Of Rape and Selective Outrage

Photo: Kazi Tahsin Agaz Apurbo

'It could've been my sister, it could've been my mother, it could've been me'. Every time the media reports on a story of a woman's rape, the bulk of general opinion seems to revolve around this issue of imagining what it would be like if the other women in your family are raped. And that, then, becomes the origin of our outrage. Less so that it has happened, but more so that hypothetically it could have happened to someone close to you. And even then, it is less so about the extreme level of violence that they would face and more so about how *I*, the protagonist of the world (almost always a man), would feel if it had happened to them. A very selfish shame, then, fuels the outrage.

And yet, there is more to add to the line with which we began. Think back to the Pahela Baishakh mass sexual assault incident. It instigated a kind of condemnation from the civil society like never before-- that it happened in front of thousands of others and, even more so, that it happened at TSC during a festival to celebrate the Bengali New Year. Think of the very recent news about the rape and murder of Shohagi Tonu inside the Comilla cantonment area. There was outrage yet again, perhaps even more vociferous outrage, as we came to terms with the fact that rape had taken place inside the confines of an area assumed to be safe. It created a rupture in our media narratives of what it means to be safe and who is actually there to keep us safe.

If even the 'most guarded' parts of the country are not safe for its citizens (specifically non-males) then what choice do we have but to take to the streets? However, while the Pahela Baishakh assault incident and the rape and murder of Tonu brought out large public protests, the news that in the past eight years, 434 indigenous women and girls have faced sexual abuse, harassment and rape could only muster a roundtable of discussion (report: Social Realities of Indigenous Women 2015). In none of these reported cases has there ever been justice served, according to the report, and that most of the alleged perpetrators have been Bangali settlers. Let's add to our sentence again, which now begins to rhyme:

'It could've been my sister,

It could've been my mother,

It could've been me,

It could've been another Bangali'

Before we move on, let us take a moment to reflect on the rapes and assaults that go unreported– so deeply invisible are these bodies that they cannot be perceived to ever have been raped. They are scoffed at by the law, by the police, by the medical examiners and by the general public at large– the Bihari women, the indigenous men and women, the Hijras, the differently-abled, the homosexual. There are some stories at which we feel angry, and some which we do not believe. Whose voice is believable when they come forward with a story of rape?

When rape breaks the hegemony of civil society, feathers are ruffled. However, when rape is a systematic tool for the destruction and destabilisation of an entire group, like it was during the 1971 war, when the Pakistani Army raped and assaulted en masse, and like it is even today in some regions of the country, no one really speaks of it. What, then, are we to learn from our own reactions in a country where rape happens everywhere but only a select few are spoken of?

Today, the protests for Tonu's rape and murder are still ongoing and long may they continue, for we still have a way to go before we are able to break out of our narratives of Bangali nationalism, our narratives of viewing women's bodies as valuable only when they are related to us (every other body is disposable), our narratives of viewing Hijra bodies, gay and lesbian bodies as not 'worthy' enough to be angry about. Is it not rape, then, if we (the urban-centric, Bangali, middle-class dwellers) cannot relate to it?