In the various discussions following the recent
#DelhiGangRape and the Government's intentional violent crackdown on peaceful
#DelhiProtests followed by and even more shameful disinformation and misdirection campaign by the Govt and
#paidmedia, some people have expressed the opinion that
#castration is a fitting punishment for rapists.
The
Chief Justice of India, Justice Verma is seeking / accepting suggestions for modifications to the laws that punish rape and sexual assault.
The general public, like you and me, are allowed to send an email or fax to Justice Verma's office with your suggestions.
Email : justice.verma@nic.in or Fax
at 011.23092675
Note that it is the office of a Chief Justice of India, and therefore,
your identity in the email you send, your suggestion, and everything you say, can and will be stored and noted by the Government of India.
Additionally,
Chief Justices are very busy people, hence, it is important to
keep your suggestions thoughtful. Please do not suggest any means of vigilante justice / mob justice or violence as they will definitely not be entertained.
Here is one informed opinion - the author is a lawyer and so there is much weight to the suggestion.
I put myself the same questions that we are all thinking about, and I put myself, mentally in the place of the rape victim, and then, in the place of the rapist - both a convicted rapist and a rapist who could not be convicted.
Having thought of all three of those situations, the emotional consequences and the lifelong burdens of shame or guilt that might remain due to rape, I think it best to suggest surgical / physical castration as a fitting punishment for rape.
Sugestion #1
But before we go to the topic of castration as a punishment for rape, we should look at an even more pressing injustice against women - the terrible handling of rape cases.
I have spoken with rape victims from various countries - including USA, the EU and Australia in online chat rooms. Everywhere it is the same story - policemen,
being poorly educated or thoroughly de-sensitised males involved daily in
the business of fighting crime, have no clue or idea of what a terrible emotional state a rape victim is in.
It is
simply impossible for a rape victim to calmly state the tragedy that has just befallen her. Her consciousness is shaken, she is often trembling, depending on the violence inflicted in the rape, she might not be able to even sit down properly.
She in invariably in tears, her dignity and self-respect is completely gone.
In most cases, if you were to pressure the victim sufficiently,
you could easily get her to commit suicide right there, on the reporting desk in the police station.
Our judicial system needs to understand that
rape is not a legal matter or standard crime reporting situation. It is medical emergency and a situation worthy of
nothing less than ICU-level care and support.
You
probably do not understand it unless you were raped yourself or
unless you spoke with dozens of rape victims .
Instead of providing medical and emotional support we put these broken and about-to-kill-themselves ladies into the hands of de-sensitised brash men whose entire training is about how to handle violent criminals in self-defense.
Would you give your new-born child or your dying aged mother into the hands of your local butcher for safe-keeping for the first 24 hours of its life on earth?
That is exactly what we do when we expect women to report rapes to the police who are rough, themselves pretty aggressive males, armed with lathis and guns, paunches bulging, incapable of speaking respectfully or even fluently in any language.
Policemen are often the people with lowest IQ among trained Govt officials.
They are mostly never trained to talk to ICU patients, and definitely never to talk with patients with mental disorders.
Without fail, rape is the beginning of a depression phase that lasts months to years in every single case.
Are our cops even trained to recognise sick people?
Yet we go around as if our rape-handling system is fine as long as a report is filed as usual in a police station to a cop with a lathi and a gun and fat file.
There is no provision for voice recording, there is no guarantee that there will not be a crude remark, a stupid question, a trigger for suicide.
Half the policemen do not even know what the menstrual cycle is. This means they do not know the anxiety that a woman is facing about getting pregnant with an unwanted child.
In short,
a rape is not a crime reporting situation, it is medical emergency.
It needs ICU - level care for the victim.
India definitely has the
money and doctors needed - otherwise why would we have
thriving medical tourism?
What needs immediate overhaul is the system of reporting rapes.
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The victim should not go to a police station, she should go to a local, trusted medical centre of her choice to report rape. Period.
Additionally, all rape cases, must invariably be handled
exclusively by lady cops, lady doctors and the Govt must invariably provide a choice of an experienced lady lawyer - with the choice given to the victim.
