Gulnaz’s story is horrific at multiple levels.  A system which charges rape victims with adultery is awful enough,  while jailing people for adultery  as if it were a capital crime is even more horrible.  But what really are you saying when you proclaim that said adultery can be forgiven if only you marry the guy who committed a violent crime against you?

Marrying your rapist is not a new theme, or even an Islamic theme.  I have seen this even in Hindi/ Tamil/ Telugu movies – the 1990 movie Dil (starring Aamir Khan and Madhuri Dixit) is one example I remember, and I am sure there are many others. (Readers, can you think of more examples ?)

But how does rape become A-okay if the victim marries the rapist?  The only logic I can think of is that somehow the woman’s ‘crime’- adultery/ losing her virginity is seen as worse than the man’s violent crime.  Never mind that attaching a label of  adultery implies the woman had some choice in the matter.  The people who can call a rape as adultery are no doubt,  implicitly, also blaming the woman for letting herself be raped.  Her clothes/ speech/ behavior will all be scrutinized for being “provocative”.  Of course, if you are in Afghanistan, not wearing a burqa would be deemed as dressing provocatively.

pic courtesy Reuters

No one would question that marrying your rapist is punishment.  To start with,  a man who is violent and  has so little respect for women is not the sort one would choose to marry, and to add to that, there would be the resentment against the woman for daring to call him out for rape.  In Gulnaz’s case, the rapist had been imprisoned too, which would make it even worse.  There is the  psychological damage the woman would suffer by reliving the rape every time she sees her husband, and the very real chance of physical abuse by her husband.

Why would you subject the victim to such cruel punishment?  This is only logical if you are, in fact, punishing the woman  for letting herself be raped by getting her married to her rapist, so she does not provoke some other hapless man into raping her.  You also choose to believe that the rapist will somehow change his ways if only he gets married to his victim. Or you can tell society that since the rape victim herself has chosen to forgive her attacker, we should also follow suit and ignore the fact that a crime had been committed.

And what if the rapist is already married (as in Gulnaz’s case – the rapist is her cousin’s husband).   Even if the religion/ State allows bigamy, does the rapist’s wife have no say in the matter?  What if bigamy is not allowed – should the rapist divorce his wife to marry his victim?

Rape is a capital crime and should be treated as such.  No action of the victim can be a mitigating factor, and no pardon by the victim can erase the fact that the rapist committed a crime  and needs to be punished.

What are the consequences of having laws like this? Rape victims would be very reluctant to report a rape, for who wants to be imprisoned, or have to relive the rape every single day by marrying your rapist?

What message does it send to men?  That if your advances are spurned by a woman, all you have to do is rape her and then society itself will ensure that she is married to you.

Nice way to discourage the incidence of rapes.

On one side, there is FIFA, sticking rigidly to its stand that hijabs can cause “choking injuries” and are thus unsafe to wear.  On the other side, you have the Iranian sports authorities who had at least a year to protest to FIFA if they did not like the redesigned caps that FIFA proposed to address this very issue in 2010.  The caps apparently don’t cover the entire neck (which makes them not the same as a hijab), but surely the Iranians knew this before?

Iranian women footballers Pic: Yahoo Sports

Let’s take FIFA’s stand first.  Is the hijab really a choking hazard?  From the picture above, I cannot see how anyone can accidentally choke on a hihab.  It does not have loose ends floating around, so you cannot trip on it, or have anyone get tangled it in it, or accidentally pull it.

But if someone were to grab the headscarf from behind, in the nape area, yes, you could choke.  But such a grab would have to be deliberate, and is not only illegal as per football rules, trying to choke someone deliberately would be illegal in any country.  There is no reason why you would want to grab someone’s neck to stop them when you are playing football.

So I cannot understand FIFA’s logic – are they saying that they want to prevent a set of players from playing because someone could potentially illegally grab them by the neck?  Is that the substance of their objection to the hijab?  If it is, it doesn’t make any sense.  One even starts to wonder if this is the real reason.  After all, banning hijabs in public seems to be the current fashion in Europe.

It also looks like Iran was not the only team facing the headscarf issue. Jordanian players had the same problem, but the team resolved this by not picking those women who were unwilling to play without headscarves. In even more conservative Iran, this would not have been an option.

And now the Iranian delegation is accusing the Bahrainian referree of being politically motivated in his decision to stop Iranians from playing.  (Bahrain and Iran have not been on the best of terms of late, and Bahrain believes Iran has been supporting the anti-government protestors in Bahrain).

