month ago.
On Friday it was reported that a 19-year-old woman had died in a hospital in the north-western city of Jaipur after she set herself on fire allegedly following aggressive harassment from a neighbour. She said the man had threatened to kill her brother and father if she did not marry him.
In another incident reported on Friday a woman was said to have jumped from a moving train to escape an assault. Sexual harassment on public transport is endemic in India where men target single young women. Such abuse is described euphemistically as "eve-teasing" with perpetrators dubbed "railway Romeos".
One persistent problem, women say, is men filming their faces or bodies on mobile phones in buses or trains.
Indian activists have repeatedly argued that media descriptions of such activities as "eve-teasing" contribute to the widespread acceptance of sexual harassment in public places.
A recent survey by the Hindustan Times newspaper found that nearly 80% of women aged between 18 and 25 in Delhi had been harassed last year and more than 90% of men of the same age had "friends who had made passes at women in public places". Nearly two-thirds of the latter thought the problem was exaggerated. It was also reported on Friday that though Delhi police had received 64 calls alleging a rape and 501 calls about harassment since 16 December, only four formal inquiries had been launched.
Senior officials across the south Asian region have defended their government's records on tackling sexual violence against women. In Delhi, Sushilkumar Shinde, the Indian home secretary, said on Friday that crimes against women and marginalised sections of society were increasing, and it was the government's responsibility to stop them. "This needs to be curbed by an iron hand," he told a conference of state officials from across India convened to discuss how to protect women. He called for changes in the law and the way police investigate cases so justice could be swiftly delivered. Many rape cases are bogged down in India's overburdened and sluggish court system for years. "We need a reappraisal of the entire system," he said.
Dr Shirin Sharmin Chowdhury, the Bangladeshi minister for women and children's affairs, said her government was "taking this issue very seriously".
"Just yesterday [Thursday] a sex offender … was given a very high punishment under the law," she said, "but sometimes the delay and the whole process of the trial takes a bit of time to ensure justice."
Protests are expected on Saturday in Bangladesh following the news of a new incident: the rape and killing of a student in the south-east of the country. The 14-year-old is reported to have left home to bring in her family's cows in Rangamati district one evening earlier this week. Her uncle later found her body in a forest. An autopsy report later confirmed that she had been raped and then strangled

Delhi gang-rape could prove a catalyst for change for women | Annie Kelly

Protesters in New Delhi take part in a silent march to demand justice for the 23-year-old woman who was gang-raped and murdered. Photograph: ZUMA / Rex Features

Over the past two weeks, the streets of India have been calling for change. The outpouring of anger and grief that has followed the rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in New Delhi just over two weeks ago has resulted in thousands taking to the streets of Delhi and cities, towns and villages across India. It is, says Dr Ranjana Kumari, a women's rights campaigner, an unprecedented moment in India's history.
"Can this grief, this anger at the brutalisation and murder of a young woman result in positive change?" she says. "What we are seeing on our streets is a defining moment of our democracy. For decades, India's endemic violence against women has been a defining issue for women's groups and the rights movement, but for the first time the crime of sexual offence and rape has been taken up by the people themselves."
She says her organisation, The Centre for Social Research (CSR), used to be asked continually why it was failing to mobilise more protesters against the institutional misogyny and violence that makes India one of the worst places in the world to be a woman.
"We could never really give an adequate response, because we couldn't find a way to break through the levels of entrenched attitudes towards women," she says.
"Now, for the first time the citizens have got very angry. Civil society at large has taken women's rights as their own cause and as an activist this makes me hopeful even at a time of such grief. For decades, NGOs, women's groups, human rights organisations have been pushing against this wall of institutional sexism; now a part of that wall has broken down and we must seize this moment."
According to Lenin Kumar, student union president at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, fundamental to lasting change is harnessing the anger and the desire for change among India's majority – its young people. "This is the first time in India that so many young people all over the country have poured into the streets in protest over an issue of gender," he says.
"We have had enough. We want gender-just laws, gender-sensitive policing and structural changes to ensure freedom and safety for women. We will form broader solidarities with lawyers, doctors, women's groups and other student groups and we will hold the home ministry to task."
Civil society groups have been putting together a suggested list of legal changes that could ensure better protection for women: tough new rape laws, fast-track courts and better police protection.
The Justice Verma commission, has been established to give recommendations on amending existing laws to provide speedier justice and convictions in sexual assault cases.
"We have demanded amendments in the law on sexual harassment at the workplace – prevention, prohibition and redressal to remove the problematic provision of 'conciliation' and have demanded measures to deal with the harassment that women in our country face everyday," Kumar says.
The attack on 16 December has also sparked an unprecedented debate about social attitudes to women in India. Can India's civil society groups harness this public anger and desire for change, and start to dismantle centuries of entrenched discrimination and violence?
"In the past we have struggled to change attitudes and I think we are all really concerned that the world will move on without any real change happening. The victory of those on the streets cannot simply be the punishment of the perpetrators," says Manak Matiyani of The Youth Collective, a youth development NGO.
"For a lot of people the nature of crime itself is the outrage but what we need to do is seize the opportunity to challenge baseline attitudes to women. Civil society groups keep reaching out to the same populations over and over again. This is the chance to try and get a much wider audience behind our campaigns."
To do this, many women's groups accept that there needs to be greater co-ordination and communication within the sector. "There is an incredible number of different groups working on women's issues in India but what is missing is any real co-operation or cross-working," says Nisha Agrawal, Oxfam India's country director.
"When we were recently trying to co-ordinate on the sexual harassment bill, we realised that within the sector we were very divided on many small issues and this is certainly holding us back. We need to find ways of organising ourselves into powerful networks all working towards a common agenda if we are to honour the young woman who died and reflect the voices of the people on the streets."
Resources are inevitably another stumbling block to seizing momentum. "The women's sector in India is facing a huge funding hole," Agrawal says. "Aid to India is dropping. Corporates and rich Indians are not stepping into the gap. We have no funding of our campaigning work, so this is going to be a real challenge to pick this up and do as much as we'd like to do."
Yet, according to many groups, in the collective horror at the death of a young woman on a bus, the seeds of change have been sown. "We know what needs to be done to make a difference, we know what the government must do to make India a safer and more equal place for women, now we have the public support to make [the government] sit up and listen," Amitabh Kumar, CSR's head of communications, says. "One thing is for sure, when Indian women break the chains of patriarchy, then there is no going back."