In addition, wherever and as far as possible, the
judge or judicial bench hearing the rape case must be ladies.
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In the relatively small number of, but very real, cases of men being raped (always by other men), the choice of speaking with male cops, doctors and lawyers must be given too.
This measure too will
provide tremendous strength to women to come forward and report rapes.
Naturally then, we can expect the number of
reported rapes to soar astronomically.
And let me also say this for the record, at the risk of sounding cold and ruthless - if you are a criminal lawyer, you will not run out of business for a few decades because of the rape cases being registered.
Also
due to this extremely high prevalence of unreported rape, expect even this basic support mechanism of
reporting rape at a medical centre rather than a police station
to be obstructed by the very lawmakers and legislators who claim that they have daughters and they understand.
Suggestion #2
Now to the original point - castration as a punishment.
Informally:
A few things I would like to add in this discussion, but strictly
to be kept out of any legal letter to anybody:
I am a normal middle-aged Indian who lives in an Indian metro and has been exposed to all the common cultural phenomena in metro life - like people making fun of girls, adult humour, general threats from bullies in school and/or college, forced to be in a physical fight once, and so on.
I have heard a lot of men-only talk in college and in various offices I have worked in.
I have also heard a lot of crude jokes in my lifetime, at the expense of other men and women too.
And I am one who dearly loves his manhood.
From that set of common life experiences that most urban male youngsters experience, I can tell you with confidence, that
castration of a rapist by the Government, as an
official punishment, will produce a strong deterrent among men and
put a heavy social and emotional price on the male psyche about committing
sexual assault on women, sexual harassment of women, eve-teasing, molesting and
making dirty comments at women.
As of now, among the rowdy elements in urban youth, and in a vast section of rural youth,
especially Haryana, raping someone is
considered something to brag about in men's circles.
It is definitely informally
considered a sign of prowess and male-ness among criminals who are not in jail (once in jail, criminals think very differently of rapists) and
also among police constables and Army jawans.
This is definitely not acceptable to me as an Indian citizen with a wife, sisters and maybe soon, a daughter.
Formally:
Here is the letter I sent to the office of CJI Justice Verma. Please
do not copy paste it into an email. Think about it, take any points from it, and add your views, data, facts, news items, links, reports, etc, because you owe at least a few hours of thought for the welfare of the civilised half of our country - women.
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Respected Sir,
It is a rare privilege for a common person like me to be able to communicate directly with you.
However,
the circumstances are quite horrible - in the aftermath of the Delhi
GangRape and the poor handling of the protests by the Govt of Delhi and
of India.
As a shocked citizen of India in my early 30s, I would
like to present my suggestion for surgical castration as punishment for
rape.
I apologise in advance for any mistakes due to being ill-informed in legal language and procedure as I am not a lawyer.
Important words are underlined for ease of quick reading.
A.
Background:
Sex crimes are an
attack on the sex organs of the victim.
They are also a
permanent scar on the self-image, sense of well-being and emotional health of the victim.
Rapists
are often people with
high sex drive,
desire for domination and
revenge, or people without or with
poor sense of social living. Some are even
clinically diagnosable sociopaths who care for
their own selfish interests only, and have
no brain capacity to
understand the pain of others.
I have
personally talked with many
rape victims in online support chats and discussions,
and I find that
inevitably, the
emotional scarring is permanent -
they experience
flashbacks,
nightmares,
paranoia and
debilitating depression and
panic attacks.
Victims develop
serious trust issues because a large percentage of
rapes are by people known to the victims previously.
In
our country, India, the
social pressure to not get raped is huge,
whereas the
social pressure to not rape is not existent at all.
In
several parts of the country, the
ability to rape is considered a sign
of male superiority, and bravado.
Rape is used routinely as a weapon
to subjugate lower class or lower caste women because of the inherent
shame that the woman or victim feels after the event.
With this fear
and shame, the rapist also threatens other women to comply with his
wishes - whatever they may be - economic, social or further rape.