In this whole imbroglio, those women footballers have been caught in the middle of other people playing politics and the religion card. All those women want to do is play football, and they must have overcome enormous social pressure to get to where they are.  I am sure they don’t find it comfortable to run around in the hot sun in track pants, long sleeves and a hijab.  But that’s the only way they can play at all, so they don’t have much of a choice.  It is a victory in itself that Iran still has a women’s football team and that it is allowed to play regular football at the highest level.  I cannot imagine this happening in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia -  after all,  Saudi women weren’t even allowed inside stadiums to watch football until a few years back.

The Iranian team also seems to be a pretty good one – they are ranked 51 in the world (India, in comparison, is at 54).  So they have every reason to presume that they would have qualified for the Olympics if not for this whole needless  hijab controversy.

At the end of the day, I blame FIFA for not looking at the bigger picture.  Their objections are so minor compared to the pressures the players are facing.  Why does FIFA have to stick to its ridiculous stand if it means disqualifying a whole country’s players?  Is this really the spirit of the Olympics ?  Shouldn’t they rather be encouraging these brave women who are battling so much to be able to play football?

Little did I know that singling out NRIs for stealing from their bags is an international practice.   According to this news article, Michael Arato, a TSA official in Newark airport  was found guilty of stealing cash and other valuables from travelers.  Apparently, Arato and his subordinate would steal the cash from bags during X-ray screening, and sometimes subject their intended victims’ carry on bags for additional screening so they could pocket the cash.

Here is where it gets interesting:

According to the original complaint, authorities became suspicious after receiving several complaints from passengers on Air India’s daily nonstop flight to India that money and valuables from their carry-on bags had gone missing after TSA employees at Arato’s checkpoint had searched them by hand.

The victims were mostly women of Indian decent (sic) who did not speak English, the complaint said.

What is even more interesting (and hilarious) is how Arato tries to justify his actions:

Arato was caught on tape explaining his action by saying that the travelers were leaving the country with “our money,” ABC reported.

Now, if only our Indian baggage handlers could come up with a similar justification.

To me, it  typifies everything that is wrong with how one can depict arranged marriages.

Okay, I can understand the part on the proposal to marry “Amy” meeting with stiff resentment while “Amritha Khanna” is much more acceptable.  Fine, we Indians like our children to marry people of Indian origin.  You can take objection to this too, but I’ll give it a pass, it’s understandable – for shared values, culture and all those reasons.

Though, Amritha’s own “Indianness” is a little open to question, given she feels the need to rename herself Amy when she has a perfectly pronounceable name.  (Also, what’s with the “h” in Amritha? That’s a South Indian way of spelling it, hardly one a Khanna would use).

But what’s much more interesting is how Ms. Khanna introduces herself.  She says nothing about herself, or what she does, but her first words are “My father is a doctor in New York”.   This piece of information apparently results in instant acceptance by the boy’s family.   Since doctors in NYC don’t exactly live in penury, apparently all we need to know to make her a perfectly acceptable bride is that she is of Indian origin and has a rich father.

Is this really how they want to depict arranged marriages? I come away with the message that we may now be modern enough to use a website to find brides, but in the end all we want is that the bride should be pretty and rich, and her interests and personality are, as always, a non-issue.

I’m guessing it’s hard to find a crasser ad from a matrimonial website.  I’m not saying such thinking never happens;  I’m sure there are people who think and match-make along these lines.  But what I find myself wishing is that Bharat matrimony wouldn’t make this kind of thinking sound acceptable or admirable.

The first is the one by Kanta Rani and Rajesh Luthra of CSIR’s human resources group. They have analysed the number of research grants in biology, given by CSIR during the period 2004-2008, and asked how many of these went to women.

Their paper shows that, surprisingly enough, men and women are equally successful (39 per cent success among men and 41 per cent among women) in winning grants from the CSIR (and likely from other agencies as well).

Okay, I don’t know why it should be surprising that men and women were equally successful in getting grants.  But moving past that, clearly whatever is hampering women scientists, it is neither ability nor funding.

(The paper did find that women in universities were more successful than those in R&D centres at getting funding, but doesn’t say if there is a similar trend among men, so I cannot conclude anything from that).

The second paper, “Beyond family and societal attitude to retain women in science,” by Drs. Anitha Kurup and R. Maithreyi of the  National Institute of Advanced Studies, surveyed 568 women scientists.  I am amazed (and somewhat appalled) not at their research but at the conclusions they chose to draw.

