A week after two Indian girls aged 12 and 14 were gang-raped and hanged by their attackersin Uttar Pradesh, a politician in a neighbouring region has said of rape: ‘Sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s wrong.' Babulal Gaur, a member of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and minister of law and order in Madhya Pradesh said that rape is only rape if it’s reported to the police. ‘This is a social crime, which depends on men and women. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong’ he told reporters, according toThe Independent. ‘Until there's a complaint, nothing can happen.’
Now, that last bit makes some sort of sense, but only if it was coming from someone who wanted to do something about rape conviction rates, not someone who just doesn’t believe rape is always rape. One incident of rape is reported in India every 21 minutes, however, due to dodgy law enforcement, cases are poorly investigated or left unreported for fear of alleged victims being further oppressed based on their caste or religion.
To get a further idea of how messed up Indian authorities’ attitudes towards rape can be, ministers in Utter Pradesh have failed to visit the scene where the two girls were hung, and the police have used water cannon on those protesting against the treatment of the two girls. Plus, in the past week, there's been another horrific attack in the same region – a woman was gang-raped, forced to drink acid and then strangled to death.
And Guar isn’t just a random sideline politician either. He’s the minister responsible for law and order in Madhya Pradesh, a region with a population of 72.6m. To put that in perspective, the population of the UK is 63.2m. That said, the British way of doing things isn’t exactly a model for Indian authorities to aspire to. Today, the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, has launched plans to increase rape conviction rates. This comes less than a month after it was found that 900,000 crimes, including rapes, weren’t recorded properly by police.
The new measures aim to dispel ‘persistent myths and stereotypes’ around rape and sexual assault, dealing with the barriers facing rape complainants, putting the focus back onto the perpetrators’ behaviour rather than the victims’ and being more vigilant when police decide to take no further action on cases. Or in shorthand terms: Disprove that commonly-held myth by jurors and police that all rapists are men in balaclavas, and if a woman doesn't fight back she's not scared. Let's hope they make a difference.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.