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tHE Mumbai rape seems to be a classic playing out of the rape of a young professional woman in an urban wasteland which is a symbol of unplanned economic growth, by local men, presumably without employment, with criminal records (I am going by media reports here).
The frequency of rapes in urban public spaces of women who are educated, successful, professional and mobile seems like a backlash against the gains made by women through education and livelihood generation. It must be seen in the context of the rapid and uneven growth in the last decade, the impact of neoliberal policies, the differential access that men and women of different classes have had to the results of development/growth. Along with the rapid development of the IT sector, the opening up of new service sectors (hospitality, call centres, new airlines), there has been a rapid decline in agriculture and many manufacturing industries, resulting in job losses, many of them for men. The service sector prefers to employ women who are seen to be better at "soft skills". Women of a certain class, thus, appear to be more employable and in employment than before. Many of the rapes in recent times, in urban spaces are of upwardly mobile, educated, professional women by poorer, often unemployed men. This reminds me of a rape which occurred in an area in West Bengal, once noted for its copper mines, which had since folded up leaving a community of unemployed people (for whom no provisions had been made). Local youths had gangraped a young NRI woman who had come to visit the area. The woman refused to lodge a FIR and wrote a long piece in the newspaper saying that she did not think that these individual young men could be blamed for her rape. She saw it as a failure of the State and its faulty development policies. This cannot be a justification at all and has dangerous implications. Yet we need to hold the State accountable for creating an impossible economic situation. We need to see gender crimes as embedded in larger socio-economic structures. The pious utterances of the State on violence against women and its laws will fall flat unless the question of larger structural change is addressed. The feminist position against death penalty has to be seen as an aspect of this problem. Let us not be reactive but proactive Criminalising the individual and treating him as aberrant (the "rarest of rare" crime argument) helps us to be complacent. We can pretend it is only a few perverse individuals who rape. If we kill them, we can be safe. Rape is a larger problem of patriarchy, killing individuals will not solve the problem. The frequency of rapes remind us that this is definitely not about a few bad men. We can take heart from exceptional men like Nirbhaya's friend, the boys who came out on the streets of Delhi, or the young male intern who accompanied the Mumbai girl and acted as the main witness. In Kolkata, we have launched a movement to make streets safe for women at night. "Take Back the Night" campaign was an old 1970s feminist campaign which we have tried to revive. Women must reclaim the streets and the night. A bunch of women (and transgenders and men) meet regularly at a late hour in different points of the city to make people who use the streets aware of the need for greater public safety. This group also examines if there are enough provisions for night transport available for women. Are the police kiosks manned at night? Are women found on the streets at a late hour? Are they feeling safe?
— The writer is Head Women's Studies Department, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
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Shame on our hypocrisy, even an animal gets more respect
