Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamta Bannerjee demanded a central law against rape vide her letter dated August 22, 2024 addressed to the Prime Minister of India for purpose best known to her. Apart from this, the former Chief Justice of India NV Ramana has also urged for a legislation for the safety of doctors with uniform punishment across India. These two are stalwarts and honorable but their real intentions remain obscure.
Being a Chief Minister, Bannerjee must be aware that there is a major criminal law in India named and styled as Bharat Nyaya Samhita. It is not only a central legislation but also addresses rape in a deterrent manner. Therefore any legislation only for rape shall be a wasteful expenditure.
Rape is a heinous act against society and thereby it becomes a crime. A kind of crime where the deterrent theory of punishment is welcomed by every strata of society, be it feminist or chauvinist. Only the pervert could demand for a less severe punishment. The reason being it is a crime where the criminal is psychologically defunct to return to the normal state. In most of the cases, particularly in a case of rape and murder, the criminal is unable to get reformed and most of the cases point to the fact that the criminal received pleasure in committing the very crime. The main causes of this crime induced pleasure are pornography, power, lust, politics, anger, sadism, fundamentalism, cognitive bias, feeling of entitlement to sex, situational behavior, etc. Sensing this view, feminists are demanding for a complete ban on pornography. Liberals remain an exception to this demand because either they are not exposed to pornography or they just want to show that they are the flagbearers of democracy where everyone is free to enjoy one’s pleasure in one’s own way.
The author of these lines is advocating for a complete ban on pornography in any manner whatsoever. Reason being, it is depicting women as a subordinate sex toy. Karen Boyle in her work The Pornography debates: Beyond Cause and Effect argues that pornography in any form is exploitative, degrading and picturing women in a sexually subordinate status. Ironically, her work is not taken seriously in toto. Had her work been taken seriously, there could have been a complete ban on pornography. This is not the case. Thanks to the legislatures who banned child pornography under the legislation and, hence, we could decipher that pornography brings adversity to society, otherwise questioning the need of banning it could not have arisen.
According to a 2022 study, the total amount of pornographic content accessible online was estimated to be over 10,000 terabytes. There are two famous websites which hijack the majority of pornographic traffic. To please the feminist, truth cannot change as women do view pornography not at par with men but they certainly do. Rapists are true outsiders, as defined by sociologist Howard S. Becker. Taking clues from his famous book Outsider, those who break the certain laws adopted by the society are outsiders. They do not accept the rules by which they are being judged and do not regard those who judge them either competent or legitimately entitled to do so. Pornography is such a deviant; the viewer of which develops an ideology that they are true and the rest who judge them do not take their ideologies on account. They are situationally deviant from the society group which later develops into habit and, therefore, it becomes an illness.
Criminologists Aira Y. Hass, Chris Moloney and William J. Chambliss in their book Criminology, wrote, “Researchers also note that some of the acts depicted in pornographic materials such as the double penetration of women, or the penetration of women by large objects, are both physically and psychologically harmful. Moreover, the widespread dissemination of pornographic material objectifies the human body and allows men to justify the treatment of women as objects… A growing body of literature examines the effects of viewing pornography, especially violent pornography, on perpetuating and reinforcing sexual assault. While studies have not been able to establish a direct cause-effect relationship between viewing pornography and sexual assault, research suggests that pornography contributes to attitudes and patterns of behavior that are exploitative and abusive to women. Pornography very often portrays individuals as either willing participants who enjoy being dominated and subordinated, or forced participants engaging in brutal acts of violence and degradation. Pornography may serve to reinforce coercive behavior in individuals inclined toward violence and sexual aggression because of their individual traits or socio-cultural upbringing. Moreover, researchers note that pornography plays a factor in the misperception among men that women like, enjoy, and fantasize about violent sexual acts.”
Recent allegations against BJP leaders Chinmayanand (now acquitted from all charges), Kuldeep Singh Sengar and Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh etc. are true examples of crime involving power and politics. In this situation, criminals always defy social norms and they take law for granted. They situated themselves above law. In most of the rape cases, it is found that criminal and victims both know each other and the same becomes a true example of lust as well as anger and thereby gives birth to sexual coercion.
Sadism is often aroused by pornography. Criminals take pleasure in hurting the ‘weak sex’ as depicted in the pornography novels and films. Not doing the same with his wife, he files for divorce and searches for another girl to whom he could inflict torture as depicted in pornography. The same is true with the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of any religion first attack upon the fair sex of conflicting religion. Their prime targets are women under the disguise of religion under evolutionary pressures. Rapists are mostly narcissist chauvinists having an anti-social background who in their childhood are exposed to abuse under retribution who later developed anti-social personality traits combined with irrational thoughts that influence emotion and thereby developed the feeling of entitlement to sex. Rapists of Bilkis Bano (who was raped in the riot erupted after Godhra incident in Gujarat in 2002) may be taken the prime example of it.
Some reformists argue that there is nothing to show that pornography causes inequality and thus any attempt to ban the same would result in a wasteful expenditure. This argument bears no merit. Enforcement of laws are sometimes reformist, sometimes deterrent and sometimes retributive. Crime against women disturbs the society as a whole and in case of any apprehension that pornography causes sexual violence, it must be dealt with by iron-hand. Social psychologists are of the view that women and men do not differ in terms of their willingness to engage in pro-social behaviour, rather, such differences may emerge only in specific situations and therefore, media could also be blamed for the same. Telecast of violence and hatred also brings aggression and thereby incites for rape.
The Reformative school of criminologists do not agree with Sigmund Freud who postulated that aggression is the outcome of biological factors. It stems mainly from thanatos (death wish) which at the beginning is inward i.e. aimed towards self destruction and later becomes outwards, towards others. Social psychologists Nyla R. Branscombe and Robert A. Baron in their book Social Psychology (Adapted by Preeti Kapur) write, “A related view was proposed by Konrad Lorenz, an ethologist (Lorenz, 1966- 1974), who suggested that aggression springs mainly from an inherited fighting instinct which assures that only the strongest males will obtain mates and pass their genes on to the next generation.” This inherited agression easily gets translated into the crime of rape.
John Rawls in his famous book, “A Theory of Justice” argues, “…although a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked by a conflict as well as an identity of interests.” Conforming with his view, it could be established that the illnesses of rapists are settled by the judiciary only. Law of rape is particularly not a blue law which remains inoperative for years. The prompt judgements are a deterrent to the offenders. Since a rapist is an ‘outsider’, any choice of his rehabilitation would lead to its exponential growth as the message would go otherwise. The Indian judiciary must bring justice speedily, more particularly where crime involves a woman and that justice must not be retributive or reformative rather it should be deterrent.
