What the West hears about rape in India — and why that must change
Rape is a global issue. Not just a problem in India
The fight against gender violence is something I deeply care about. It is difficult not to. Everywhere you look, across all media, every day, you find echoes of deeply upsetting incidents: sexual violence, rape, incest, murder.
In recent times, perhaps no other country has received as much international media attention as India in this context. As a Western news reader, my impressions of India — a country I have always wanted to visit, but am anxious about visiting — are shaped by what I read in the Guardian and the BBC and the CNN.
And what I read, what I hear, is frightening.
India’s abuse of women is the biggest human rights violation on Earth, a Guardian article said recently. CNN wrote about India’s problem with rape. And just today, Bloomberg carried a piece on how sexual violence is robbing Indian businesses of talented women.
All the stories made interesting points within their context. But taken together and read in the larger context one would read them in— against the backdrop of a post-Nirbhaya India, from where emerges frequent media reports on Kathua and Unnao and victim-burning — it is difficult not to think Indians experience far worse a situation in terms of rape and sexual violence than those in the West.
But is that the truth? Or is that the ‘truth’ made by the news media?
If we look at Western countries, both the UK and the US have pretty depressing figures for rape and sexual violence. In the UK, according to Office for the National Statistics, in 2017 an estimated 646,000 were victims of sexual offences (including rape) in England and Wales alone. Of this, only 121,187 — just 18.7% — were reported to the police, including 41,186 recorded cases of rape. In the US, in 2016 an estimated 95,730 people were victims of forcible rapes. According to news reports, one in six women experience sexual assault in their life time in the United States, with someone being raped every 98 seconds.
I could try and make my case by comparing Indian statistics with this. I could say, for instance, that according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau report of 2016, there are only 38,947 cases of reported rape in India — which is way behind what is reported in the UK and US. I could also point to reports that say Sweden has 63.5 reported rapes per 100,000 citizens, higher than that reported in India.
But such comparisons can be misleading — which is part of the point I want to make.
Articles in the news media about why India is the ‘rape capital of the world’ are often based on perceptions, superficial comparisons, and incomplete — or incomparable — statistics. There are no international standards, and different nations collect and classify sexual violence in different ways that comparisons — as this article clarifies — need to be made with utmost caution. Moreover, the sociocultural contexts that contribute to the situation are not always considered, and quite often such reports tend to be responses to shocking incidents that demand — or are seen to demand — strong media stances.
There is also the ‘proximity’ factor that comes into play when the Western media look at India. Given the distant site of news, and lack of connectedness that the Western audiences feel with the ‘global south’, there needs to be other factors — extreme violence, victimisation of children, etc — to engage the far-removed audiences in the West. Incidents like Kathua and Unnao, hence, become representative of India for the average Westerner.
Writing up rape and sexual violence as an ‘Indian problem’ and decrying ‘India’s rape culture’ are problematic not just because this gives India a bad name. In doing so, the news media also help shift the focus away from what is happening in the West and elsewhere, helping to hide away the ‘rape culture’ there from public attention.
Rape is a global issue. Not just ‘India’s problem’.
