"on rape and neocolonialism"

Front pages around the world have run riot with the Delhi rape. Discussions and reports  on Radio, TV and on the net have followed suit.  Very little of all that 'reaction' has any real depth or even a desire to  address the  larger reality of  Rape.

This article leads the way to something more that needs to be said. And done.



In the United Kingdom 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 80,000 are raped each year (2010/2011).  These statistics do not include rape victims who are male, whose aggressors are both male and female.  The population of the United Kingdom is 20 times smaller of India’s population.  Yet living in the UK and reading its media, one could easily think that rape solely existed in India and that there is only injustice against women in the subcontinent and other ‘developing countries.’  



 However the majority of these discussions have served as cathartic moments for the Westerner to express her disdain for those ‘other countries that do not respect women’s rights’ while proclaiming her own country’s superiority in this area. Facebook comments as well have replicated this neo-colonial gaze towards other countries and in recent days India has been rendered a monolith in human rights abuses; yet the country in which I am currently living has aided my own country (the USA) to amass over 1,000,000 Iraqi, Afghani and Pakistani deaths. (Of course, nothing is mentioned about these women’s rights to live in these countries.)  As such, I am gravely concerned by the focus placed by Westerners upon rape outside of their own borders since rape is not a problem unique to India.  Violence against women is a global problem that needs to be discussed honestly and without pigeon-holing certain cultures as more culpable.

Memmi writes:  “The first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to that splendid (European) and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him.”  Yet the inverse is also true: that the European expects this disappearance to occur because she sees herself and her culture as far superior to the other and the other’s culture.  Hence Western subjects seem drawn to take up the case of ‘women’s rights’ each and every time a travesty is mediatised (not that they don’t happen daily here and abroad) in order to cathect a personal issue onto the world terrain of human atrocity.  The neo-colonial era of  burqa from 2001 is now transformed to the rape victim of 2012 who elusively escapes all media critique back home.

Yet, if we are to play the statistics game, we might as well do it properly and analyse not the rapes that occurs every 34 minutes in the United Kingdom, but the per capita offences per 100,000 which reveal a quite different statistical field of information.   As recorded by the police registries of each country rape offences in India show 1.8 rapes for every 100,000 versus 28.8 rapes reported for every 100,000 in the United Kingdom.  

 I felt pressured to jump onto what I refer to as the ‘burqa bandwagon,’ a discursive space where Western women assert their societal superiority and their own country’s excellence in legal jurisprudence.  Personally, I am not drawn to such dialectical arguments and neo-colonial spaces since progress is simply not a linear development that begins at A and ends with Z, nor is it a demarcation that can be made from across many oceans to societies that have very specific differences in how women interact with men and other women.  I am also far too aware of the media blackout that has surrounded the murders of women, children and men in the past eleven years in this ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan perpetuated by ostensibly ‘enlightened’ and ‘democratic’ Western nations.  The innocent dead see none of this democracy.  Were we to examine honestly the place of rape in the global sphere, the UK and the US would have to shoulder a huge amount of blame for having rendered unstable these countries they have invaded and occupied lending a greater vulnerability to women and children specifically as the link between women’s rights and economic development and literacy is well documented.

As war crimes in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have highlighted rape over the past fifteen years, so did the pervasive Bosnian ‘Rape Camps’ of the 1990s remind us of the power of rape as a weapon of control in conflict situations closer to home.  Yet, rape goes much further back than the US soldiers’ war crimes in Viet Nam of the 1960s and 1970s or the Nanking rapes by the Japanese forces in 1937. Rape is found throughout history as it is well documented and cannot simply be linked to x or y spot on the planet.  Moreover, media incursions into post 9/11 Afghanistan have highlighted the need to understand rape in a larger context wherein women are not the only victims: what was uncovered by many journalists post 9/11 is that boys and young men were also the victims of the Northern Alliance.  Likewise, revelations such as the Zimbabwe female gangs who have been raping male soldiers has recently come up again in media focus demonstrating the power of women to be sexually violent. When one Facebook poster writes about Damani, stating, “As long as there are men on this planet it will never end…,” I reminded her of the rape of men and the problems facing these men in terms of reporting the violence and of having these reports being taken seriously. The stigma for men to report rape today in any country is most humiliating as these men are basically told that it is impossible for them to physically be raped or that he should ‘consider himself fortunate.’  Recent research into the rape of men is revealing that there are far more male rape victims than previously estimated and that many of the perpetrators are women (most often mothers, aunts, nannies, etc).  In the United States of America 10% of all rape victims are men.  

What is going on with the need for Western subjects to highlight Damani’s death as somehow endemic to India and other ‘third-world’ nations alone?  I suspect that there is something much deeper going on in this growing problem of armchair Facebook ‘advocacy’ which reveals myriad humans who click and ‘like’ an article about a truism.  For it is self-evident that a tortured puppy or a raped Indian medical student is ‘a bad thing’, yet these are the items of vast interest for people to idle away their days on Facebook.  There is a huge disconnect in my fellow Londoners who post about the travesty of Damani whilst espousing the superiority of their own culture.  On the one hand there is something incredibly violent about casually posting, sharing and liking an article about a rape without the deconstruction of similar events in our own political landscape.  On the other hand, this growing trend of armchair Facebook advocacy falsely simulates a political action–as if ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ such articles is actually doing something other than objectify a rape and a death which is for Damani’s family and community alone to experience.  All the rest is cultural fetishism.

Let us learn from India and get off our computers to engage in real political dissent speaking against all forms of rape here and now.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/01/on-rape-and-neocolonialism/