Af Kunda Dixit
Demonstrationer i Kathmandu mod voldtægt og mord på kvinder blev en verdensnyhed takket være en kædereaktion, anført af de nye sociale medier. De kan noget, de traditionelle medier ikke kan.
Domestic violence and the victimisation of women is not new in our male-directed societies, what is new is the degree to which its magnification through social media can spread solidarity, and potentially trigger policy change.
The street demonstrations in Kathmandu against recent rapes and murders of women would probably not have made it to the #2 news on BBC World on Saturday morning if it hadn’t been tagged to the anti-rape protests in Delhi
And that story wouldn’t have been the #1 item if the protests in India hadn’t snowballed due to outraged citizens on social media leading the charge. As the protests grew and continued in India, it fuelled print and TV coverage, and the chain reaction attained critical mass.
In Nepal, protests over the robbery and rape of a 20-year-old woman by immigration and police broke into the public consciousness last month because of the role of journalists and cyber-savvy activists.
Left to the traditional media, the story would probably have died quietly like many other rape stories before. It was a tipping point because the crime involved immigration officials who looted the young woman and a policeman who, instead of protecting her, turned predator.
Pending murders and disappearances of women in Kathmandu, and the cases of two young women who were burnt alive by family members in Banke and Bara at about the same time, added fuel to the fire.
The protests in Kathmandu would possibly have happened anyway, but saturation coverage in the Indian media about the Delhi rape also helped sustain the public’s interest in Nepal.
Forced to marry their rapists
These were not isolated crimes. Rape has always been endemic in Nepal, it’s just that women press charges more often now and the media reports it.
It is also a cross-border phenomenon because we share similar patriarchal value-systems with northern India. At the time this story was breaking in Nepal, a piece by Satrudhan Shah and commissioned by the Centre for Investigative Journalism detailed many cases in the eastern Tarai of victims forced to marry their rapists by the community, police and even gender rights activists.
The story was published in Annapurna Post in Nepali, and as ‘Rape for Ransom‘ in English in Nepali Times.
In July 2011, in a crime not very different than the Delhi case, a young nun was savagely raped by a group of men in a bus in Bhojpur in eastern Nepal. There was some media coverage during the time but nothing on the scale of the nationwide outrage that is happening now.
Why the discrepancy? Did the fact that this incident happened in a remote district have anything to do with it? Is Bhojpur less important than Kathmandu?
Could it be that activists weren’t yet using social media as effectively then to spread their outrage in the nun rape? Have the number of Twitter and Facebook users in Nepal crossed a critical mass in the last one-and-half years?
Or is this a case of what Indian commentator Ajaz Ashraf, while analysing the protests in Delhi, called ‘the privilege of grief‘ and ‘the hierarchy of sorrow’?
Indeed, why did one rape provoke sustained protests outside Baluwatar and Singha Darbar, when thousands of rapes and murders in the past year didn’t?
When rape is not “news”
Every crime cited in Satrudhan Shah’s investigative piece from Mahottari is a misogynist manifestation of male dominance, each of them could be described as ‘heinous’, ‘savage’, ‘brutal’.
But the victims were Dalit or Muslim girls in the poorest districts in Nepal. Traditional media rules define ‘news’ as something that is out of the ordinary, absurd, negative, where a lot of people have to die suddenly and spectacularly, all in one place.
When rape is an everyday occurrence, then it is not out of the ordinary anymore. If the victims are well-to-do, an accident is always more newsworthy, and it is even more so if there are interesting visuals.
Something that happens to lots of poor people, especially women and children, scattered across a remote and poor part of one of the poorest countries in the world doesn’t fit the news paradigm.
And a mainstream media steeped in society’s patriarchal culture reacts to stories of rape much in the same way as the policeman in Mahottari who feels his role is not to detain suspects, but to mediate between powerful political protectors of the rapist and the violated woman’s community by arranging a marriage between the victim and perpetrator.
Cultue of male dominance
The culture of male domination pervades every sphere of Nepali life, exacting its toll mainly on girls and young women.
It manifests itself in the slaughter of unborn daughters through the increasing prevalence of female foeticide. Once they are born, brothers are sometimes fed before sisters, and more likely to be taken to hospital if they are sick, boys are mostly enrolled in private schools while girls go to cheaper government schools.
