Trauma unlimited for rape victims

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It looks as if rape is one crime that men can commit with impunity in the state. Invariably, it is the victim who is shamed, not the violator.

Three years ago, the devastated father of a teenage girl, the victim of multiple rapes, decided to fight the injustice, knowing only too well that he would be exposing his only child to society’s arbitrary judgements.

First, being a child of 15, she had to make a statement before the child welfare committee. The same thing had to be repeated in front of a police officer, who was unfriendly and ruthlessly inquisitive.

The family was then told that the incident had taken place in another jurisdiction and so the girl had to subject herself to interrogation by another police officer, who seemed eager to establish that the 15-year-old had loose morals. That night, the girl had a seizure and had to be urgently admitted.

Two days later, she was taken to a government hospital for the health check as part of the legal procedure. She had to stand in the queue for nearly two hours and when she finally came before the gynaecologist, one of the first things the lady doctor asked the victim was: “For how long have you been going around with boys?” Next morning, the girl was found dead inside her room, and her father was later seen hanging from a tree in their backyard.

Three more victims had attempted suicide in the last two years.
Such tragedies have clearly not moved our rulers. In 2013, the state made a big show of opening One-Stop Crisis Cells (OSCC), where victims of sexual abuse were to be given all kinds of post-trauma assistance on an emergency basis and under a single roof, in all district hospitals and five other government hospitals. It was an arrangement where the system — the police, doctor, lawyer and counsellor — goes to the victim and not the other way round.

Now, two-and-a-half years later, there is a cell in many of the district hospitals but none has a women police officer, a counsellor, a lawyer or even a dedicated gynaecologist. In other words, they exist in name alone.

The schoolgirl who was gang-raped by eight youths in Oachira last December reportedly had to recount her trauma to three police officials on three different days. She later attempted suicide.

“If OSCCs were functional, such sustained stress on the victim, caused by having to repeat their trauma, could have been avoided,” said J. Sandhya, member of the State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights. One of the mandates given to OSCCs is to capture on camera the statement of the victim so that they don’t have to repeat it again and again.

The OSCC, modelled on the lines of Rape Crisis Centres in the US, was devised to prevent the humiliation and torture victims suffer in the name of medical, legal and other procedures. “It is too much to ask of a victim, fresh from the trauma, to subject herself to police interrogation, medical examination and then make a formal legal statement,” said Sandhya Raju of Human Rights Legal Network.

“Our system is not sensitised to make rape victims comfortable. It seems designed to induce unnecessary guilt in them,” she added. According to noted psychiatrist Dr C. J. John, at the root of the problem is the “rape culture” in the state. By rape culture, he means an environment where victim blaming is not just present but quite common and popular.

“The victim is automatically branded as spoiled. Who cares the violation had taken place without her will? Our society blindly wants to burden the victim with guilt,” Dr John said.

No wonder, a top police official said more than half of the rape cases are left unreported. However, to deter potential rapists, reporting the crime is inevitable. But it is like asking for the moon without a spacecraft.

“How can we ever call upon the victim to come out in the open when we have no mechanism in place to help them recover from the trauma,” Dr John wondered.