EDITORIAL: WHY LAW ALONE WON'T DETER RAPISTS?

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

The nation is fooled into yet another rape-outrage-rape cycle.

As usual, Sonia Gandhi, the most influential woman in India, spoke like an opposition leader by saying that “action and not words are needed” while the responsibility to do it lay with her own party.

Her party’s home minister launched himself into another round of all-too-familiar officialese that is packed with promises of action and punishment.

Fighting fatigue of serial protests since the Hazare days, students, activists and angry citizens poured into the streets pushing down police barricades and demanding more punishment, more stringent laws and more hanging.


In January, INN had argued how futile this approach is and why it is necessary to break this cycle if we want our girls and women to be safer and our communities, less criminal. Just as death penalty doesn’t deter homicides or high walls do not prevent crime in community, threats of punishment or sending people to jail or gallows do not change behaviour.

If they do, the continuous string of rapes, including that of the minor in east Delhi last week, wouldn’t have happened – that too after the unprecedented public anger and subsequent legislation evoked by the December gang-rape in a moving bus. The mere thought of the assault suffered by the alleged rapists in Tihar jail, the lynch-tendency of the protest-crowds, and the mysterious suicide of the main accused would have been more than sufficient to deter the man, who allegedly raped and sexually tortured the minor.

Reportedly, even as the crowds continued with their protests since the rape of the minor, three more girls have been sexually abused in different parts of Delhi. Of course, this is not new. Even as the capital was on the boil following the December gang-rape, there was no respite in the incidence – in a month, Delhi alone reported 45 cases of rape and 75 cases of molestation.

This is where the protestors and the governments are willy nilly co-creating the rape-outrage-rape cycle. At the core of this street theatre, that takes us nowhere as the rising incidence of rapes and sexual violence shows, are two reasons: one, the public outrage is uninformed and ill-guided and two, politicians and governments are veterans in anticipating and defusing such public anger.

The repetitive outrage of people is certainly spontaneous, except for the motivated protests by rival political parties; but their demands are the same and are devoid of imagination. They ask for the same things that they had asked for in December – more policing and capital punishment.

This is exactly what allows people like Sushil Kumar Shinde and Sheila Dixit to get away. They are looking for key words and clever reductionism – some suspension, some arrests, and high-voltage trials until another rape brings people to the streets.

Unfortunately, the crowds and the governments are together in this unseemly tango.

This cycle has to break and it can be done only by the people, as one of the most quoted sociologists Margaret Mead had argued. But, they have to be informed and specific. If they want to see change, they have to change their chorus. Isn’t it loud and clear that the fear of the gallows doesn’t work?

That the fear of suspension doesn’t prevent an middle aged police official from slapping a teen aged girl because she demanded accountability?

Instead of the hangman’s noose or suspensions, people should ask for a systemic change. They should not let Manmohan Singh, Shinde and others get away with criminal and judicial fixes against rape or violence against women in a country which has about three crore cases pending in its courts. What is needed is saving our infants, girls and women from sexual violence and not punishing criminals after they torture and maim them.

Easier said than done, isn’ it? And where do we start?

The bigger picture is treating women as equal, social transformation and less criminal societies.

And its disaggregated result?

Behaviour change.

It requires long term and short term policies and programmes. The whole process has to start with communities.

It’s not rocket science or some unachievable ideal. It’s as simple a task as eradicating polio or reducing infant mortality or filariasis. Some states in India have done it remarkably well. Without looking at the social determinants of health, none of these interventions could have worked. It’s time that we looked at the social determinants of the violence against women.

It will take time and a lot of money, but the country is not unfamiliar with the processes. All that is required is political will. For the demand to work, politics will have to cleanse itself of criminals and rapists.

Our crowds should ask for such a systemic change. It’s a multi-billion dollar social engineering project. It will require everything that a social and behaviour change intervention requires including massive communication campaigns, incentives for progress, and constitutional commitments by state and central governments.

Punishment too will work in such a situation.

If the UPA can do a logistically complicated NREGS for votes, in which cash was just given away in faraway lands, they should be able to do this as well. Unfortunately, the Congress will not do it on their own because it won’t get them votes and the Planning Commission or the Economic Adviser do not advise the Prime Minister on rapes or sexual violence. Only the pressure of people can bring this change.

Without such a social change, India will plunge into mediaeval darkness.

The community has a critical role in discouraging criminal behaviour. As the “theory of reasoned action” notes, intention is an important factor in determining behaviour and it is influenced both by what one things as good or bad, and how society perceives it.

If society perceives that aggressing a woman or eve-teasing as normal, it will certainly shape the behaviour of our boys and men towards women.

Behavioural change, according to the “state of change model”, is a five-step process. It starts with a thought by an individual on his behaviour, followed by a desire and intention to change, and the actual process of change.

As American psychologist and behaviourist BF Skinner had noted “punished behavior is likely to reappear after the punitive consequences are withdrawn…Perhaps the greatest drawback is the fact that punishment does not actually offer any information about more appropriate or desired behaviors. While subjects might be learning to not perform certain actions, they are not really learning anything about what they should be doing.”

For heaven’s sake, let’s stop this clamour for punishment. Instead let’s push for social change to stop this pandemic. The government should spend at least a few thousand crores for several years and bring in constitutional amendments to make states (particularly those that account for 14 per cent of the country’s rape burden) fall in line.

Punishment is what the governments will like to offer. It’s of no use. As research studies show, “punitive approaches do not teach alternative behaviour” just as anti-diarrheal drugs do not cure diarrhea.