It is the mindset of gender inequality
I’ve written before about Leslee Udwin’s interviews with the men who raped Jyoti Singh and pulled her intestines out on that Delhi bus in 2012. But here’s another sample, from NPR:
They play a clip from Udwin’s film, then the interviewer asks Udwin about it:
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: A lady are more precious than a gem, than a diamond. It is up to you how you want to keep that diamond in your hand. If you put your diamond on the street, certainly the dog will take it out. You can’t stop.
MARTIN: So what is he saying?
UDWIN: Well, essentially, he is giving expression to patriarchy. He is saying that men hold this diamond – this precious gem of womankind – in their hand. They control it. It’s their decision as to where they put this diamond. If you put it on the street, he’s saying, you deserve what you get. Keep your girls and women under lock and key at home. Give them no independence. Give them no equality. It’s just appalling.
Keep them under lock and key, and if they outrageously and criminally escape and go outside, punish them by raping them and pulling out their intestines.
MARTIN: Is there something in the making of this film that particularly surprised you?
UDWIN: So many things surprised me, Michel. First of all, I imagined that at least one of these seven rapists I interviewed would express remorse for even one second. No, they did not- no remorse. Why? Because they deep down really don’t believe they’ve done anything wrong. In fact, they’re indignant. Why are they be made an example of when everybody’s at it?
Then I expected them to be monsters. I thought I was inquiring into the psychopathy of rapists because the media had told me they were monsters. I wish they had been. Every one of these rapists was as normal as they come. It is the mindset of gender inequality that is responsible for rape and violence against women. These are just the symptoms, and until we change that, this will continue apace across the entire world.
While we watch helplessly.
‘Every one of these rapists was as normal as they come.’
As normal as WHO? Nazi policemen, lynching party attendees, pedophile priests?
Those people you mention, John? They’re the boy (and much more rarely, the girl) next door to someone, too. That’s Udwin’s point.
That until we stop thinking there’s something not like Us about Them, humanity will never be able to stop the problem at its source.
I know. You’ll say, “I’m not like that” and you aren’t. But that’s because of the rules of the groups you’ve lived in and the choices you’ve made, some of them maybe quite small.
John, I think you’ve read here long enough to understand what the author means when she calls them “normal”, and not “cartoonishly obvious villains that everyone would have no trouble believing was a rapist.”
Nazi policemen were normal. That’s the point. Being a Nazi policeman lurks in each of us. Most of us won’t be a Nazi policeman but most of us will get thrill from (say) winning status battles or lording it over a rivals. Deterring Nazi policemen starts at home, in my opinion. We need to recognize these lurking tendencies in ourselves
I’ve heard this before. Not in India though, but in one of the African countries.
I had a conversation with a local guy about women travelling solo in Africa. I heard stories of harassment from such women, but I heard also how lovely the people (including men) can be to them – how nice, selfless and going out of their way to help. Reacting to this, the guy said something like “When we see such women, sometimes we treat them as whores. But women are treasures. Unlike us, foreigners do not value their women and when seeing them alone, we pity them, so we help”.
Of course this is not an exact quote – not after so many years! – but that was the content. Still, I do remember that the words “whores” and “treasures” were used. Nevertheless, it was not these words that made the conversation so memorable, but the suggestion that they help out of pity. If it weren’t for his words, I would never consider it as an explanation.
I hope that it was nothing more than just one guy’s opinion… but I’m not so sure.
I recommend watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s two remarkable and terrifying films about the massacres in Indonesia in the 1960s: ‘The Act of Killing’ and ‘The Look of Silence’. We are none of us very nice.
It would be really nice to be able to believe that people who do this sort of thing are monsters — as defined by being somehow extraordinarily brutal and lacking in conscience. It would also be *almost* nice to believe that there’s something one (if one is a woman) could do to stay safe, even if it’s a galling thing to have to do: one could at least feel safe some of the time, at least be able to divide one’s activities into “safe” and “risky”. The reality is, unfortunately, that no matter what one does or doesn’t do, if one is a woman, one is never safe — at any time someone can decide she committed some infraction that justifies torturing her to death. This someone doesn’t have to be a monster — they just have to feel aggrieved by something a woman (or her owners) has or hasn’t done. Then it’s just a simple matter of administering a proper (and deserved) punishment, which is not an action reserved only for monsters. It’s not even something that happens only in far away, exotic places which are notorious for treating women poorly and which one can stay away from (assuming she was lucky enough not to be born there, of course). Case in point: http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/florida-man-reaches-inside-woman-and-disembowels-her-for-uttering-exs-name-during-sex/