Until the 1970s, whether in academic discussions or popular forums, there was a complete denial of the intentional violence or coercion associated with forced sexual encounters. In fact, it was a deflection towards the father and his private property, and of course, his reputation: men took it personally first.

The act was seen as “anti-social” in ways that disrupted a patrilinear and patrilocal society. It was commemorated in descriptions of wars, when raping women was normalised as a form of wartime offence. During this time, if a woman failed to forget and act normally, she was relegated to the position of a “witch” in some cultures and a “dayan” in others, unless they acted as expected from women in society. Unless, of course, she is a mythological “princess”, like Draupadi, whose modesty was outraged in an elite court, but she was “protected by a god” before the “act” could take place, and eventually “avenged by her husbands”.

In the year 1970, Sandra Sutherland and Donald Scherl published an article titled “Patterns of response among victims of rape” (American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 503-11). It was eventually out of this research that the “rape-trauma syndrome” was conceptualised. Basically, people, the occupants of these privileged academic spaces, finally asked or rather prioritised the question of what happens to the person if they are not dead, if they survive. Is that survival a staged process? If so, what are the various stages?

Soon after it was Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975) that reframed rape broadly as an expression of power rather than sexual urge, laying methodological groundwork for further research on the issue. In academia too, like several other fields of research, such important questions took much longer to reach South Asia. The reality of the “Third World”, therefore, shapes the social reality of countries such as India and Bangladesh.

During the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, members of the Pakistani military and Razakar paramilitary forces carried out what is described as a systematic campaign of genocidal rape, targeting both Bengali Muslims and Hindus. The Bangladeshi state itself formally recognised this: on December 22, 1971, the Government of Bangladesh declared the title Birangona (war heroine) for women raped by the Pakistani Army during the war, with President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman calling on the country to honour them “as his daughters”. This event allowed the women to narrate and record their experiences and offered to the historian a relatively narrativised but more ethical source to study the past in corroboration with other facts.

Despite such questions being raised, the academic “circles” remained limited in their outreach, and therefore their impact on the everyday lives of people. For instance, Joanna Bourke has written a book as recently as 2007 titled Rape: A History from 1860 to Present. This book studies the rapist, raising questions regarding the structural and institutional factors that shaped the perpetrator, finding depth using psycho-analytical models. Often victims too try to do this, think like the perpetrator, trying to find some rationale/logic behind their actions, what happened — the fact/event. But that is what psychologists are studying and their findings showed patterns of behaviour that resulted from the act of rape, whether as symptoms of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) or just the difficulties that emerge for such victims of trauma in their alignment with a mentally “healthier” society. But how many Indians can afford a psychologist?

Despite these academic engagements, the “social reaction” or circulation of such research advancements was something that sociological endeavours could generate. Such studies led to an intersectional analysis of the event of sexual violence. How was the victim’s life affected according to their designated social roles? In India, for women this included caste and class-based realities, social expectations around marriage, and the fear of ostracisation.

Even if a woman is empowered according to other parameters of class and caste, it is often her “reputation” on which her privileges rest. Therefore, the healthy space for dialogue for women who have survived acts of sexual violence remains limited. It is then through literature, whether as social media posts or stories, that such dialogue takes place. The legal proceedings discuss the event and then decide the immediate consequences of the same, determining only in specific ways the relationship between the perpetrator and victim after the event. After Nirbhaya, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 widened the legal definition of rape and made it mandatory for the police to register FIRs. Consequently, there was a 35% rise in reported cases in the same year. The takeaway is that this data is limited; it only reflects what was reported —neither does it establish “incidence” nor does it reflect “justice”. However, no judgment in court has the power to control the various consequences, economically, socially, and psychologically determined, that a woman must face after having survived trauma.

As historically established, campus-based protests have had legislative impacts on the country’s present. These are also the spaces for dialogue that leads to social advancement. More and more cases are reported after such dialogues take place statistically. These dialogues should continue even after the rage that the country is feeling now dies down. The rage need not always find expression in retaliatory violence, whether physical or verbal, but in eagerness to always leave room for dialogue as an active member of any society. Whether the woman is a “survivor” or a “victim”, therefore, depends on the social context in which she chooses to live on.

Kajri Raymahasay is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, University of Delhi