“Her heart was a migrating bird
Flying over an empty ocean
Vertical descent was absurd
Only horizontal motion…”
From The Flight from Love by Bachchoo

If public comment is any indicator, there is universal outrage over the three-year sentence meted out by an Indian court to the (then) 17-year-old convicted of the gangrape and murder of a young woman in Delhi last year. The court passed the maximum sentence the law allows for a juvenile, though his four adult co-defendants could face the death penalty.
Will such an outcry, or the extreme penalty which may be imposed on the adult rapists, go any way towards a reduction in cases of rape? Can deterrence work to significantly change criminal behaviour or does the fear of detection and death do very little to deter would-be rapists whose criminal intent is rooted in male attitude towards women — in this case in the cultures of India?
The cultural attitude is reflected in the swear words of Indian languages. These generally imply incest with sisters, mothers and even daughters. When the phrases don’t stretch to incest, they allude in rough terms to the anatomy of the mother or sister. The word “sala”, though literally meaning brother-in-law, implies, sometimes playfully, the casual sexual degradation of the sister of the person addressed.
In school and college when a serious dispute broke out between two males and words of this nature were exchanged, a condition was often laid down: “Don’t go on mothers,” which meant, “You may abuse me as much as you like but I will defend the sexual honour of my female relatives with my life.”
One has often heard on the Indian streets disputes in which some wise voice says something analogous to Jesus’ caution to those stoning the woman caught in the act of adultery: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!” In the case of a brawl in India, the insult to women is often countered with, “Don’t you have a mother and sisters of your own?”
However protective the culture is of one’s own family’s females (and statistics of incest and rape within the family imply that this is not a uniformly respected norm), the incidence of rape and more tellingly of gangrape is a manifestation — no, a product — of cultural attitudes towards women.
Can anything that the state through legislation or the courts through exemplary sentences do to alter such deep-seated and widely prevalent attitudes? The threat of severe punishment may result in some hesitation, but can it smash the distorting lens of the male psyche that can objectify and degrade another human being to this extent?
Public attitudes can be altered to some extent, even in the span of a generation. In our times in the West, attitudes to race and gender equality have been assaulted and ameliorated by the political movement of Afro-Americans and feminists. In the UK this year gay marriage was legalised. The law criminalising homosexuality was abolished in the Sixties. The “gay movement” became increasingly assertive of the right to socio-political equality and that has certainly altered public attitudes and curtailed the language of homophobic prejudice.
The war of attitudes can never be decisively won, but the forces of prejudice are certainly on the retreat.
This week in the UK a charity that represents the interests of disabled people published the results of a survey which purports to chart the attitudes of the public towards people with one or other form of physical disability. The survey concluded that the 2012 Paralympics, which were held following the Olympic Games in London, drew packed audiences and went a long way towards altering public perceptions. Britain saw people in wheelchairs, the partially-sighted, the blind, those without a limb or disabled in other ways determined to compete undeterred. The spectacle of men and women overriding their disabilities in a display of human — dare one say it — nonchalance was remarkable and inspiring. And looking at the muscular arms and torsos of the athletes who had lost their legs and were in wheelchairs made me certainly fearful of getting into any disputation with any of them.
The report went on, alas, to say that the gains in attitude towards the Paralympics had since been eroded by the strategies and statements of the present government. Though no minister or member of Parliament has stooped to any abuse, the government has, in the course of its campaign to cut the state’s welfare spending — which is the money paid to the unemployed, the disabled and those in very low-income employment to enable them to survive by paying their rents and giving them living and heating allowances — spread an attitude.
This attitude springs from ministers constantly contrasting those who are employed with those who live with the help of “benefits” paid out of the welfare bill. It gives respectability to the opinion that those who have to rely on the state to survive are layabouts and “scroungers”.
There are some 65 million people living in Britain today. The welfare budget spent on the disabled is about £19 billion. That may seem a huge amount of money until one considers that the total annual welfare budget is £159 billion out of which 10-12 per cent is spent on disability allowance, carers for the disabled and incapacity benefits. I don’t mean to imply that the 90 per cent spent on people without disabilities is in any way absorbed by shysters and scroungers, but this government’s rhetoric about the welfare bill perpetrates the idea that most people, able or with physical disabilities, are in some sense sponging off the tax payer.
Another way of looking at it is that those on welfare benefits are the victims of a capitalist system that runs a free market in labour in a consumer and rentier society in which seven per cent of the population own 84 per cent of the wealth and which relegates a section of its able and disabled working classes to live on the bread line.