Consider this:

Most of these 568 were married (86 per cent of WIR, 88 per cent of WNR and 92 per cent of WNW). Yet a small number of women in research (14 per cent) preferred to remain single to keep their career on track (compare this with the 2.5 per cent of men in research, who were single). This suggests that a majority of women scientists are able to balance both their career and family responsibility.

So, er, one in seven women think they can only advance in their careers if they remain single, and that suggests that most women are able to balance career and family responsibility?  Really?  I would think rather that it shows the opposite – that women find that marriage (and children) affect their career so much that large numbers of them would rather stay single.   Clearly, it is not an issue of the women’s own commitment, obviously some of them are so committed that they prefer to remain single rather than damage their careers.  Given the social stigma that single women still face in India,  this is quite a sacrifice.  Clearly, there is something institutional going on here that the women are not able to tackle.

Pic courtesy: The Hindu

Here is more:

Another fact emerged. Although nuclear family and lack of childcare facilities may have affected WNW from continuing in science, they reported difficulties in finding jobs, institutions or advisors. This difficulty was more with the WNW group than with WIR or WNR.

So, it’s not just lack of childcare facilities, but there is outright discrimination against women that makes finding jobs or even advisors “difficult”.  The study doesn’t probe into why this is the case, and whether men with similar qualifications face the same difficulties.

So now what have we found – it’s not women’s ability or commitment, but opportunities available to them that make the difference.  You would think the study would talk about changing attitudes, right?

Wrong.  All that the study suggests, at the end of this, is that work timings should be made more flexible.

I am all in favor of flexible work timings, I am sure many men and women will find them helpful.  But aren’t we asking for too little here? Shouldn’t women scientists in India be more aggressive in demanding equal treatment ?  If a woman scientist cannot even find an advisor willing to take her on, or a job where she can prove herself, we have a very serious problem that merely changing office timings will not solve.

Neither is it just the lack of childcare facilities that are holding back women.  As far as I can see,  even the tip of the iceberg that these studies reveal shows that we need a whole new attitudinal change towards women scientists in India.  Why is nobody talking about this?

It’s when I read studies like these that I really wish we had class action lawsuits in India.

“Men will be required to wear a dark-colored suit, a white shirt and a red tie, and women a female equivalent of this,” Mr. Kern said. The dress code is still under review, he added.

This sounds much more reasonable than that original dress code (the English translation of which is here), which is full of gems.  There is the blatant sexism, such as in directives regarding hair coloring.

For men, it says :

Colored hair or bits prove unconvincing when the artificial color contrast with excessively the target age of your skin. Similarly, a gray beard or white, can clash with the color of your hair retouched.

For women, on the other hand,

A suitable hairstyle is essential to please others and itself and also contributes to determining your well-being. Studies have shown that hair neat and stylish and impeccable cut dramatically increase Capital sympathy and allow individuals to set their personalities.

and

.• If you have a color, you must ensure that your roots are always impeccable.

Pic: Flickr/Matt512

The directives for women are of course, the most detailed, talking about everything from what color nail polish you should use to how your eye glasses frame should match your jewelry (no, seriously).  Other gems include:

• Wear underwear flesh-colored below white blouses. In addition, we recommend thepossible, not to conceal the neck. Traces make-up on collars are bad effect.

• In general, a blouse is worn with a jacket. When it very hot, and after confirmation of your supervisor,you can not wear that shirt with the pants or skirt.  (I am trying to imagine how this conversation with the supervisor will go.)

• Never wear shoes that are too small for you:there’s nothing worse than a twisted smile.

Men probably have it easier.  There is the lecture about how your tie should depend on your waistline.  ” A thin node provides a rate disproportionate in an individual corpulent.”  But read the full document, if you haven’t already.  It is hilarious in the extreme.

UBS is not the only company with such a detailed dress code, although it is probably a little more extreme than others.  But I’ve heard of other banks with such “rules”.  One of R’s former employers (also a bank) had a dress code which said, among other things, “Women should always wear underwear”.  (No, there was nothing specified about men.)

At some point, even the most well-intentioned dress code starts to become sexist and micromanaging, not to mention insulting everyone’s intelligence.  You wonder who spends so much time composing and approving these things.

All of which brings me to the point – do we really need such explicit dress codes?  Does it really reflect on the employer if an individual turns up to work in tight shoes, or with a small tie knot, or with powder on her shirt collar?

Granted, employers do not want employees dressed in mini skirts or shorts, and new college graduates may not always understand the difference between “Business casual” and “Business formal”.  But this can be easily addressed at the interview stage itself, or during orientation.  Surely, if you trust someone with shouldering their work responsibilities in your company and interacting with clients etc, you should trust them to dress appropriately?

