Monday, March 16, 2015
No Country for Women
The following opinion piece was published in Republica on March 16, 2015 with the title "Bad to worse". The direct link to Republica is here. The unedited version is below:
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.
Labels: death penalty, maoists, rape, sexual violence, VAW
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