Over the past few years, international media coverage has focused on a reported rape epidemic in India, underscored by several high-profile gang rape cases that sparked mass protests throughout the country.
Indian women's rights advocates have repeatedly called for tougher punishment against rapists and for better services to women who have been raped, including protection from retaliation. They have also organized SlutWalks around the country to ensure that women do not feel ashamed for being victims of sexual harassment and violence.
But the idea of India having an explosion of sexual violence, or that merely finding criminal justice solutions for perpetrators, does not tell the whole story. For starters, sexual violence is an epidemic in virtually every country. In the United States, for example, nearly one in five women are raped, and many more are not likely to report sexual violence and harassment out of fear or reprisal. The current hand-wringing the U.S. Senate over how to deal with a rape epidemic in the U.S. military, for example, shows that even the most industrialized countries struggle to deal with sexual violence and a culture of machismo that has helped to facilitate such acts.
In India, the reason why there has been a growing number of reported cases of sexual violence in the media is because more women are coming forward, and that's a good start. As it is in many parts of the world, sexual violence can only be addressed when victims begin reporting their cases - and when law enforcement accordingly recognizes that a crime has possibly taken place.
The more important issue that needs to be reckoned with is India's woefully archaic social infrastructure. Like the country's inability to keep up with physical infrastructure (luxury homes being built in areas with no proper sewage systems, for example), Indian social capacity seems stuck in a Victorian time warp, where 19th century colonial mores on sex and sexuality have remained a powerful force in education, policy, and social relations. Those Victorian standards, internalized by members of all of India's cultural and religious groups and sanctioned in some ways by a secular court system, have manifested themselves in some of the most draconian ways, including a recent decision by the Supreme Court to inexplicably criminalize homosexuality.
India's social infrastructure gap is widened by the fact that while sex and gender relations are a taboo to discuss among many Indians, globalization has saturated sexual imagery as a facilitator of conspicuous consumption. These days, every major city in India is replete with sexually implicit (or explicit) imagery, while the country's cultural industries - eager to please foreign markets - have become more ostentatious in their depictions of sexuality. Moreover, Indian society seems to have conflated Westernization with modernization, without recognizing that the rapid pace of globalization and urbanization have left the vast majority of Indians ill-prepared for the culture shock.
Many Indian men who come from rural areas to the big city are not accustomed to these changes. I liken it to someone from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan moving to Chicago or Detroit and getting overwhelmed by the image and information overload in a completely different environment. More tragically, many parts of India are still struggling with the concept of embracing women's rights in practice, underscored by the scores of young girls who are trafficked to bigger cities as sex workers. The perpetual objectification of women and the failure of education and social institutions to safeguard women's rights has created a perfect storm by which gang rape has become sadly more common across the country.
While it would be easy to blame religious conservatism on India's sexual illiteracy, it wouldn't tell the whole story and inaccurately puts the burden on religion itself. Hindu philosophy, which emphasizes female divinity and respect for women, has historically been progressive when addressing issues of sex and gender, though many Hindus struggle to put that into practice. As a result, many middle-class Hindu families have embraced colonial-era standards about sex and refuse to bring it up in the public sphere. Meanwhile, most Christian schools - where many middle and upper-class Indians send their children - do not have sex education, and Islamic education centers still tend to enforce certain gender norms that make it difficult for women to get an open space. With that being said, Indian social justice activists of all religious traditions have pushed for greater discussions about sex and sexual violence in public discourse, an effort that has unfortunately received quite a bit of resistance from policymakers.
Perhaps mandating sexual education in schools across the country would be a controversial but necessary first step in helping to make a generation of Indian boys and girls more aware about social relations. In the long term, it can equip the future generation of educators, policymakers, and the masses of Indians who share public space with the tools needed to prevent and combat sexual violence. Whether India has the political and social will to snap out of its Victorian rigidity remains to be seen.