January 13, 2008

RAPE is the most horrific form of torture. Rapists literally invade and attempt to conquer the psychological, physical and sexual terrain of their victims. Rapists, through transforming their victim’s ‘no’ into a ‘yes’, also strive to triumph over the victim’s social territory. Though rape is generally more about power than about sex, the fact remains that it is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Humans, especially women, were victims of this atrocity for centuries before it was even recognised as a crime or a human rights’ violation. It continues to humiliate and demean the very soul and sanctity of women all around the globe. Though numbers are more frightening in our part of the world, rape is as much a crisis of manliness in the West as it is in the subcontinent. Rape remains primarily a problem associated with degraded masculinities.

Drawing together the work of criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to analyse what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence, the book under review is an intriguing treatise on rape and its history in the West. The author Joanna Bourke is a professor of history at Birkbeck College in London and has previously written the prize-winning An Intimate History of Killing and the critically acclaimed Fear. In this latest work, Rape: A history from 1860 to the present, Bourke struggles with the definitions of rape and rapist, and of consent and compulsion in her part of the world. She proves with the help of real life cases that rape and sexual violence are deeply-rooted in time, and are ‘ever-changing’ according to specific political, economic and cultural environments. According to her, ‘the rapist, not the victim, is at the centre of this book.’

Technically, the book functions within a historical paradigm and sets itself in opposition to critical explanations such as that of evolutionary psychology, which conceives a stability of sexually violent behaviour that can be ‘traced back to our most distant ancestors and can even be located within genes’ — male genes.

According to Bourke, the anger underpinning her decision to write this book was stimulated by statistics revealing that less than five per cent of reported cases of rape in the UK ended in the conviction of the perpetrator. The book reveals other shocking statistics: the British Crime Survey of the year 2001 found that the prevalence rate of rape was 0.3 per cent for women over 16 years, which is equivalent to an estimated 47,000 adult female victims each year. And it is not just UK, for in America over 27 per cent of college women have experienced either rape or attempted rape since the age of 14. Fifteen per cent of these 27 per cent women are victims of rape and the figures get increasingly frightening by the day. Sadly men in the two most developed continents in the world are still getting away with rape, despite three decades of rigorous lobbying and extensive law reform in that part of the world.

One can therefore only imagine how severe the situation must be in Pakistan’s densely populated cities, towns and remote villages. According to a Human Rights Commission of Pakistan report, one woman is raped every six hours and another is gang-raped every fourth day. A large number of these cases go unreported because any suggestion of sex is considered taboo in Pakistan. In contrast to Bourke’s less than five per cent convicted rape cases in the UK, Pakistan has none — for in most cases the rapists grease the palms of police officers and walk away free men.

A rural Pakistani woman is the property of her husband and the honour of her guardian. The situation of urban Pakistani women is more or less similar, but perhaps somewhat worse because they are more aware and educated yet have few rights and freedoms nevertheless. Though women like Mukhtaran Mai, Dr Shazia and Sonia Naz have stepped up and spoken against rape and abuse, hundreds and thousands of women all around the country are being victimised but fail to voice their protests. Although all of Bourke’s research has been carried out in the West, the information can be used to compare and contrast the legal system and social fabric on our side of the world. Both UK and Pakistan have various local and international NGOs working on women’s issues and trying to repair the rotten state of affairs, yet the system is still collapsing. What needs to be understood is that the social structure is beyond repair, especially in the local scenario. Taboos and norms cannot be changed by any lengthy process of evolution — they have to be dealt with by nothing less than a revolution and a new social system.

Bourke suggests less raucous punishments for sexual offenders and encourages a drug and rehabilitation-based psychological treatment. One would tend to disagree with her as medicine and rehabilitation are too lenient a punishment for an offence that changes the remaining life of the victim by shattering their very being. The offenders should and must be sentenced to severe punishment for violating a very basic human right: one’s right over one’s own body.

Nonetheless, through groundbreaking research work the author has dared to imagine a future in which different choices are made; a future free from sexual violence.
 

THE narratives and rites involved in attempting to reduce another person to an undifferentiated body, a body-in-pain, are embedded in humdrums practices, everyday knowledge. Demystifying the category of the rapist makes sexual violence seem no longer inevitable. It also opens up another possibility of resistance. Steeped in notions of trauma and seduced by pocalyptic fantasies, it is easy to forget that the seemingly unrestrained brutality of abusers is always contested. Terror is always local. To universalise it is to remove the specifics of individual histories and the possibilities of acting otherwise. It is to situate sexual torture in the realm of moral edification. The traumatising subject is knowing being with a range of knowledges, emotions, desires and needs open to him or her: by uncovering its multiple voices, we make it imaginatively accessible and politically contestable. By revealing the specificities of the past, we can imagine a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the threshold of the human.
— excerpt from book

Rape: A history from 1860 to the present
By Joanna Bourke
Virago Press, London
Available with Paramount Books, Karachi
ISBN 1-84408-154-7
565pp. Rs1,995