By Swami Agnivesh and Valson Thampu
First, a word about rape-murder. By hyphenating the two words, we seek to highlight a growing connection and continuity between the two. Rape culminates in murder. This appears to be alarmingly so in connection with the rape of girls.
Yesterday we watched two things on TV in quick succession. First, Big B’s appeal to ensure that our country does not become known to the rest of the world as rape-land. The other was the news that a four-year old girl was rape-murdered in Mumbai.
Measures meant to deter rape by making it punishable in an exemplary fashion have had the unwitting effect of increasing the murder of rape victims so as to eliminate evidence. It goes without saying that rape and all sex-related crimes need to be viewed with the seriousness they deserve. This is not the domain for spurious compassion. It is the victim, not the aggressor, who deserves our compassion.
But there is a serious issue that events one after another continue to highlight.
Is deterrence, by itself, a sufficient response to the illness of our society as manifested through sex-related crimes? Increased deterrence does not appear to have effected a better security environment for women in our society. On the contrary, saner and more civilized metropolises – Bengaluru, Mumbai – are now baring their fangs of social aberration.
Capital punishment has not deterred murder. Increased levels of deterrence, while psychologically satisfying and politically appealing, may not make our cities and streets safe for girls and women or neighbourhoods safe for girl children.
Crime is a disease. This is to say nothing new. Crime is to a society what symptoms are to the illness of a person. Suppose you have diabetes-related un-healing ulcers or weeping psoriasis. You don’t heal yourself by shooting your ulcers and extirpating weeping sites. You look for a radical solution. It is foolish to think that deterrence, while necessary, is a solution. Deterrence is a response to a symptom; not the remedy for a disease.
There are two schools of thought on sex-related crimes. One holds that an illusion of their increase has been created by increased alertness of women activists and growing media reportage. The second holds that sex-crimes have in fact increased, and continue to do so, alarmingly.
It is true that sex-related crimes existed all through history. In the past attempts were made to explain it away by invoking female seductiveness and male vulnerability. So, it was more a matter of woman being a seductress than man being a predator. Mercifully now no one believes in this.
We want to argue that the key to understanding, and even containing, this absolute shame lies in the understanding of culture, combined with a scientific view of the male and female principles. There are two aspects that readily come to mind.
First, the male is sexually more restless than the female. This is subsumed in all cultures. Even today, a certain extent of sexual adventurism is associated with the young male. Every college or university going youth will endorse this. Sexual prowess is, in varying degrees, an ingredient of the macho image. The abstemious are scorned as sissies.
Tolstoy, in his Confessions, narrates how his aunt urged him to have a physical relation with a married woman so he could be normal! Also, how his peers ridiculed him for being sexually disciplined.
Second there is a difference between the caring orientation of the male and the female, which is a cultural blind spot. There was a time when human beings were no different from animals in sexual behavior.
Promiscuity, polygamy and polyandry were accepted practices. Even scriptures record such instances. Sexual mores began to change when our species began to lead settled lives, which put an unprecedented emphasis on the nurture of the young of the species.
Of all animals, it is the human infant that needs the most extended care and nurture. The need for greater sexual discipline of the female arises directly from the fact that she is the traditional care-giver. Not just to the baby, but also to all else, including the jumbo-sized baby called husband. The wife is conveniently and hypocritically labeled “the angel of the house.” All else are lucky care consumers! What a convenient division of labor! Men still think this is their entitlement and, what is worse, that this works to their advantage.
Anthropology and educational psychology alike point out that the unusually prolonged dependence of the growing babe, and the need to be nurtured by his or her parents for years, is nature’s arrangement for developing a culture of caring, personal attachment and social orientation.
“Dependence,” which modern culture understands only negatively, is a positive social resource. From a social angle, independence – which gives birth to the aberration of the autonomous, self-contained individual -, is a hindrance to the development of our social sense and capacity for relationship-building. Criminology establishes a link –as, in literature, Dostoevsky does in Crime and Punishment – between the pathological aloneness of the self-contained, uncaring individual and proclivity to crime.
If this is true, the key to getting a handle on the spiraling sex-related crime is the reconfiguration of our culture, especially in respect of the male-female division of labor at home based on inherited stereotypes. The exemption of the male from the duty to care and to nurture, and the whole of it being assigned to the female – all the more indefensible at a time when women are, in many instances, better employed – is not only unfair but also unscientific.
Man and woman are life-partners. Today they are no more than sex-partners. But life is more than sex! Freud’s idea that sex rules the world is true only when life is reduced to the biochemistry of sexual encounters.
The dynamism of human nature involves an equilibrium between care and cruelty. Cruelty reigns by default. It happens when man is no longer empowered and required to be a care-giver.
Given the above, we have to conclude that a terrible mistake is being piously perpetuated at all levels. Men, victims already of cultural conditioning, deem it self-demeaning to share domestic work. Women, again culturally conditioned, deem it unfair to men to involve them in the soulful works of cooking as well as nurturing babies. Mothers think they love their sons best by treating them as a species superior to daughters.
We have heard many exclaim, “How could a man who has a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter do such a thing!” The answer lies in the scope of the word ‘have’. How can you ‘have’ what you haven’t nurtured and cared for? How can a man, who does not care for his own mother, wife, sister and daughter care for anyone else?
Law is a very limited instrument. What really helps is a change in human nature. Training men to be caring, nurturing individuals is the way forward. This will not happen, unless women see things in perspective and play their role in reclaiming the authentic male. Truth be told, none without a mother’s heart deserves to be acknowledged a man!