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South Asian women say India's response to the New Delhi gang rape and murder fails to address women's rights but express some optimism that cultural change is beginning
WASHINGTON – There is nothing special about South Asian politics or culture that fosters violence against women. It happens all over the world. The tragedy of the New Delhi gang rape and murder on a public bus of a 23-year-old medical student returning from the movies is that nothing in India's official response has challenged traditional attitudes. Protection of women has been the response, not an affirming of a woman’s right to autonomy and full citizenship.
The discourse must return to women’s rights and control over our bodies, said women from South Asia on a World Bank panel on Thursday who were debating gender-based violence in the region.
“Our response has been to strengthen the apparatus of the state, not strengthening the sexual rights of women,” said Ratna Kapur, professor at Jindal Global Law School. The new Indian law in response to the Dec. 16, 2012, rape focused on harsh sentencing for rapes and the death penalty for attackers.
“Women are seen as weak and vulnerable needing protection and not subject to rights, while men are virile and muscular, and that is not being challenged at all. Women are being infantalised,” Kapur said.
In Bangladesh, there was a copy-cat rape on a bus that scarcely garnered any attention or protests like those that followed the Delhi attack, said Shireen Huq, founder of women’s advocacy group Nari Pokhkho. Such a response illustrates that changing attitudes about the status of women will be hardest of all.
She cited a study her group conducted based on multiple interviews of men convicted of rape. In large part, they expressed a sense of right, a license to be violent toward women and they spoke of a traditional sense that this was what it meant to be a man.
While the growing ranks of working women in South Asia might feel a new sense of freedom as they move into the public arena with income in their pockets, freedom is not won by buying consumer goods in new shopping malls, wearing jeans or demonstrating against rape.
“It is a long struggle of hands-on work and rights will be won one bit at a time,” Huq said.
“Where I am disturbed is that the outrage is not accompanied by a sense of having to struggle for our rights,” Huq said.
Meanwhile in rural areas, horrific rapes and sexual abuse within the family continue to happen all the time and go unnoticed, said Nisha Agrawal, chief executive officer of Oxfam India, who is unconvinced the New Delhi case has started to change attitudes.
“Surveys show that 70-80 percent of people think it is perfectly fine to beat a woman if she does not have a meal ready for you on time, if she disrespects your in-laws or refuses to have sex with you,” she said.
CUSP OF CHANGE
Yet the panel expressed some optimism that as women in South Asia increasingly move from higher education into the workplace, significant change will happen. India will have 450 million people in the middle class this decade, many of them working women whose expectations are shifting rapidly as they move into the public sphere.
“When women become financially independent and the bread winners, respect will follow too. Law cannot do it. I really believe that financial empowerment is a huge part of the story,” said Seema Aziz, a businesswoman and chair of the educational charity CARE Foundation in Pakistan.
“This could be a tipping point, if we build on it and government and society looks at it, builds on it and looks for the reasons behind it,” she said.
It is women who will drive this change by moving from under the protective shield of men and the state, toward an autonomous definition of self that includes bodily integrity.
The women’s response to the Delhi attack showed that change is starting, said Kapur: “They are saying ‘I am not your mother, I am not your sister, I am not a girl. I am a citizen.’”
Once you talk of citizenship, you are talking of rights.
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