Working with NewsTracker showed me how easy it is to become numb to India’s rape problem
If you tweet out every news story on rape, you’ll be mistaken for a spambot
I suddenly realised how dry my eyes felt. I looked away from the newsfeed I had been staring at on the screen. A newsfeed crafted to give me the latest stories on rape, sexual violence, molestation, assault. I wasn’t prepared.
When I was first tasked with compiling a daily newsletter[i] based on stories about sexual violence in the Indian media, I was sceptical. It was a bit of an overkill I thought — putting together a daily round-up would be a struggle. I was partially right. It was a struggle, but not because there were not enough stories. There were too many of them.
It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the statistics — I knew that more than a hundred rape cases are reported in India every day. But statistics make India’s rape problem more palatable than it should be — they don’t sicken the way stories do. It was overwhelming to take stock of dozens of reports about rape and rape culture every day, reading about the survivors/victims, their families, the horrific details of the crimes, the public response (if any) and, sometimes, the absurd reactions that came from political leaders in the wake of such incidents.
THE NEWS MEDIA HAS TO WALK A TIGHTROPE BETWEEN SENSATIONALISING AND NORMALISING RAPE.
When I started working on the MAAR (Media Action Against Rape) NewsTracker in May 2018, my engagement with the problem of rape in India was rather cursory. I had keenly followed ‘high-profile’ cases such as Nirbhaya and Kathua, but my understanding was specious. I didn’t quite grasp the superstructure of rape-culture, of which each particular rape is but an instance. As for the news media, I thought I knew what role it could and should play in combating the issue. Off the top of my head, I could list out some the obvious problems such as disproportionate coverage, lack of follow-ups and trials by media.
Yet, in the following months, my understanding was constantly challenged. I began to realise that rape is so much more than a crime and that the solution cannot be limited to punishment. I also saw that “fixing” the media’s coverage is not as easy as it is to point out obvious problems.
Given the sheer number of sexual crimes that happen in India every day, the news media has to walk a tightrope between sensationalising and normalising rape. I realised the enormity of this challenge when we started promoting NewsTracker stories on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
We thought it would be useful to have a single source of information on sexual assault news, so we decided to create a Twitter feed that would use a keyword-based algorithm to tweet out fresh stories as they appeared daily. But the number of stories was staggering. By tweeting out each one of them, we ran the risk of being mistaken for a spambot and being banned by Twitter.
The irony of the situation where a particular story getting widespread coverage made it suspicious to the spam filters and algorithms wasn’t lost on me.
WERE WE BEING COUNTERPRODUCTIVE BY TWEETING OUT EACH AND EVERY NEWS ARTICLE? IS RAPE BEST SERVED IN SMALL PORTIONS?
Every evening, I would enter that list of keywords separated by “OR” in the search bar and would notice the shrinking size of the side-scroller as the results poured in. I would say to myself, “70 stories have come in the last 16 hours? That means 70 tweets! Surely people aren’t going to read all that!”
Being a teacher at a university has taught me that if I get too eager and give my class a lot of readings, it will have the opposite of the intended effect. They’ll simply start ignoring all the readings. Were we being counterproductive by tweeting out each and every news article? Is rape best served in small portions? Any story, no matter how well researched and written, can only do so much if it gets buried under the deluge of content online. I tried to find a way around the problem: perhaps, I figured, we don’t have to share all reports of one incident across newspapers.
In a couple of days’ time on the project, it was clear to me how easy it is for a reporter or even an interested reader to get numbed by the ubiquity of sexual violence, and thus internalise rape as part of the fabric of India.
The big story doing the rounds in this time period was about the Muzaffarpur shelter home where 34 inmates (all minors) were systematically sexually assaulted for years. And this was just the tip of the iceberg: a social audit reported that many other shelter homes needed further scrutiny for physical and sexual abuse. Even though the story was sufficiently gruesome and was given wide and sustained media coverage, the public outrage was limited.
MEDIA AND ACADEMIA NEED TO REALISE THAT THEIR WORK IS COMPLEMENTARY WHEN IT COMES TO COMBATING SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND RAPE CULTURE, AND THAT THEY ARE NATURAL ALLIES IN THIS BATTLE.
Despite the magnitude of this systemic lapse, people in Bihar, which is where I come from, and the country at large treated it as ‘just another rape story’ not worthy of any long-term commitment. The trajectory it followed was familiar: exposure, some outrage and a political blame game. Nonetheless, this case did inspire the Central government to commit to auditing shelter homes across the country by October.
It is significant to point out that the story surfaced because of a social audit of all shelter homes in Bihar, conducted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. What is considered as an academic exercise led to this expose — something we would normally associate with investigative journalism. It dawned upon me that media and academia need to realise that their work is complementary when it comes to combating sexual violence and rape culture, and that they are natural allies in this battle.
This insight motivated me at points where I found myself questioning the impact our work would have on the ground. I was convinced that collaborations between the media and academia are essential in the fight against sexual violence.
THE NUMBERS THAT ONCE SHOOK YOU LOOK LIKE ANY OTHER DEPRESSING DATA. THE STORIES TAKE ON A CERTAIN SAMENESS. WHEN THIS HAPPENS, IT IS TIME TO STOP AND REMEMBER WHY THE FIGHT AGAINST SEXUAL VIOLENCE MATTERS.
Connecting with other stakeholders on Twitter also made me aware of the large number of organisations and platforms that are working in their own specialised ways to combat rape — including legal aid and awareness, therapy and rehabilitation for survivors, socio-cultural interventions for the public, data collection, policy research, sensitising police and medical personnel, activism for or against the death penalty. However, there is little coordination between different stakeholders and that is where I felt a platform such as NewsTracker could come in handy.
Those of us who immerse ourselves in projects dealing with sexual violence probably experience a similar gamut of emotions — anger, a drive to bring about change, helplessness, numbness. I think is important to acknowledge the latter. The numbers that once shook you look like any other depressing data. The stories take on a certain sameness, blurring into each other. When this happens, it is time to stop and remember why the fight against sexual violence — violence against humanity — matters. It takes persistence, patience, co-ordination and courage to tackle this mammoth issue, and every dent we make is worth the effort.
[i] It has since been changed to a twice-weekly newsletter to allow for greater depth of content
