The more things change...

A silhouetted figure sits hunched on the floor, her knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, head hung low. Another sits curled up in a corner, her face buried in her palms. Both portraits are frequently splashed across Indian television screens or tucked neatly in newsprint alongside news of sexual assault against women. The components captured in these pictograms - background colours, sartorial elements, body contours, etc - are altered with wearying regularity. Despite attempts to avoid sameness, however, the illustrators achieve little: the downward tilt of the head doesn't ease a bit, nor does the grip of hands that cover the face loosen.
 

The hide-the-face technique serves two purposes: it tells you there was a rape and it spares everyone in the newsroom the horror of depicting the event graphically. But a third prong unfolds, nevertheless, which is perhaps more striking in its impact. It reinforces the time-honoured embodiment of a rape victim. If the purpose was to picture the victim as a suffering individual, the point would have come across even if she had her hand on head or were shown struggling with her perpetrators. The newsrooms, however, have taken it on themselves to enshroud her face, almost as an unwritten rule. In a perfect world, such a flawed depiction of sexual abuse - feeding into the unfounded corollary of loss of face - would have been booed out of the newsroom. Not in India.

In the wake of the brutal gang rape on December 16, 2012, of a paramedic student in Delhi, and similar incidents reported subsequently from across the nation, the reality of sex crimes has hit hard - but is it deep enough? You only have to turn to the media - news and other - for clues.

To its credit, ever since the murmurs on the street against sexual assault yielded to shouts, the news media has been hard at work drumming into social conscience the idea of rape as a crime that needs to be dealt with firmly. Sadly, though, "sexual assault" and "shame", two expressions carefully kept far apart in the written word, are unthinkingly bracketed together in pictograms. Clearly, it's much easier to wipe out traces of gender insensitivity from the lexicon of sexual violence, but it's nearly impossible to steer the mind of an illustrator. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, the said pictorial representation of the victim stiffens the idea of rape as something it's not - the encroachment on the victim's honour - rather than something it really is - the violation of an individual's right to their body.

A particularly unsettling illustration comes to mind. On the website of a leading Indian newspaper, alongside a dispassionate news report about the prime minister's approval to an ordinance on sexual assault, sits an image of much lurid appeal. It shows a woman with her head bowed, her long tresses veiling her face, and her hands clasped behind her neck. She has nothing on except a tattered Indian tricolour. A muscular hand is jabbing its evil fingers in the rip across the flag wrapped around her; another brawny hand is grabbing the malevolent arm. So much for progressive art!

Not that the written word is free from irrationality. Grope the grab bag of social media campaigns a little deeper and you are sure to stumble on strategies that set out to improve the state of affairs but, in a subtly sexist way, end up doing more harm than good. Roaring demands are made for action against sexual abuse, because, after all, "India's daughters, sisters and mothers" are at risk. So, if one were in foster care, had no siblings and were without offspring - or, simply, chose to define herself as nothing more than an individual in her own right - she would have to fend for herself or, well, find a way to become a "daughter, sister or mother". The oft-repeated line of reasoning that a sense of kinship makes it easier for the masses to empathise with victims of social crimes falls flat in this context - India's "daughters, sisters and mothers" are no less unsafe within the boundaries of home than outside. All that the "mother, sister, daughter" rhetoric, then, does is reverse the painfully slow, gradual steps - if any - towards gender equality.

For all its noise about gender equality, the media seems reluctant to overstep the boundaries of regressive social norms. If questions are asked, they aren't uncomfortable enough to rock the boat. Nevertheless, attempts at tweaking the deeply embedded stereotypes about gender roles are gaining momentum across social networking sites.

One such attempt is MARD. Its progenitor, actor-cum-film maker Farhan Akhtar, has thoughtfully based his campaign on his interpretation of the word mard (which means "man"), long uttered in a thundering tone to distinguish it from its gender counterpart, aurat ("woman"). He defines MARD as "Men Against Rape and Discrimination". A sleek moustache serves as the symbol of his campaign. His Twitter and Facebook pages churn out posts about how a real mard can further the cause of gender equality. One of those posts features a poem that talks about the myriad emotions a sexually abused girl child experiences: rage, fear, confusion, distrust, etc. The concluding verse reads: "I stand with you little girl/to seek justice, to chastise/the devil that defiled you/I swear, will find no allies."

The Oxford dictionary defines "defile" as: "to make something dirty or no longer pure, especially something that people consider important or holy." The poem has drawn 5,303 "likes" and 1,905 "shares". Assuming that a quarter of those who "liked" the poem went on to finish reading it, more than 1,300 people saw nothing amiss. Need I say more?