New Delhi, Oct. 6 -- By every measure the state uses, the response to the gang rape of a seventeen-year-old in Aastha Kunj on 21 September has been a success. Three arrests within a day. One accused shot in the leg. A safety audit of every park in Delhi, entry restricted after sunset.
I spent eight years studying rape for my doctoral research, and by the measure victimology uses, the girl herself disappeared from this story on 22 September. Nothing that has happened since is about her. I can tell you what happens next because I watched it happen to everyone before her.
Early in my fieldwork, I went to meet a family whose eight-year-old had been raped by her stepfather. The man who opened the door was the stepfather. A colleague who had worked on these cases for years advised me: wear a suit and a bindi, look married, and, if possible, wear sindoor.
I have never stopped thinking about what it meant that the way to be safe while studying rape in this country was to look like I belonged to a man. That is the logic of our response to sexual violence. Protection is offered to women in exchange for being less present: less visible, less free, less in the park after dark. Lock the gates. Move the classes online. Wear the sindoor.
Victimology has a term for the kind of victim a society finds easiest to believe: the ideal victim. She is a woman attacked by a stranger while doing something respectable. The girl in Aastha Kunj is close to that ideal: a child, on her way to the Kalkaji temple, attacked by strangers pretending to be police. But watch as the case ages. She was in a park at 7.30 in the evening with a male friend. When the story becomes about her choices, the anger will fade and the questions will begin: why was she there, why so late, who was the boy.
A sixteen-year-old in Swaroop Nagar, gang-raped and murdered earlier this month, drew a fraction of the attention: she had left school and gone to meet a boy she knew. Sympathy for a rape victim is rationed by honour: by whether the girl was where a good girl is supposed to be.
But here is what my research found that I did not expect. Even the most ideal victim is not protected from what the system does next. The December 2012 Delhi gang rape produced the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, which the country still calls the Nirbhaya Act. Her mother, Asha Devi, told me that the family never knew what was happening in the case. She had to hire a private lawyer to attend hearings, while the convicts stretched the process across seven years. The mother the laws were written for described the system as something that happened to her, not for her.
She is not the exception. The father of a nine-year-old boy waited ten years for compensation and said the sentence that sums up my entire dissertation: we are invisible in this process of justice. A girl a court advised to marry the man who assaulted her said: he did what he did to me, not to the court. In India, it is not a malfunction. It is the design. The system turns a person into a case file, her trauma into evidence, and her need to heal into a wait for a verdict that, when it comes, ends in acquittal three times out of four.
And when it fails, we reach for the only tool we have. After 2012, we widened the definition of rape, built fast-track courts and brought in the death penalty for child rape. Our response to rape is a failure of imagination. We cannot picture justice as anything other than punishment or restriction. The victims I listened to could imagine more. Asha Devi wanted the hanging, but also remorse, information, prevention and to be treated as a person in her daughter's case. The families I sat with wanted safety, dignity, a voice, and enough money to keep their other children in school. The state offers punishment and compensation, delivering the first a quarter of the time and the second, as the father of that nine-year-old learned, a decade late.
A victim-centred system would not require a new law. It requires one named victim advocate for every survivor, standing with her and her family from FIR to verdict. Not a helpline. A person who calls before and after every hearing. The POCSO Rules of 2020 already entitle every child victim to a support person, and in 2023 the Supreme Court held that providing one is the state's obligation, not an option. Enforce it, and extend it to every rape survivor, adult or child. It costs almost nothing.
The audit due this week will tell us how many lights and cameras Delhi's parks have. It will not tell us whether a woman can be in one at nine at night, or what happens to a seventeen-year-old after the arrests are made. Those are the only two questions that matter.
Views expressed are personal. The writer teaches at O.P. Jindal Global University
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.