Delhi gang-rape: look westward in disgust
This article was in The Guardian, and they make what I think is a good point about how there's a relationship between poverty, lack of education and attitudes towards women. I do think some of the things I've been reading have crossed the line into an attempt to demonise India and its culture....
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There's something uncomfortably neocolonial about the way the Delhi gang-rape and subsequent death of the woman now known as Damini is being handled in the UK and US media. While India's civil and political spheres are alight with protest and demands for changes to the country's culture of sexual violence, commentators here are using the event to simultaneously demonise Indian society, lionise our own, and minimise the enormity of western rape culture.
A particularly blatant example of this is Libby Purves's piece for the Times. She says the Delhi bus rape should "shatter our Bollywood fantasies". For Purves, westerners enjoy a romanticised view of India, all heady spirituality and Marigold Hotels; and especially romantic in their views, for reasons Purves neglects to address, are the British. Thus, upright Europeans have sentimentally ignored the "murderous, hyena-like male contempt" that Purves says is an Indian cultural norm. Neatly excised from her account however is the relationship between poverty, lack of education and repressive attitudes towards women, and, by extension, the role of Europe in creating and sustaining poverty in its former colonies. Attitudes towards women in the east were once used by colonialists to, first, prop up the logic of cultural superiority that justified unequal power relations (the "white man's burden"
and second, silence feminists working back in the west by telling them that, comparatively, they had nothing to complain about.
When it finishes calling Indian men hyenas, Purves's article states that westerners "have the luxury of fretting about frillier feminist issues such as magazine images, rude remarks and men not doing housework". Does anyone else see an unattractive historical pattern here?
Her article is not, by any means, the only one to report on this issue as if rape is something that only happens "over there" – something we civilised folk in the west have somehow put behind us. Elsewhere, the message is subtler, but a misplaced sense of cultural superiority shines through. For example, this BBC article states, as if shocking, the statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours. That equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately four times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; in the US only 24% of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction. This is the strange kind of reportage you tend to get on the issue.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/01/delhi-rape-damini
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