In my 50 years of journalistic experience covering gender issues, one tragic irony has remained constant – victims of mass rape seldom get justice, especially if the assaulters are rich or politically well-connected. As time has passed, improved technology has added another layer to this problem. While technology helps nail perpetrators, it also exposes victims to shaming by the society that should have protected them. The victims hide and helplessly watch their lives fall apart, while the perpetrators move freely with bravado and courts drag their feet over punishing them. It’s the same old story, only with a tech twist.
In 1986, I covered the mass rape of women in a village called Thangamani in Kerala’s Idukki district, where the police themselves were the perpetrators. What started as a fairly innocuous argument between a few students and the owner of a bus service escalated into a major fallout with the police taking the side of the bus owner. Within a couple of days, more police reinforcements arrived and with the backing of the then-incumbent United Democratic Front (UDF) government, they descended on the village at midnight. The men of the village had fled into the forests to escape police brutality believing that the women would not be harassed. But what followed were ghastly events. All the women in the village, irrespective of their age, were assaulted, beaten, and molested. The Opposition led by the Left Democratic Front (LDF) stepped in and the raid on the village soon became a politicised event. Then came the irony. Most of the women who were allegedly assaulted did not want to complain.
When I spoke to some of them a couple of months later, the women continued to deny that they had been sexually assaulted. Then slowly, a woman whispered to me that both she and her daughter had been assaulted, and her younger daughter was forcibly kissed and bitten on the cheek. They feared that if such news got around, the reputation of the entire village would be affected and they were worried about their daughters' future.
Sexual assault in those days was a well-hidden crime, usually committed under the cover of darkness. Justice Sridevi was appointed to investigate the case, and I also got to know her over the many months it took her to do a thorough investigation. She was steady and fearless, and the women of Thankamani were willing to confide in her because of her empathy. Though the accusations were difficult to prove, she compiled a good report which took a long time to see the light of the day.
Cut to the Pollachi case which happened about 35 years later, when social media was the favoured means of communication among the young, and cell phone cameras made a secret recording of sexual assaults easy. As many as 60 young women were reportedly raped over 7 years in Pollachi, a small town in rural Tamil Nadu. The women were mostly befriended by a gang of young men over social media, and after a pretended romance, they lured these women to secluded areas and sexually assaulted them. The acts were filmed to enable blackmail, and this fear kept the survivors from sharing what happened to them, even with their own families, for many years. Pollachi is a small town where everyone knew everyone else, and the survivors had nowhere to hide. It took one brave girl in 2019 to complain to the police, testifying that she was stripped and beaten and that she escaped before she could be sexually assaulted.
The gang was soon busted and three kingpins were arrested. But it was too late for the victims, whose images had already done the rounds on social media. The police were also insensitive in handling the case as they revealed the name and photo of the girl who complained. Her brother was promptly beaten up by the other gang members who had avoided arrest, and her family was in a state of panic. The other survivors were effectively silenced. That case too, dragged on and on.
Even today, in the case of Janata Dal (Secular) MP Prajwal Revanna’s sexual assault videos in Karnataka, it’s not the technology that has changed, but the ease with which even the most un-tech-savvy users are manipulating it. The assaulter is the grandson of HD Deve Gowda, belonging to a prominent political family, who is alleged to have sexually assaulted many women including social workers, party workers, and wives of party workers, all from his constituency of Hasan over several years. He is said to have recorded these assaults probably to blackmail them into silence, but a disgruntled aide secretly got hold of the visuals and passed them on to political rivals. The hitherto innocuous pen drive, normally used for saving data, became the ultimate blackmail weapon and tool of vengeance.
Spreading the smear campaign was easy. No social media account was needed. The target audience could pick the pen drives off the roadside, bus stops, or any public place. Dozens and dozens of them lay scattered everywhere with explicit pictures of assaults in which the faces of the women were visible.
But, again, as thousands of these pen drives flooded the small town, the women suffered. While the main accused escaped to Germany with his diplomatic passport, and his father, who is also accused as an abettor in the case was released on bail, the women who suffered physical, mental, and emotional trauma were abandoned to fend for themselves. They now live in constant fear, not only of social stigma but also fear of renewed violence as the accused who are still at large wield enormous political clout.
Though systems have likely become better in terms of gender justice, it remains a sad constant that victims of mass sexual violence seldom get the justice they deserve. In the case of Prajwal, it remains to be seen how much more the women will have to endure until they can feel safe again.
Views expressed are author‘s own.
Gita Aravamudan is a journalist and the author of Baby Makers: The Story of Indian Surrogacy.