So why do companies come up with these manuals?  Is it a control issue, or is there really an explosion of badly dressed people at work?

I am also curious about the situation in India.  Time was when women used to wear either sarees or salwars, and men used to wear a shirt, and sometimes a tie.  I’m sure things have changed now.  Do the new crop of companies have explicit, written dress codes?  Are these companies where only Western wear is allowed? (No salwars, sarees)?  What would be the rationale for such rules, if any?

But perhaps women needn’t have bothered fighting for pants.  At the speed at which some of them are going, they have left pants far behind.   Perhaps the decline started a few years ago, when some women started wearing skorts to work (and everywhere else).  Skorts, of course, were  skirt+ shorts.   They didn’t look much like skirts in most cases; they were really a sneaky way of wearing shorts to work.  Some companies allow shorts to work too. Here in the midwest, I know at least one company which actually allows employees to wear shorts to work, no need to hide them as skorts.

Clearly, pant hemlines have been rising in the last several years.  But it looks like they may have risen even further now.

The harbinger of this trend must surely be Venus Williams’ outfit at the ongoing U.S. Open:

A pantless Venus Williams (Pic courtesy: Washington Post)

Clearly, fashion now dictates that both pants and skirts are obsolete.  All you need is a nightshirt.

You could dismiss this as a case of one sportswoman dressing badly.   Of course women aren’t all going to dress like that.   Of course this won’t be a trend.

But I got a little worried when the Wall Street Journal, published this rather interesting fashion forecast for the fall season :

Here are a few predictions, based on interviews and previews of collections I’ve had lately:

Dressy shorts, in.

Suits – blazers that can be mixed and matched separately with skirts, pants and shorts – also in.

Yes, they did say “shorts”, and just in case you have any doubts about how short those shorts are, here is the picture they printed with the article :

Fashion forecast by WSJ (Pic courtesy : WSJ/ Dolce & Gabbana Fall 2010)

Do you remember that belief about falling hemlines (longer skirts – and pants?) predicting a recession and rising hemlines (shorter skirts and pants) predicting a recovery?  Well, going by that, we must be in the biggest boom of all time, because I can’t see hemlines rising any further.

The two bills were originally vetoed by the State Governor.  But then both the State House and Senate overrode the veto and passed the bills into law.

Here is a description of the two laws from the New York Times:

Though other states have passed similar measures requiring women to have ultrasounds, Oklahoma’s law goes further, mandating that a doctor or technician set up the monitor so the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims.

A second measure passed into law on Tuesday prevents women who have had a disabled baby from suing a doctor for withholding information about birth defects while the child was in the womb.

The first law essentially tries emotional harassment and guilt-induction to get pregnant women  to abandon their plans to have an abortion.  This is bad enough, and in the case of rape/ incest victims who are already traumatized, completely callous.

But the second law is something you could never have imagined seeing in a Western, First  World country.  Basically, it says that if a woman goes for an ultrasound or amniocentesis (or any other test) and the doctor notices birth defects in the fetus but does not tell the mother because, gee, he/ she (the doctor) doesn’t like women having abortions,  and the baby is subsequently born with a birth defect, the doctor is not responsible. No malpractice suit can be filed against him/ her.

The NY Times quotes the State Governor when he vetoed the bill, and I completely agree with him:

Mr. Henry said, “It is unconscionable to grant a physician legal protection to mislead or misinform pregnant women in an effort to impose his or her personal beliefs on a patient.”

But obviously, the lawmakers thought differently, for reasons best known to them.  And now thousands of pregnant women are going to have ultrasounds and other tests which are as good as useless, because what’s the point when you don’t know if the doctor is going to hide information from you?

What happens if babies are born with Down’s Syndrome or some other disorder – will these lawmakers and the doctor take care of the baby all its life?

What about the emotional agony that the parents will suffer while binging up such a baby – will these lawmakers and the doctor share that agony?  Will they recompense the parents for it? (Not that any amount will compensate them fully).

Will the lawmakers and the doctor pay the medical bills for all the treatments for this baby?

And what happens if the fetus poses a life-threatening danger to the mother – will such a doctor go unpunished if he does not inform the mother even then, because she may abort the fetus?

Can anyone tell me just what these lawmakers are thinking?  Why is it becoming more and more accepted for people to superimpose their beliefs (religious or otherwise) on others?

A lawsuit has been filed against this law, of course, but for now, the law continues to be in force.  The lawsuit has been filed by a New York based abortion-rights group.