Child marriage is still common, the female school dropout rate is double that for boys, dowry deaths, bride-burning, acid attacks, ‘honour killings’ by family members’, lack of citizenship in the mother’s name, women tortured for being ‘witches’, domestic violence, harassment at work, are all at epidemic proportions.
Aggression against women, rape and murder are just extreme manifestations of this entrenched culture of domination, discrimination and violence.
Building up solidarity
By its very nature, the media industry is obsessed with the rich, powerful and famous. Its short attention span, its reactive nature makes the mainstream press unable or unwilling to cover the structural socio-cultural roots of gender-based violence.
We are trained to cover events not trends, incidents not processes, breaking news not analysis and interpretation. This is why after the feeding frenzy is over, the media will inevitably move on to another crisis. If the timing is not right and there is a political scandal at the same time, the story of another rape in a faraway district will break, flash briefly, and fade away.
The activists on the streets outside Baluwatar know this, which is why they are pacing themselves for sustained protests, maintaining the energy level and building up solidarity through social media.
Their demands are not just for fast-tracking the investigation and trial in the four iconic cases, but to drive the political will to amend laws and make the bureaucracy and police more accountable. As in India, there is a demand to look holistically at what can be done to reform the mindset of Nepali maledom so that laws are enforced to deter crimes against women.
And if the traditional media will not take up the issues, activists now have blogs, Twitter and the 1.7 million users of Facebook in Nepal to galvanise public opinion.
These crimes happen because of both class and gender-based power differentials. Those in positions of authority use opportunity, impunity and the pervading culture of corruption to prey on the vulnerable. That is why Kathmandu airport has become such a hotbed of crime, and even before the case of Sita Rai there were 3-5 cases every week of women migrant workers robbed or abused by immigration officials and police.
The last place many Dalit or Muslim families go to when their daughters are raped in the Tarai is the police station, and often they can’t even expect a sympathetic hearing from male members of their own families and communities.
Many Nepali girls trafficked to India from the districts around Kathmandu for sexual slavery are sold off by their uncles, brothers or fathers.
Corruption and impunity
Under the doctrine of ‘state obligation’ it should be a sovereign nation’s responsibility to protect citizens and deliver justice. But we can’t hold out much hope given this administration’s track record on corruption and impunity.
The outrage with which Nepal’s political parties reacted to the detention in the UK of army colonel Kumar Lama for torture committed during the conflict shows that justice is very low on the list of priorities for Nepal’s rulers.
Justice is a mirage for war crimes, murders, disappearances, torture and rape committed between 1996 and 2006 because the warring sides are now both in the establishment. But what the rulers don’t realise is that when the state abdicates its role, perpetrators can be apprehended under the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’.
Gender collision
The only sliver of hope is that Nepali society is changing rapidly. Female literacy has doubled in the last 15 years, resulting in the average age of marriage going up, the fertility rate coming down dramatically.
With 30 per cent of young Nepali men working outside the country, women are single-handedly managing households and taking leadership positions in forestry, irrigation, school and health post management committees.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons for the increase in violence against women: literate women are more assertive, while men even if they can read and write, are still steeped in patriarchal entitlement.
What we are seeing in Nepal today is that gender collision.
For the traditional media, it is time for introspection and to ask whether it should remain a mute observer or take on an agenda-setting role. Media should complement social media and citizen journalism to be a force for social change.
But are journalists prepared to make a paradigm shift in coverage by covering processes and not just events? How gender-sensitive are we, how inclusive are our newsrooms, are we going beyond the event to dig at the roots of violence, will our coverage lead to social reform, or will it be sensational, superficial and a brief pause before the spotlight moves elsewhere?
Kunda Dixit er en af Nepals førende journalister og redaktører og en international kapacitet, når det gælder asiatiske presseforhold. Han har grundlagt og udgiver Nepali Times (http://nepalitimes.com.np) og er med-udgiver af Himal Magazine. Han har udgivet flere bøger, blandt andre trilogien – A People At War, Never Again og People After War om konflikten i Nepal. Han var Asien-Stillehavs direktør for Inter Press Service (IPS) fra 1990 til 1996 og direktør for Panos Institute South Asia fra 1997 to 2000.
Ovenstående er fra hans blog i Nepali Times, ”eastwest with Kunda Dixit”, som han har stillet til rådighed for U-landsnyt.dk.
