Are guns the answer to rape?

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Yesterday morning at breakfast time, I got talking to Lauren, an American woman who is in Lucknow volunteering for a women’s legal advocacy which provides legal advice and education on laws relating to women’s issues.

India’s laws regarding the protection of women are actually quite progressive, but the will to implement these laws by the police force is a far cry from the spirit in which those laws were enacted. What’s more, many women don’t even know of the existence of laws that are supposed to protect them.

A lot of the work Lauren’s charity does involves translating the laws from English – the Indian bureaucracy is conducted in English – into Hindu and a myriad of other Indian languages for general consumption. And it’s not just a matter of translation, says Lauren. The idea that there is a law to protect her from her husband’s abuse is just incomprehensible to many Indian women who still live in small, patriarchal villages.

When Lauren went to work, I came into my room and turned on my computer. On the Guardian’s homepage there was a story about an increasing number of Indian woman buying guns to protect themselves.

Navdeep, a middle class woman from Ludhiana, near Chandiargh in Punjab, explained to the Guardian why she needed a shot gun, ‘Our government cannot take care of so many people. They get to know about crime cases only once they occur. That’s why we have to take care of our safety on our own.’

This is not an unusual or unique view among Indian women. In fact, even Anandita, a smart, well-educated Indian woman I’ve met in Lucknow is considering buying a gun herself for the same reasons.

But is this distrust in the police justified, I wondered. And then I read the report from Tehelka, a respected Indian publication known for its investigative work.

Following a series of recent rape cases in which the response by the police was less than sympathetic toward the victim – in one case in which a bar worker was gang raped walking home after work, the police response was to issue a blanket curfew of 8pm, thereby denying women the right to work at night, or basically announcing that if they did they were asking to be raped – the magazine conducted its own investigation into police officers’ attitudes to rape.

Tehelka interviewed more than 30 police officers in 23 stations in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) posing at research scholars. Their mission was to answer the following questions:

Have we created a system that instills [sic] fear in the heart of offenders, promotes deterrence and ensures that offenders get exemplary punishment? While we may have excellent statutes to deal with crimes against women, do we also have the police machinery to implement the law in its letter and spirit? Are police stations of the NCR being manned by professional and efficient police officers who can deliver justice to hapless women turning up at their doors?

Their findings were a pretty resounding ‘no’. They found that more than half doubted that rape existed in most cases, citing that women were ‘asking for it’ by dressing immodestly, drinking alcohol, staying out late or by having relationships with men. One police officer even stated that if a woman had sex with her boyfriend, then she shouldn’t be surprised if his friends wanted in on the action. To him, this was ample justification for gang rape.

‘It’s very rare that a girl is forcefully picked up by 10 boys. A girl who gets into a car with boys is never innocent. If she does, she definitely has a relationship with at least one of them,’ one police officer told Tehelka’s researchers.

Another officer has this to say about women who drink alcohol with men: ‘If a girl asks for a birthday party and is alone with 2-3 boys and sees they are drinking, she knows what is likely to happen. When she herself goes for such a party, she can’t complain of rape. How can you call it rape if she is sitting and drinking with them?’

Overwhelmingly, the police officers interviewed seemed to believe that most of the reported cases of rape were instances of prostitution gone wrong. Some even claimed that women had made a business out of accusing men of rape.

‘People have understood this is a lucrative trade for women; it’s business. They’ve found an income source. It’s common; you’re short of money, your parents don’t give you money to spend. You make compromises.’

Tehelka reported that more than 17 officers spoke ‘about a supposedly dirty nexus of money, mal-intent, compromises and sex.’

In another case of gang rape, the victim was said to obviously be asking for it since her mother is divorced and now has a younger boyfriend.

‘The girl’s mother is divorced. She’s living with another man from the Yadav community. She’s 48 whereas the man is 28. It’s inevitable the two daughters will be wayward, isn’t it?

‘Now when two young girls watch their 48-year-old mother sleeping with a 28-year-old man, even they’ll be aroused. Sex is like hunger.’

The report is conclusive and convincing: the police officers investigating crimes against women are not in tune with the spirit of India’s progressive laws.

When we talk about this magazine investigation over breakfast the next morning, Anandita says, ‘Oh no, the men are never punished for the rape. That never happens.’ And this is why she feels she needs a gun. I can understand her sentiment.

I know that every woman and – I would like to think – man reading this is horrified at these quotes and attitudes. Thank God, I can hear you say, that we live in a country where people no longer have these attitudes.

And yet, in spite of these attitudes, the conviction rate of rape cases in Delhi is 34.6 per cent, a statistic Tehelka laments, but one which is almost 30 percentage points higher than the British rate. It’s true that there is a much higher rate of unreported rape in India than the West - one report found that for every reported rape 50 go unreported – and why would you report a rape if this was the attitude you would be met with?

I’m glad I don’t feel like I need a gun to protect myself in Australia or Britain, but maybe that’s just more to do with my opinion on gun ownership. Because what if I were raped while coming home drunk: Could I bear to be put on the witness stand and have my outfit scrutinised along with my drinking habits and sexual history? I’m really not sure.

Only one thing is clear to me: from east to west, as women, we all have a long way to go.