After rape - a search for solutions

After I Was Raped: The Untold Lives of Five Survivors

Author: Urmi Bhattacheryya

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 225

Price: Rs 399

The rape and murder of a 23-year-old female physiotherapy student in December 2012 in New Delhi was a watershed moment for gender politics in India, sparking massive protests across the country and leading to a revision of laws dealing with sexual crimes. Called Nirbhaya, since it is illegal to name rape victims and survivors, she became a symbol for rising sexual crimes in the country, and also, movements against it. While reports of sexual crimes — along with all its connotations of class and caste — have been ubiquitous in the popular media, the rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit woman in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, in September last year, revealed yet again how precarious women are in India.

Several books (besides films, documentaries, and long-form reportage) — such as Priyanka Dubey’s No Nation for Women (2018), Sohaila Abdulali’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape (2018), Tara Kaushal’s Why Men Rape (2020), Sonia Falerio’s The Good Girls (2021) to name a few — have begun to document this in recent years. Urmi Bhattacheryya’s book is an important addition to this growing body of work. 

Ms Bhattacheryya, who worked for several years as the gender editor at The Quint, documents the lives of five survivors in this book, all of whom she met while reporting. “The names of all survivors and their family members have been changed throughout,” she writes. 

Explaining why she chose these five survivors in the Introduction to her book, Ms Bhattacheryya writes: “Why did I choose these five women with apparently nothing in common except the single unifying factor of their rape? Because they are united also in the fact that theirs are (c)old cases, with little thought expended on them anymore, since the sensationalizing and the voyeurism of their rapes ended.” There are other reasons as well. As Ms Bhattacheryya explains, she has tried to understand the people in her book beyond their identity as survivors, classified by media narratives as “brave” or “good”. She also finds in them points of conversation about important considerations around rape, such as ways to better protect children and how atrocities against vulnerable Dalit women can be prevented.

A recently published Unesco report, Sexual Violence and the News Media, claims: “News outlets tend to disproportionately publish unusual cases, such as those involving extreme brutality or attacks by strangers, thus presenting a misleading picture of how sexual violence usually manifests in India.” It adds: “While overt victim-blaming was evident in only 2.2 per cent cases, very rarely was there an attempt to provide a voice, direct or otherwise, for the victim.” Though her book was published well before the report, Ms Bhattacheryya attempts to correct at least these two problems of media reporting on sexual violence. She does not shy away from reporting the brutality in each of the cases in her book, but she does so with empathy rather than puerile voyeurism. And she also allows the survivors to speak for themselves, not only about their trauma but also about other aspects of their life.

This, in no way, makes it an easier book to read. Quite the contrary. The vivid description of violence, and the monumental indifference and shame that rape survivors must encounter, can make a reader throw up their hands in despair. I often found my throat constricted and a sinking feeling in my stomach, and had to stop reading to recover. (Perhaps that’s the reason it took me so long to review it.) One can only imagine the efforts Ms Bhattacheryya and her subjects had to put in to give this book its current form.

Each of the five women profiled in the book have a dedicated chapter, but Ms Bhattacheryya also has one chapter on caste and sexual assault. As the National Crime Records Bureau data from 2019 showed, reports of crimes against Dalits, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were on the rise in India. 

Ms Bhattacheryya argues that in the case of Dalit women, rape is not only a crime against their gender but also against their caste. “Why was Meera [one of the survivors profiled in the book] raped?” she writes. “Rape is about power, yes, but in her case, it was also about one-upmanship; about a dominant caste man attempting to show a less-than-privileged caste family — or rather, man, his inability to ‘protect’ his woman.” She adds that it was also a conflict over land that played out, as usually, on a woman’s body.

For Ms Bhattacheryya, it is not enough to document these atrocities. She also tries to provide laws or regulations at the end of each chapter that could have helped the survivors. Traditionally, a journalist is not required to provide such suggestions — they are expected to be neutral observers, not taking sides. But, in our post-MeToo world, there has been a reassessment of journalistic ethics and “solutions journalism” is a growing field within the profession. 

Ms Bhattacheryya’s book — an essential document for our times — explores this new avenue as well.  

The writer teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat