Against death

Thursday, 24 September 2015 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

A SPATE of high-profile incidents of violence against women and children, and the subsequent proliferation of outrage on social media, has spurred the revival of the ideology of colonial era laws allowing death as a punishment for crimes of a severe nature.

The gruesome details of Vidya’s gang rape in Jaffna, Jerusha’s mutilation in Kilinochchi, Seya’s assault and strangulation in Kotadeniyawa, and the repeated rape of an autistic staffer at a prominent dining establishment are enough to drive the most pacifist public into cries for blood.

However, while retributive violence enacted on the perpetrator may offer some degree of catharsis for the populace and perhaps even act as a deterrent for future perpetrators (though such claims are reportedly dubious), it does little to address the source of such crimes.

The death penalty is ultimately a sentencing that requires there to be a convict to carry it to fruition. In Sri Lanka, however, there are no such convicts. For around 4,000 cases of assaults reported in the last four years, only a meagre 700 or so convictions have taken place. This, combined with the fact that only around one in five cases are actually reported, suggests the dizzying scale to which abusers enjoy impunity in this country.

With high social indicators for women, Sri Lanka has not been subject to the same level of scrutiny with regard to rape in civil society compared to its South Asian neighbours. However, it makes up for this with an ongoing legacy of allegations concerning impunity and sexual violence across the north and the east.

Thus while the apparatus of the State intrudes with the threat of death to perpetrators of sexual violence, its judgment is clouded by its own historic complicity in such crimes. If the State were true to its commitment to address violence against women and children, why not criminalise marital rape or express greater zeal in condemning rapes?

In a society caught between the dual patriarchies of pre-colonial feudalism and post-colonial liberalism, the answer to rape cannot be as simple as the introduction of further coercive measures by the State. Instead there must be a meaningful analysis of how the very state structure and male-dominated leadership of this society is complicit in violence towards women.

Rapes do not occur in a cultural vacuum by aberrant citizens who spring out of thin air. In Sri Lanka, rape is the product of the same misogynistic culture that censures women’s sexuality and denies political and corporate representation (despite marginally better performances in education). Though they make for incendiary headlines, the majority of rapes do not happen in dark alleyways in the dead of night.

Global patterns suggest that rapes are most often perpetrated by known assailants, relatives, loved ones even. Rapists are fathers, brothers and sons. Rapists are a product of this society, and stopping such crimes from happening will require a far more concerted effort at community mobilising than bravado shows of force by the State.

The State will not undo what it has wrought; tackling this issue in a progressive non-reactionary manner will take sustained grassroots community mobilisation on a mass scale across lines of religion, ethnicity, caste and class.