An elderly nun was gang-raped by bandits on March 14 in West Bengal when they broke into the Convent of Jesus and Mary School, in Ranaghat, West Bengal. Since society normally has a standard fare of questions to ask women who get raped, we have decided to skip protocol and get to the questions directly. Let’s begin. Where were we? Oh yes, an elderly nun was gang-raped by bandits on March 14 at Kolkata.
Q1. She must be wearing something revealing or flashy.
Ans: No, she is a nun. She was wearing a nun’s habit, a long gown that covers neck to ankle and we presume her head was covered too with the nun’s habit.
Q2: So she must have done something provocative.
Ans: She is a 72-year-old nun. She has taken an oath of celibacy and sworn herself to god. Besides, when bandits break into one’s abode, the last thing that is there on a woman’s mind is provocation. She was only trying to prevent the bandits from stealing relics away from the convent.
Q3: That’s impossible! Why would men rape women unless there was provocation by the woman? She must have done something!
Ans: Once again, she is a 72-year-old nun. When the attackers broke into the premises, they tied up several of the nuns. This elderly senior nun tried to prevent them from stealing relics.
Q4: I don’t believe you. She must have done something for sure. Rape is always a woman’s fault!
Ans: …………… (too angry to speak)!
Maybe nobody is asking these questions loudly because the victim is a nun, somebody who by profession is said to be celibate, withdrawn from matters of the flesh, in service to god. Nobody would ask anything if the victim happens to be a child either, it’s just happy innocence shattered by a brute monster. But if the victim happened to be a girl or a woman between the ages of 12 to 50, then it is almost always the girl’s fault. People don’t hesitate to point fingers at the girl then, openly and publicly.
We have narrow-minded, bigoted lawyers who defend the Nirbhaya rapists saying it is the girl’s fault for leaving the confines of her home, for being with a boy and other outrageous strictures like ‘If it was my daughter, I’d have burnt her alive’ and statements like that.
We also have an idiot judge in a Swedish court, who last week shockingly acquitted a 27-year-old man of raping a 13-year-old girl because the young teen’s body was “well-developed”! Clearly being a woman sucks in all societies. That judgement is tantamount to the judicial system saying that the little girl’s breasts and hips are the reason that she was raped, and also the reason that her rapist will be set free. That child will have a lifetime of body image issues and trauma to deal with!
We all need to rethink our common perception of rape. It is not that of a skimpily dressed woman out late at night, ‘tempting’ an uneducated man. There are rich men who rape poor defenseless women. There are fathers who rape and abuse their minor daughters, sometimes as young as three years old. Not just fathers. It’s uncles, grandfathers, the family friend, older cousin, the watchman, the delivery guy, the guru, the priest… the list is endless. Last week, a security guard at a construction site raped a six-year-old girl whose father worked there? What did she do to deserve it?
And it doesn’t just end there. We also have marital rape, where the husband forces himself on his wife against her wishes, beats her, abuses her, subjects her to torture and misery, day in and day out. But our courts won’t intervene, because they don’t recognize marital rape.
Wait. Don’t go away yet. I still haven’t come to rape by occupying armed forces. There have been many horror stories in the North East, in Kashmir of rape and brutality under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. These are not stories of provocatively dressed women. These are stories of women living in sheer terror night after night. These stories hardly ever come out, because they are not part of mainland India’s perception of rape.
And it’s not just India. Across the globe, wherever armed forces have occupied and invaded, there have been horror stories of rape and sexual brutality. And yes, this includes the holier-than-thou US soldiers in Iraq too.
The victims are women of different shapes, sizes, colour, ages and children too – boys and girls. Sometimes they are as young as a two-year-old baby. The big picture is that there is no rhyme or reason why a particular victim is chosen to be raped.
The only common factor underlying all this is that it’s MEN who rape all these young and old women, these children, these elderly nuns, powerless mentally and physically challenged women. It’s all men. It seems to me a simple matter of mathematics. IT’S THE MAN’S FAULT. It always is!
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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