Dehradun Boarding School Gang Rape: Why Do We Protect the Accused?

“People who know about the rape know that the woman won’t be believed. So they don’t waste time in helping her.”

Protestors hold candles during a candle light vigil to mark the first anniversary of the Delhi gang rape, in New Delhi December 16, 2013. Image used for representational purpose.

(Photo: Reuters)

Can you imagine what it must have felt like, for a 16-year-old girl, who’s just missed her period? Older people – adults, whom she’d have ordinarily trusted – now becoming shadowy spectres in the conspiracy against her, saying something to the tune of, “It’ll be all right, if you just take these medicines and remember to tell no one”.

Since no school action that one knows of was taken against the four accused boy students, it can be assumed she saw them, in school corridors, in and around the hostel where they raped her – and that they saw her. Can you imagine what she thought when she looked into the eyes of the protected four?

Why are the first impulses to protect the accused and launch several-arms’-distance between the survivor and justice? In the case of the Dehradun boarding school gang rape, the gang rape was shushed for an entire month.

How the Dehradun Gang Rape Case Unfolded

A 16-year-old Class 10 student was lured out of class by a male classmate who said that a teacher was calling her. The girl was taken to an under-construction room where three other boys were waiting – they dragged her in, gagged her and, joined by the classmate who’d brought her, proceeded to rape her. The girl was warned against telling anyone unless she wanted to be defamed.

However, by 16 August, the school authorities had been intimated, but – and here’s the intriguing part – they chose to blame the girl instead, urging her not to defame the school.

Essentially, there was a lot of information relayed to the girl about being afraid, very afraid of defamation – whether hers or the school’s or her family’s. Funnily, no one thought of complaining to the cops.

“They must have believed that if one of ‘their lot’ gets punished, the whole school will also get punished by association,” says Manju Chouhan, a field worker with Jan Sahas, an NGO that works round-the-clock with girl and women survivors of sexual violence.

Throwing Our Weight Behind the Accused

But why was the first impulse to shield the boys – and not punish?

The mindset of society hasn’t changed at all. In most cases, both the culprits and the people who come to know about it, know that the woman won’t be heard at all. Therefore, they don’t waste any time in extending their help to the weaker agent – who, for them, is the survivor.

Manju Chouhan

Manju, who’s an active case worker – who helps women who've been raped access both justice and psychological healing – tells me that this is a predominant factor in, sadly, most minor rape cases.

Jan Sahas currently has about 4,500 cases of minor rapes on its register, and in almost of them, the child survivor is hidden away from the world. Some survivors don’t even reach the police station.

Manju, who's worked with rape survivors who come up against passive, don’t-ask-don’t-tell members of their own community, believes a community also seems to rally around the accused over the survivor because of the warped sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

Often, they don’t consider rape a crime and brush it off as a young boy’s ‘mistake’. In this case, the school must have also impulsively decided not to ‘hamper their futures’ without sparing a single thought for the girl’s life.

When it became apparent to the 16-year-old Dehradun rape survivor that she might be pregnant, she was given “home remedies” to abort the possible foetus. She took these and took violently ill, complaining of severe stomach ache.

At this point, she reached out to the school administration again (the director, principal, administrative officer and his wife, and the hostel caretaker have since been arrested) and they chose to ‘shush’ it yet again – taking her for an abortion to a private clinic.

A day after the clinic visit, a source tipped off the cops and the cover-up was well and truly exposed.

In all of this, the voice that wasn’t lent an ear to? The 16-year-old survivor’s who had the most to say.

A Rape Survivor’s Side of the Story...

Says Radha*, a 35-year-old rape survivor from a hamlet near Dewas town of Madhya Pradesh:

One of the worst things for me to fathom, was why people didn’t believe me. I used to feel very bad – and I would convince myself that maybe it was because the accused was a powerful man.

I ask Radha* (her story can be read in greater detail here) about the kind of pressure a survivor feels from the exertion of power by forces stronger than her – the kind of pressure the Dehradun 16-year-old must have been subjected to, daily.

I used to think, <i>main jaha bhi jaun, unki chalti hai</i> (wherever I go, these men are exerting power). It’s hard for survivors to not cower down when the rapists say – ‘Keep your mouth shut or we’ll kill you/ harm your family’. When you’re threatened by people more powerful than you, it’s easy to withdraw….

The 16-year-old Dehradun school student was warned by the director that she would be expelled from the school. She was so withdrawn at the time the cops finally came knocking, that she stayed tight-lipped for two hours before she broke.

One of the immediate recourses taken right after the news broke? The Uttarakhand education department declaring that it would cancel the school’s CBSE licence.

A band-aid on a fractured bone.

After the school’s exemplary display of what-not-do-when-you-find-out-about-rape, the board’s not done much differently. The important what-after steps will be to – provide counselling to the girl and her parents (“pressures from within a family to withdraw a case is also huge,” warns Manju) as well as education to all the school’s students to be able to speak up when a survivor’s agency has been stifled.

Will someone set these grassroots changes into motion?