I Spit on Your Grave is a shocking rape and vengeance film that confronts you with many questions in the context of last week?s slew of violence reported against minor girls. In east Delhi, a five-year-old girl was locked into a room for two days and raped by two men. Small glass bottles and candles were found in her vagina. Another abandoned five-year-old girl, raped and lying unconscious was found outside Delhi?s AIIMS. Flown to a Nagpur hospital was a four-year-old girl, kidnapped, raped and in a coma.
This new happening of child rape in India is excruciatingly painful. But people tell me it?s not new, it merely sounds new because TV channels flash it noisily. When toddler girls and other women are being raped across the country, what conclusion can we come to for the reason? Is it lack of sex education, lack of on-time sexual experience, frustration from unemployment, illiteracy or poverty that?s making underprivileged people desperately advance towards sexual violence? There?s a school that believes women dress ?indecently? which provokes men, so it?s women?s fault that they get sexually abused. Should we then say that five-year-olds also dress to sexually provoke? Or is digital technology advancement ultimately responsible as pornography proliferates through the Internet on to mobile phones, instigating men to seek immediate release of their sexual energies.
Perhaps our social law and order system is too lenient and lax. Rapists are somehow becoming national heroes, widely discussed. Remember the question about what will happen to the rapist who was still a minor, although he was the cruellest of them all, who shoved an iron rod into the private body part of the 23-year-old fatally gang-raped girl inside a moving New Delhi bus last December? In the classic Hindi movie, Sholay, there?s the good man hero Vijay and the bad man hero Gabbar. But it?s Gabbar?s dialogues that are more remembered, enacted in school functions and quoted even today.
How long will women remain victims of sexual ravage? Newspapers report of rapes committed every single day. I seriously believe that rapists should be subjected to mass humiliation. They need to experience psychological trauma before being handed over for justice to prevail. If rapists are forced to see and experience horrible, vicious rape inflicted theatrically on them by brutes, and women made to torment them, there may be some chance of reforming their misdemeanours. Applying the ethic of reciprocity, ?Do to others what you would have them do to you? (Matthew 7.12) is the best cure. The film I Spit on Your Grave shows the victim?s revenge to be rightly reciprocal.
In experiencing raw brutality, I Spit on Your Grave by Meir Zarchi will churn your stomach in disgust. The protagonist is senselessly desecrated by five rapists, one even films the debasing rape in graphic detail, then she?s chased, naked and bleeding into the forest, raped, assaulted, raped at gunpoint, raped again and left as dead. Even the local police are in league with the rapists. Her endless victimisation makes you despise the male species and seek pure revenge. The girl actually escapes and returns in cold-blooded fury to avenge her perpetrators. We see her cleverly take the rapists off-guard and in equally explicit scenes of vengeful assault on male genitalia, she gruesomely makes them perish in agonised torture. So is this a feminist film? Supposedly not because too much sex is revealed, the kind that?s made for men; it?s an attack on male sexuality and infatuation with their virility.
Another victimisation of women is the unborn girl child who?s snuffed out before birth. Boys are more valued socially, so if parents illegally find out the foetus is a girl, an abortion is done. Do women have the right to abort? Yes, India?s law allows abortion as a fundamental right for women to take control of their own bodies. In France, it was only after writer-philosopher Simone de Beauvoir protested with ?343 sluts? who signed a manifesto for it, did health minister Simone Veil get the law enacted in 1975. She had to fight protests from males and the Catholic Church, which to this day does not allow abortion.
Even with abortion having no religious barrier, India lacks trained paramedical personnel and facilities. So every two hours a woman dies because of abortion-related complications. In the 6.4 million abortions taking place every year, almost 3.6 million are unsafe, performed in unhygienic conditions by untrained providers. It?s pathetic that poor health services make pregnant women die.
Women victims now have tough new laws to use to punish sexual crimes against them, but savage rape attacks on young and old alike prove that law implementation is not perfect. When the legal system is not quick and responsive, should women take up radical action themselves? Obviously, no law-abiding citizen can ever advocate that. It?s only when men sensitise other men through the window of ?Respect, and Save Women? manifesto that I?m promoting can the rape-revenge cycle get broken. A correction of societal attitude towards girls and women is the need of the hour.
Shombit is an international consultant to top management on
differentiating business strategy with execution excellence (www.shiningconsulting.com)