But here’s my final question – this bill has been debated for many months; it’s not sudden.  And lawmakers would not have overriden the veto if they weren’t sure their constituents would support them.  So how much have the women of Oklahoma been protesting these provisions?  Have they been writing to their representatives protesting the bill  (now law) ?

It’s not even an issue which affects women alone.  For too long, abortion has been seen as a women’s issue, and there can be some justification because the woman should have the ultimate say in abortion.

But when you get into the area of misinformation (or denial of information) on birth defects, this is not even just about abortion but about denial of medical care.

So what are the good people of Oklahoma – women and men – doing about these laws?  How did they allow their lawmakers to pass such a law?

Ruchika Girhotra (Wiki pic)

We all know the facts of what happened to Ruchika Girhotra – in 1990, 14 year-old Ruchika was molested by Shambhu Pratap Singh Rathore, a police offer who subsequently rose to become the Director General of Police in Haryana (i.e. the highest-ranking police officer in the state of Haryana).  Rathore subsequently started harassing Ruchika’s family because he did not want them to go public with the crime.

Ruchika was traumatized for years by the “molestation”  and she subsequently committed suicide.  Nineteen years after the offence, in Dec. 2009, Rathore was finally sentenced – to 6 months in prison and fined a paltry Rs. 1000.  After the public uproar that ensued at this mild sentence, the case has now been transferred to the CBI.

There are at least two issues here:

Issue 1 :  Indian Laws on Molestation and Attempts to Rape:

Current Indian laws look at “molestation” as a minor offence.  Section 509 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) states:

Section 509. Word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman
Whoever, intending to insult the modesty of any woman, utters any word, makes any sound or gesture, or exhibits any object, intending that such word or sound shall be heard, of that such gesture or object shall be seen, by such woman, or intrudes upon the privacy of such woman, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both.

When you consider Rathore’s 6 month sentence, it is ironic to note that if poor Ruchika had failed in her suicide attempt, she may have received a harsher punishment than Rathore’s.  Sec. 309 of the IPC states :

Section 309. Attempt to commit suicide
Whoever attempts to commit suicide and does any act towards the commission of such offence, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for term which may extend to one year [ or with fine, or with both].

So what does Sec. 509 mean by “privacy of a woman”? The media and the law use different words while talking about sexual harassment, and none of them are clear.  We need to explicitly define “molestation”, “eve-teasing”, “misbehavior” and every other euphemism we use.  Right now, everything short of outright rape goes by “eve-teasing” , “molestation” or “intruding upon privacy”.  Harassment of women in India takes different forms.  There is the groping that happens in public places – on buses, in crowds and so on, and there is the harassment that happens behind closed doors, where it can turn into an attempt to rape.   Which brings us to the other irony in Indian law – we have penalties for Attempt to Suicide and Attempt to Murder., but as the Supreme Court has ruled in a different case, the IPC does not recognize “Attempt to rape” as a crime.

An unsuccessful rapist can only be charged under Section 354, Assault or criminal force to women with intent to outrage her modesty, which carries a maximum sentence of 2 years – not a very harsh punishment for an almost-rapist.   Let’s be clear, the major issue in rape is not only the physical trauma that the victim suffers, but also the psychological trauma – which she would be suffer even in an attempt to rape.  The social stigma that she would suffer in Indian society wold not be very different either.  So while the victim suffers nearly the same consequences, how can a perpetrator who had every intention to rape get a mere slap of the wrist just because he was not successful in carrying out the rape?

Issue 2:  Offences against minors should carry a greater penalty than offences against adults.

In many cases, minor children may not even understand what has happened to them, or be able to explain the nature of the offence clearly.  Even when they do understand and can articulate clearly, the balance of power between a adult and a  child is so skewed that it is very easy for an adult to cow down a child with threats.

From the perpetrator’s viewpoint, children are an easy target of sexual harassment – whether molestation, rape or  incest, precisely because the probability of detection is so low.

One way to deter this is to make the punishment for a crime against a minor so stringent that even with a low probability of detection, the adult perpetrator will still think twice before committing the crime.  So I believe that the same crime, when committed against a minor child, should carry a punishment which is many times harsher that when committed against an adult.

The message that the judgement in Ruchika’s case has sent out  is that you can get away with a mere slap on the wrist if you commit a crime against a minor.  The Indian government needs to take action to change this perception.  I think it is high time our legislators made the necessary changes in the Indian Penal Code.  That is possibly the best justice that Ruchika Girhotra and all the other silently suffering Ruchikas around the country can get.