B.
Suggestion #1 :
From my numerous chats with rape victims I can say these things with definite surety:
The lady victim is forced to explain rape as a crime to male police officers.
The lady victim is forced to repeat her story to multiple male officers and medical personnel.
The
male police officers in question are not often polite, understanding,
or capable of providing emotional support to the rape victim. Even in
USA, Canada and Europe, many women victims have been greeted with
replies like the following when they go to report a rape:
- Dont tell me you did not enjoy it while it was going on
- You should have called for help
- You should not walk alone at night
- You must have said something insulting and so they raped you
- You should have carried a weapon and used it
- You are fat and ugly, so it is not possible that anyone has raped you
- Are you sure you were not just molested, but actually raped?
- So-and-so is very powerful in our area and so we cannot accept a rape case against him
- Go away, come back when you have evidence that you got raped.
When
such statements are made to a lady rape victim in trauma and shock, it
is nearly impossible to expect her to give a proper report of the rape -
the victim is almost always in tears, broken down, trembling, and
desperate for emotional comfort of some kind.
They
definitely need only women to handle them at that critical time.
Hence I strongly suggest that an
amendment be made
to ensure that
1.1 All rape cases be
handled only by women police constables, inspectors and officers and women investigators
1.2 All rape
laboratory investigations be done only by lady doctors, in laboratories under lady medical officers
1.3 All rape victims be
provided lady lawyers to fight their case.
1.4
If and only if, it is not discriminatory,
lady judges be preferred to hear cases of sexual assault or rape.
1.5
Gentlemen should be allowed to take on any or all of these roles
only in the case that the victim is a male.
C.
Castration as punishment:
The following is suggestion made about 2 years ago by
Sessions Judge Kamini Lau :
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“It
is time that we as a civil society stand up and also think of a law
similar to the one existing in many developed countries providing for
surgical and chemical castrations”.
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I therefore believe -
Castration is a proportional punishment for sex crimes, which are themselves an attack on the sex organs of the victim.
Countries using Chemical Castration to sentence people convicted of sexual crimes (namely; rapists and pedophiles):
United States
· California [1]
· Florida [2]
· Georgia
· Iowa [3]
· Louisiana [4]
· Montana
· Oregon,
· Texas and
· Wisconsin [5]
Europe [5]
· Germany [6]
· Portugal [7]
· Poland [8]
· UK [9]
· Moldova [10]
· Estonia [11];
· Israel [12]
· Australia [13]
· Argentina [14]
· New Zealand [15]
· South Korea [16]
· Russia [17]
D.
Suggestion #2:
My personal opinions
against chemical castration and
supporting physical / surgical castration are as follows:-
(1)
The
law against rapists could be made
even more loose by corrupt legislators by removing imprisonment and adding only chemical castration - this will be the opposite effect of what we want.
(2)
Chemical castration is reversible and in the ground reality of this corrupt system, might not even be implemented correctly at all -
improper / diluted chemicals,
fake / doctored injections,
fake / doctored test results, etc, producing a situation of -zero- punishment for rapists.
Hence, I strongly suggest that
physical / surgical castration be used instead.
Because not only is it a permanent scar, but it also
shifts the burden of shame to the (mostly male)
attacker.
The
difference in effect produced by physical castration and chemical
castration is quite dramatic - and it will be a fitting scar on the
attacker, just as rape is a permanent shame and scar on the female
victim.
Imagine, for example, how would
a rapist, who has been castrated and set free immediately, face the world -
1. the men he did business with, his social circle, maybe his criminal circle -
he will face the same shame that the victim faces.
2. His
love life being destroyed the same way the victim's is, he will have
full understanding of the consequences of sexual assault.
3. His
chief motivator for crime - his sex drive and his male ego - will be crushed as it is not existent any more.
4. He
dare not eve-tease another woman because the woman can taunt him back.
5. He
dare not plot a revenge sexual assault with another man because he cannot perform a sex act, nor will the accomplice agree because of the
fear of getting into the same position as the castrated attacker.
