Free The Curse of That Night by Rochak Bhatnagar Page A

THE VICTIM”
    Senior political and religious victims leaders have shown this ‘blame the victim’ mentality towards rape victims on several occasions and police often follow suit.
    An investigation by India’s leading magazine and a news channel found that more than half the police officers (interviewed) had prejudices – blaming the victim’s clothes or the fact that she was out at night, suggesting that she was ‘asking for it’!
    Most people would agree with the fact that police is generally highly insensitive to female victims.
    The entire police force is not gender insensitive, but training and sensitisation is definitely needed.
    In force (police), an average constable does not meet a woman very often. You meet your colleagues, they are men. You pick up accused, most are men. You take them to court, most of them are men. You bring them to jail, most are men. So a constable’s interaction with a woman on a daily basis is very low.
    Currently, women make up around 6.5 percent of India’s police force, according to the latest NCRB data.
    For a rape victim, lodging a First Information Report (FIR), with the police is just the First Hurdle. The procedures that follow are often even more gruelling, humiliating and traumatic for the victim.
    An over-burdened public health system – where the average gynaecologist has no training in conducting medical examinations and is often reluctant to do so for the fear of being embroiled in criminal cases – which means that the victim gets little sympathy.
    Others have been forced to sit for hours in bloodied clothes, even after an examination, without being allowed to change or shower. Some are publicly identified as ‘rape victims’ in hospital corridors.
    Medical care such as treatment for injuries or infections, or to address the possibility that the victim might have contracted HIV/AIDS is more often than not, unavailable. In most cases, trauma counselling is unheard of.
    The so-called ‘Two finger test’ – an archaic practice, banned in many countries, which involves a doctor inserting fingers into a victim’s vagina to determine if she is ‘habituated to sex’ – is widely used in India, despite an order by the Director General of Health Services in 2011 to discontinue it.
    The test is irrelevant and unscientific which is equivalent to‘re-rape’ of the victim.
    The World Health Organisation’s guidelines for medico-legal care for sexual assault victims state that the health and welfare of the victim is ‘the overriding priority’ – yet this is rarely followed in India.
    Well, this was the case with Aarti too.
    “What does it feel like to be raped? I could write about the details… how the evening rolled out – but that’s a story most rape victims tell. How it FEELS though? It feels like nobody will ever know how you feel at that particular moment of time. It feels like you’re cut loose, you don’t know what to do. It feels like you are nothing. It feels like the whole world left you and you have nowhere to craw that’s safe. And when you tell your family or friends – they don’t know how to cope, so they send you off to a psychiatrist. You feel so damn guilty, as if you’ve had sent an invitation to be raped. You stop talking about it. You try to get your life back on track. You call the rape crisis centre and they ask you to calm down because you’re hysterical and crying too much. They advise you to drive down to the police station but you can’t because you are so weak, dizzy and helpless and the last thing you want is to be put through a barrage of questions and have some other stranger poke around in your private parts. My rapist is a high profile personality, son of an MLA – what chance do I have of proving his guilt? Even if, word does get around, I might get a threatening message passed via him to shut my mouth. So what’s the point fighting over it? Will I ever get justice in this gloomy world?” Aarti thought.
    She had