Patricia Mukhim
The number of rape cases in matrilineal Meghalaya is just mind boggling. The latest rape and murder case at Upper Shillong is no different from the Nirbhaiya incident but I doubt that this case from Meghalaya would even come on the blip of the national news media. The Nirbhaiya case got not just worldwide publicity but also saw some very stringent reforms in laws related to rape. This then led to the making of a film on it by a white Caucasian female, film maker Leslee Udwin which exposed the ugly side of the average Indian male psyche, including the lawyers defending the rapists. The first societal reaction after a rape is to caution girls/women to dress ‘decently,’ as if a four or five year old who is raped is immodestly dressed. This is society’s convoluted mindset which almost absolves the rapist of his crime and makes the woman responsible for her own safety. What can be a more absurd reasoning!
With so many rape cases occurring in a matrilineal society that is romanticised the world over, social scientists should be pondering as to why they are happening with the ferocity and frequency they are today. What is it about Khasi-Garo-Jaintia society that has undergone such a transition as to warrant this outrage from the male of the species? It is painful to read of a father raping his own daughter, an uncle his own niece and so on and so forth. So what is it that drives a man to commit rape? Is it a case of sexual perversion or a problem with manifesting sexuality the normal way?
I came across an article by renowned psychologist Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence et al) in the New York Times titled, “New studies map the mind of the rapist.” Goleman says that the mind of the rapist is one of the darkest realms of human sexuality and this is being mapped with a new precision as scientists focus their research on the psychological forces that drive sexual violence. Goleman observes that rape was earlier seen as the expression of an overwhelming sexual urge, one that women could invite by provocative dress or behaviour but more recently, it has been widely described as simple violence against women, expressed through sex. Now new findings suggest that there are many kinds of rapists and that violence and eroticism play out in varying degrees in each.
According to Goleman the new research suggests that only a small minority of rapists are sexual renegades driven by sadistic fantasies or hatred of women, and that far more common are men with a normal sexual orientation who rape impulsively as the opportunity presents itself, often while on a date.
According to Dr Howard Barbaree, a psychologist at Queen’s College in Kingston, Ontario, who is also director of a treatment program for sexual offenders, most men are repulsed by the description of an encounter where the man is forcing the woman to have sex, and the woman is in distress or pain. It dampens the arousal by about 50 percent compared to arousal levels during a scene of consenting lovemaking. Dr. Barbaree’s research was published in the Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychology. Barbaree says findings suggest that ordinarily violence inhibits sexual arousal in men because a blood flow loss of 50 percent means a man would not be able to penetrate a woman.
Interestingly, according to Barbaree, rapists often recall being intensely angry, depressed or feeling worthless for days or even months leading up to the rape. Some say that the trigger for the rape was when a woman made them angry, usually by rebuffing a sexual overture. The men experienced the rebuff as an insult to their manhood that intensified their emotional misery. However, researchers also caution that there is no single psychological formula to explain every rape account.
Dr. Robert Prentky, Professor of Psychology at Boston University Medical School has developed a typology based on an advanced computer analysis of the characteristics of close to 300 rapists. Early results were published in 1988 in The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The most frequent type is the “opportunist” whose rapes are impulsive, Dr Prentky found. Among the convicted rapists, 23 percent fell into this category. Dr. Prentky believes such rapists are far more common among those who are never caught or convicted. He says that for the opportunist, a sexual assault is part of a larger pattern of impulsive crimes. In such sexual assaults, Dr Prentky says the rapist shows no anger except in response to the victim’s resistance and uses little unnecessary force
32 percent of convicted rapists belong to the far more violent category and are classified as the “vindictive” type. Dr Prentky says their assaults are physically harmful and their intent is clearly to degrade and humiliate the woman. They are essentially misogynists or woman-haters. Another 11 per cent of rapists are driven by anger at the world and as a result inflict physical violence on helpless victims. Dr Prentky says they pick up fights with men and rape women but they are unlike other rapists in having a long history of violent crimes of all sorts, from fights in bars to assaulting policemen.
It is quite a revelation to know that sexual sadists formed only 8 per cent of the convicted rapists. Dr Prentky says these are men who are obsessed with sadistic fantasies, which their rapes were meant to enact. For such men the victim’s fear is a sexual stimulus.
However, there are other researches to suggest that violence more than eroticism is the engine that drives the rapist’s behavior. And one would like to believe that this study correlates with the rape cases in Meghalaya, although no one has ever studied rape as a case study nor have psychologists/psychiatrists interviewed the rapists here to find out by scientific measurements as to what exactly drives this behaviour in the male. That such studies have not been conducted in India which is now known worldwide for its spiralling rape cases is indeed unfortunate. If rape is, as research suggests, a part of mental health problem then it needs to be acknowledged and those showing tendencies of uncontrolled rage or some such deviant behaviour ought to seek help in the same manner that substance abusers do. It also depends largely on parents to detect such behaviours in their sons.
The problem as always is that as a society we tend to deny that there is a problem. But I would state upfront that with the number of rape cases we read about everyday in the newspapers and those that are not reported, we are a very sick society in need of therapy. Frankly, I am tired of the predictable behaviour of “do gooders” in our society who, as if on cue, issue condemnations after every rape case and then hibernate. These are the usual suspects – NGOs, pressure groups, Child Rights or Women’s Rights institutions etc., who just refuse to think imaginatively on how to address this serious societal malady. Candle light processions are par for the course. They are unlikely to change the behaviour of the deviant. Putting pressure on the law enforcers and the courts can help to hasten the judicial process and when a rapist is convicted of his crime and gets a life sentence or some such punishment then it might deter others of his ilk from going down the same path. Everything else that we are used to doing in Meghalaya is just a rigmarole – a complete waste of time.