I Think: Most of the prime-time faces commenting on rape are male
Avni Sethi, founder of Conflictorium, Ahmedabad
The 2002 riots in Gujarat was the first time things were happening so close to me. I could see places I visited go up in flames. The context of that event changed from being about one day, to an unravelling of a systemic kind of violence. I knew I had to come back to Ahmedabad and the context I grew up in. Conflictorium, a participatory museum in Ahmedabad that seeks to create a space for facilitating dialogue through art, was founded after that.
If you ask me how I consume news and what’s my relationship with that consumption, it’s a kind of acceptance of disbelief, a breaking down of faith. The consumption of news has become an energy-consuming, time-taking exercise. News is no longer news, but has become an exercise in opinion building.
More than 50 per cent of the faces who are commenting on rape are male, when one thinks of prime-time opinion-making television programs. The tone and tenor is no different from talking about military intervention or national pride — it’s the same across contexts.
Similarly, the shame ascribed to a rape victim is a media-produced response. There is an assumption that the violence which has been produced on a survivor or victim has somehow produced a loss of dignity of the victim. This narrative needs to be contested.
There was a lot of conversation after Nirbhaya around victim shaming but I still feel that the tone in which rape is written about produces a certain kind of scepticism. This disbelief in women’s stories needs to change.
To qualify a specific act of rape as “gory”, an enumeration of details takes place, leading to a production of image in journalism. It becomes sensational.This is taking us down a dangerous path.
Having said that, reporting on rape is challenging because ethical journalism would mean you listen to the multiple voices that are involved.
Religion plays such an important part in our life. It’s important to examine how it views gender roles. What I am increasingly experiencing is that women’s bodies are imagined as dispensable in religion. I can only speak from experience of a person born into a Hindu family. Look at the embedded violence within religion, of caste, on women. Books of sacred value legitimise this violence and they legitimise inequality.
This is one of the articles that NewsTracker published from 25 November to 10 December as part of the #16Days activism, aligned with the UN’s International Day for Ending Violence Against Women. This piece appeared on Day 3.
