Breaking the Silence: Rethinking Rape

Rape is a deeply rooted societal issue often silenced by stigma, yet it demands urgent discussion and action. While society universally condemns the act, motivations differ—patriarchal views focus on family honour, while feminist perspectives prioritize women’s autonomy. Factors such as toxic masculinity and a lack of understanding of consent contribute to the problem. Effective solutions require societal transformation, judicial reform, and education to foster awareness, ultimately shifting the shame from victims to perpetrators and empowering women to live without fear.

The biggest freedom that this society can ever give to a woman is the freedom not to constantly be scared about her safety. Whenever people hear about a rape that has happened (which sadly happens every 16 minutes in our country), everybody finds a consensus that it is a heinous crime. However, the purpose of consensus is different for each group. The patriarchs condemn rape as it affects family honour. Whereas feminist scholars denounce rape because it is a crime against the autonomy and bodily integrity of a woman. So the difference in understanding rape naturally leads to opposite proposals for fighting rape. Sherry Hamby, the ex-editor of Psychology of Violence says “If you don’t understand perpetrators, you’re never going to understand sexual violence”. This clearly states how we as a society mainly focus on things that cannot help us understand rape. This further states that rape is not just about sex for men but rather about power, domination, and suppression. It is a really bad representation of the deeply embedded patriarchy in our society and an even bigger outcome of the same patriarchy is marital rape.

People have classified the factors of the cause of a rape in a few ways; one of them being the biological factor which doesn’t necessarily but kind of tries to justify a rape by a man by stating that evolutionary theory plays an important part in this case. Psychiatrist James A. Brussel says that nobody is born to commit a rape however; the potential for rape is in every person. The biological reasons being brought up time and again in a rape case are just a mere excuse for not being able to hold accountable for one’s crime. Next are the societal factors which are formed by the surroundings in which a person is either brought up or is living. Our society believes that women are weak beings and are not capable of thinking independently hence they should be controlled. An extremity of this control is sexual violence. This might not be something that people speak out loud but it is something that men think of women which leads to them assaulting and raping women because according to them – ‘women invite rape’, ‘women should go back to their home before dark’, ‘western culture has influenced girls and they wear short dresses’, ‘somebody needs to keep women in their limits by raping them and by teaching them a lesson’.

Madhumita Pandey, a lecturer of criminology interviewed 112 rapists of Tihar Jail for her research after the Nirbhaya Gang Rape. Before talking to the rapists she was a bit scared and had some wild assumptions. She was expecting them to be really difficult to talk to and thought that they might be scary as well as abusive. But, to her surprise she was wrong and those men were ‘just ordinary men’. She went to talk to them to find out their understanding of gender as well as their attitude towards women. She says that the main thing that she noticed in those men was ‘toxic masculinity’- socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, devaluation of women and violence. She further says that a lot of these men don’t realize that what they’ve done is rape. They don’t understand what consent is. Most rapists do not remorse and mostly blame the victim. If they’re asked whether they did it forcibly, they agree but when they’re asked if they raped them, they refuse to accept that what they did was rape. While talking to these convicts, Madhumita realized that even murderers were accepting of the crime that they had done and they also showed remorse, unlike these rapists. What shocked her was that even when the rapists showed remorse it wasn’t for the heinous crime that they had committed but rather for the completely wrong thing – like the 49-year-old rapist who felt sorry not for raping the 5-year-old girl but rather, he said ‘ Yes I feel bad, I ruined her life. Now she is no longer a virgin, no one would marry her…..I will marry her when I come out of jail.’ So basically he felt sorry for the honour of the little girl and not the torturous stuff he did to her.

We cannot have a single solution to this issue due to its immense complexities. However, we can begin by acknowledging that rape is not merely a crime committed by an individual; it is a pervasive problem within society. We cannot simply place the blame on the accused and the victim. Instead, we must understand that making the world a better place is a shared responsibility. Rather than resorting to capital punishment, which might seem like an easy solution, we should focus on transforming our society. Some people demand harsher penalties, but if most women refrain from filing cases due to fears of repercussions like the death penalty, intensifying punishments will only reduce the number of reported cases, which is counterproductive.

Before the Nirbhaya case, was the government truly powerless to act? And even now, 11 years after Nirbhaya, another woman is brutally raped and murdered at her workplace in Kolkata. These are just the cases we hear about; countless others remain hidden. We live in a society where people casually issue rape threats, and we only seem to react when a major incident occurs. Our judicial system requires serious reform; it is long overdue. Victim blaming must end, and the shame should fall on the perpetrators, not the victims. It is crucial that the younger generation receives proper education and awareness on these issues to foster a more informed and just society.

Freya Thakur is a student pursuing English Honours from Jamia Millia Islamia.

Edited by: Ayesha Alim

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.