Views of a Nepali Economist

No Country for Women

It wasn’t long ago when Nepalis read and watched numerous rape-related news coming out from India. We sympathized with the Indian victims, but were thankful that rape was not as big a problem in Nepal. That is true no more. Puja Shah, a seven-year old from Kailali, who was raped on February 21, has since died. Her case has caught the country’s attention. However, as the country demands justice for Puja, it has come to light that another six-year old had been raped in Tehrathum on March 2. The case was kept secret until now because locals were trying to settle the case locally. It eventually became public after 11 days when the six-year old girl’s health began to deteriorate.

Violence against women has gone from bad to the worst in recent times. In the past, Nepali women were ill-treated by their husbands and in-laws. They suffered harassment for not bringing enough dowry. Girls were not sent to schools, and women lacked work opportunities beyond the confines of their homes. As years passed, we believed we were making progress by educating our girls and increasing female labor force participation. A recent study named Nepal as the country with the highest female labor force participation in the world, with 80 percent of working age Nepali women being employed.

However, violence against Nepali women has changed its form in recent years. Rape has turned out to be the most common violence inflicted upon not only Nepali women, but women in general, all over the world. Bringing the culprits to justice has been difficult because most rape cases go unreported and undocumented. It is a problem even in developed western societies. For example, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice reports that around 75 percent of rape cases in the UK go unreported. In the United States, a woman gets sexually assaulted every two minutes. Those are sobering statistics.

What do these numbers look like for Nepal? We don’t know. We will never know if we do not improve our way of dealing with the victims. In the past few days, the acid attack victims have told the media that they have been harassed by the Nepali police. They accuse the police of putting more effort in questioning the victims than finding the perpetrator. Similar reasons cause rape and other sexual assaults to go unreported in Nepal. Victims fear coming forward. They are afraid of going public because they will be asked to relive their experiences again and again in interrogations. Their families aren’t helpful either. Victims’ families are more worried about losing the family izzat than getting justice for their wives and daughters. Instead, victims’ families and the local society often engage in monetary compensation negotiation with the perpetrators. The case of the six-year old from Tehrathum is an example.

Incidence of sexual assaults on Nepali women increased during and after the conflict. Research has shown that the Nepali Army and the Maoists used ‘rape’ as a tool to teach the other side a lesson. Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organization, reports that the Nepali Army raped female relatives of suspected Maoists. On the other hand, the Maoists raped women who refused to join the insurgency or support it. Life after the assaults has not been any better for those victims. Many of the stigmatized victims have suffered further domestic violence from their own families. These findings suggest that ours is no longer a country for women, especially not for victims of sexual assaults.

In addition to a change in mindset of how we view the victims, we also need better legislations and policies. Victims of sexual violence often take a long time to come forward. However, the 35-day statute of limitations prevents them from filing reports. How many perpetrators of sexual violence roam our streets free because they were never charged due to limitations imposed by the statute of limitations?  Does that mean rape victims of the insurgency can no longer pursue their attackers?

Poor policies and legislations have meant that the mob often takes justice in its own hands. For example, earlier this month, a rape accused was dragged out from his jail cell in Nagaland by a mob, and was killed. Newer details about that case reveal that the man was probably innocent because the allegation could have been fake. A week ago, a drunk man in Agra exposed himself indecently to a girl from the neighborhood. The mob learnt of it, and hanged the man dead in an example of mob justice. Many among us believe that mob justice is a swift solution to rape and acid attack incidents. However, mob justice is fraught with danger and is not ‘just’.

Similar danger lies ahead in Nepal because there is a sizable crowd that has been demanding the acid attacker from last month to be found and hanged. If that’s the going standard for criminal punishment, I think the mob wants death penalties for the rapists, too. Even the victims of the acid attacks have been demanding their attacker be hanged. I feel that everyone needs to take a step back and dial down on their rhetoric. The whole country agrees that current provisions of punishment for sexual assaults are weak. They do not fit the crime. However, the Nepali State has not executed anyone since 1979, and the Nepali Constitution of 1990 abolished the death penalty. The death penalty robs people out of an opportunity to prove themselves innocent if fresh evidence presents itself anytime in the future.

We decided in 1990 that executing people was not a just punishment, no matter what the nature and extent of the crime. We settled on that ‘value’ as a society. To bring back the death penalty would be to give up on those values. If we don’t stick to our values when they are challenged, then they’re not really our values. They’re hobbies.