I based this post on an assignment in my Life Sex and Death class taught by Dr. Doe Daughtery at Arizona State University in the fall semester of 2021. What is at stake for women’s identities in the context of sexuality and religion? I reference a disturbing news article about victim shaming in India that occurred in March of 2021.

Misogyny has lifelong disastrous impacts on women worldwide. Although there are laws to protect women in many countries, religious patriarchal power structures usually win over recently established legal systems. The wheel of justice grinds very slowly.

An event that recently took place in India illustrates the problem. In March of 2021, Sameer Yasir, a reporter for The New York Times, covered a story in rural central India in which a sixteen-year-old girl was raped by her neighbor. The title, “She Told Relatives She’d Been Raped. They Paraded Her and the Suspect” paints the dismal picture of victim shaming. This article is an example of the power that patriarchal attitudes of honor and shame have on the identity of the teenage girl, her family members, and the community.

Many aspects of social identity are at stake. Individual, family, and community identities are tightly intertwined in Hinduism. As defined in Diversity, Oppression, & Change: Culturally Grounded Social Work, "Identity is a function of an individual's membership in various social groups and is formed and performed in different contexts" (Marsiglia and Kulis. 2015, 103). Yasir’s report tells us that her family and other villagers beat the rapist but then tied the teenage girl to him and paraded them through the streets. It is safe to assume that she recognized the faces of villagers who were kicking and punching her and spitting on her. Men made up over ninety-five percent of this crowd. They laughed at her and videoed the whole ordeal. This was posted on Twitter, turning her local shaming into a global story that ricocheted the shame to her assailants. 

Six arrests were made by local officials which included three male relatives; her brother, an uncle, and a cousin. We have two identity issues in this case. In a patriarchal Hindu family, female identity can be similar to property which may be discarded as we see in cases of female infanticide. Her identity in this patriarchal structure extends to the family as well as the community. Her fabricated shame then extends to the family and the community which accounts for them blaming her and punishing her for ‘bringing shame’ to them. Because of this construct, her suffering increased exponentially. She suffered physically and mentally from the rapist. She trusted family members by telling them what happened, and that trust was violently betrayed. She suffered public humiliation as a rape victim which further reduced her female identity to a piece of property. 

In contrast, we must consider the Indian citizens that strongly oppose these acts of victim shaming. The identity of the country on a global scale is at stake. The Indian government has laws to protect rape victims, and bringing these atrocities into the public spotlight generates more activism and public education to encourage stricter enforcement. Yasir points out that victim shaming is more common in rural areas. This may indicate that in urban populations, more exposure to education and activism has helped to increase opposition to victim shaming.

The identity of women varies depending upon the framework in which we live our lives. Our identity is determined by the family we are born into, the religious beliefs of that family, the community we function within as we grow up, and the country we are a citizen of. The quality of female identity is subject to these parameters. This teenager in a rural village in central India may still be living next to her rapist and his family, with family members that betrayed her in a community that has humiliated her. If she had hopes of marriage and family, they are probably non-existent since she has lost her virginity. Her social identity can only change through the same channels that determine it, namely family, community, and religion. Unless she has the resources to escape her current social and religious environment, she remains subject to it. 

Activism, education, and civil rights must work to influence religious communities to elevate women’s independent value, to raise awareness in communities, to break the cycle of abuse and neglect in family units, and to heal the broken identities of women no matter where they live or what faith they practice. Ultimately, the government must root out corruption and strictly enforce laws protecting women otherwise, they mean nothing. This video of interviews by Human Rights Watch shows what rape victims experience when filing an FIR, or First Information Report:  India: Rape Victims Face Barriers to Justice.

Our growing global connections through online media are a valuable vehicle to hasten change. Although Samir Yaseer’s report is disturbing to read and the video even harder to watch, it raised my awareness of the multilayered abuse that stems from misogyny and patriarchal social and religious structures. The disparity of education between countries that are enforcing civil rights as opposed to those that are just starting to break through embedded religious and cultural systems begins to narrow with wider access to information. 

References: 

Marsiglia, Flavio Francisco and Kulis, Stephen. 2015. Diversity, Oppression, & Change: Culturally Grounded Social Work (2nd Edition). Chicago, IL: Lyceum Books. 

Tandon, Raveena (@TandonRaveena). 2021. “Appalling visuals. #betibachao Hope the criminals even if they happen to be her own family members, are brought to justice and pay dearly for scarring the life of this 16-year-old. But then our courts…that’s a different story.” Twitter, March 30, 2021. shorturl.at/hzC14

Yasir, Sameer. March 31, 2021. “She told relatives she’d been raped. They paraded her and the suspect.” New York Times. Accessed December 2, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/world/asia/india-rape-paraded.html?searchResultPosition=8