As early as 1974, the then Canadian minister for health Marc Lalonde had told the world that pumping money into healthcare doesn’t necessarily improve the health of the people because poor health is caused by factors that exist outside the health system.

In 2011, the WHO brought member-states to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to agree that the conditions in which “people are born, grow, live, work and age” decide their health. “These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels.”

To improve the health of people, one has to first address the “social determinants of health”. There was conclusive evidence to back their wisdom.

But the world continues to unsuccessfully medicate its people – mostly using the latter’s money – for illnesses that could have been handled by changing these social conditions.Instead of better living conditions and lesser inequalities, medical industrial complexes flourish and people get sick, morbid, bankrupt and then die.

The outrage and discussions on the Mumbai gangrape occur in such a ludicrous, vicious and logic-less vacuum: arrest the culprits, run fast-track trials and send the hooded criminals to jail or gallows while people on the streets clamour for more justice and safety.

The same show of helplessness or lack of imagination happened in Delhi, Faridabad, Chennai and in almost all parts of India even as more women and girls were traumatised, raped, disfigured and killed in the last six months.

This outrage and promises by politicians and governments too shall pass until another city erupts in anger for a woman.

Since Delhi, this has become a national trend, but will we ever find at least a modicum of a solution? Can we ever reclaim the lives of the traumatised women and those who are terrified of living in this hopeless country? Can we reassure parents that their girl children are safe? Can we reassure girls and women when they leave home that they can return home unbruised – mentally and physically.

The answer unfortunately is a certain NO, because the solutions that we and our governments look for are outside the realm of what we make ourselves believe leads to rape. Arresting rapists, putting surveillance cameras and posting more police do not change social determinants of rape or violence against women because criminal dominance of women is ingrained in our society and perpetrated by our social and political leaders.

Unless we change it, men – criminals or otherwise – will continue to maul our women.

In Rethinking Rape, feminist academic Ann J. Cahill questions the “legal and feminist definitions of rape as mere assault”  and “emphasises the centrality of the body and sexuality in a crime which plays a crucial role in the continuing oppression of women”, while looking at rape as an urgent political and ethical issue.

Based on other feminists’ work, she argues that a woman’s body is a fluid and indeterminate site for the negotiation of power and resistance.

There cannot be a better reading of the situation than this. It’s on the body of women that men – criminal or otherwise – exercise their sense of power. How else can one explain the sudden and violent eruption of sexual urge, when five men see a girl who could be easily overpowered? In an abandoned mill-compound, it manifests as rape, while at home, it’s either domestic violence, dowry deaths or severe intimate partner violence (IPV).

According to Cahill, rape is a pervasive threat to the integrity and identity of a woman’s person. It is not limited to a specific event, but encompasses the myriad ways in which rape threatens the “prospect of feminine agency.”

It’s not only about “those women who are raped, but all women who experience their bodies as rapable and adjust their actions and self-images accordingly.”

It’s not just in India that women get raped, gang-raped or violated. Following the gang-rape in Delhi, there were a string of reports from Brazil on the gangrape of an American tourist in a van in Copacabana. In fact, there was a consistent outrage against the rising wave of rapes in Rio, which was much higher than in Delhi.

But hadn’t Rio or Brazil taken so many steps that our activists have been asking for? The country has special police stations managed by women since the 1980s, there is a special legislation to handle violence against women, in some cities there are women-only train compartments and the country even elected a woman president. But the surge in rapes is still there.

The fact of the matter is that these things don’t work because the real reasons, as in the case of social determinants of health, are outside the environment which we think encourage rape. French intellectual Michael Foucault was right when he said that “legal approaches to rape define it as merely an act of violence, not of sexuality, and therefore not distinct from other types of assaults.”

So what do we do when nothing seems to be working?

This is where we go to the simple fundamentals – treat women as equals. It’s not easy and it is not a legislative process. And the biggest obstacle for this process are our politicians who are walking-talking brand ambassadors for violence against women. The men, who block every effort to cleanse their system of criminality and corruption also block every effort to expand the space for women.

Empowerment of women is a political process and the transformation at home alone is not enough when the social milieu is largely controlled by politicians for whom misogyny is a weapon of control.

Remember the faceless girls that Shiv Sena hooligans traumatised with the help of police in Mumbai? One of them, who was terrified even to show her face or speak against the attack, is now a flourishing musician. Her parents had brought her up in an environment of equality and freedom, trained her in Carnatic and Hindustani music and encouraged her to dream big. But the outrageous men of her society terrified her and almost crushed her.

Today, she is in a different city and is a rising star in contemporary music. She is safe, secure and empowered in the company of her band-members, who are all young men.

As in the case of social determinants of health, it is the conditions that we are “born, grow, live, work and age” that make women at risk to violence and rape.

How do we change that?

The answer is certainly political and has to be decided by people such as Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mamata Bannerjee, Khap leader Jitender Chhatar and Sri Praksh Jaiswal, to name a few.

source:http://www.firstpost.com