6. Because
physical / surgical castration is immediate and much easier to verify, circumventing it by
bribery, complicity, collusion and covering it up is extremely difficult.
7.
Rape of males by males is also common and even in such cases, physical / surgical castration is a fitting and appropriate punishment.
8. In several rape cases, the
attacker is not a routine sexual attacker, but he makes
one very serious error in judgement, maybe in a
drunk state, and that results in rape, which
he regrets later on.
For such cases,
chemical castration might be more appropriate - as it does not permanently destroy the attacker, but gives him enough opportunity to change his thoughts and values.
However, there is
no way to determine in each case, whether the attacker was the one-off type or a repeat offender.
In my opinion, even in these cases, physical /
surgical castration acts as a strong deterrent as the man fears for loss of his manhood - even in drunken state, that fear should hold.
9.
Long jail sentences often make men worse than they were when they went in.
Not to mention the unreported assaults and crimes that occur inside the
jail itself - they are numerous and hidden due to absence of legal help
or proof to the inmates.
In summary, my opinion is :
1. All rape cases where victims are women must be handled by women police officers, women doctors, and women lawyers.
2. physical castration can be a strong deterrent as well as an appropriate punishment.
I thank you for reading through my suggestions.
I also thank you once again for providing a way for ordinary citizens to contact you directly.
Respect and Regards,
MS.
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References:
[1]
The first U.S. state to specify the use of
chemical castration as a punishment for child molestation, following the passage of a
modification to Section 645 of the California penal code in 1996.[13][14] .This law stipulates that
anyone convicted of child molestation with a minor under 13 years of age may be
treated with Depo Provera (Chemical Castration) if they are on parole and it is their second offense and that
offenders may not reject the treatment.[13][14][15][16]
[4]
On June 25, 2008, following a Supreme Court
ruling (Kennedy Vs. Louisiana) that the execution of child rapists where the
victim was not killed was unconstitutional,[18] Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed Senate Bill 144,
allowing Louisiana judges to sentence convicted rapists to chemical castration.[4][19][20]
[5]
The drug cyproterone acetate has
been commonly used for chemical castration throughout Europe. It is similar to
the drug MPA used in America.[5]
[9]
On April 30, 2010, a man in the United Kingdom found guilty of attempting
to murder a 60-year-old woman in order to abduct and rape her two
granddaughters, agreed to undergo chemical castration as part of the terms of
his sentence.[29]
[10]
On March 6, 2012, Moldova passed legislation for forcible
chemical castration of child molesters. The law came into effect on July 1,
2012.[30]
[11]
On June 5, 2012, Estonia passed a law to allow forced
chemical castration of sex offenders.[31]
[12]
In May 2009, two brothers from Haifa,
convicted child molesters, agreed to undergo chemical castration to avoid
committing further crimes.[32]
[13]
In 2010, a repeat child sex offender who
had been subject to chemical castration inappropriately touched and kissed a
young girl. He was found not guilty by a jury, which was not informed of the
context of his previous offences.[33]
[14]
In March 2010, Mendoza,
a province in Argentina, approved a new law which allows
rapists to voluntarily undergo chemical castration therapy in return for
reduced sentences.[34]
[15]
In New Zealand, the antilibidinal drug cyproterone acetate is
sold under the name Androcur. In November
2000 convicted paedophile Robert
Jason Dittmer attacked a victim while on the drug. In 2009 a study into the
effectiveness of the drug by Dr David Wales for the Corrections Department
found that no research had been conducted in New Zealand into the effectiveness
and such trials were ethically and practically very difficult to carry
out.[35]
[16]
In July 2011, South Korea enacted a law
allowing judges the power to sentence sex offenders who have attacked children
under the age of 16 to chemical castration.[36] On May 23, 2012, a repeat
sexual offender known only as Park was sentenced to this treatment after his
most recent attempted offence.
[17]
In October 2011, Russia parliament approved
a law allowing chemical castration for those convicted sex offenders who have
attacked children under the age of 14, as decided through a court-requested
forensic psychiatrist.[37]
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