The force of sensitivity

In the Indian Express, Pratiksha Baxi writes about the depressing disconnect between justice to rape survivors and the history of anti-rape laws. While making a case for court proceedings, she also writes about the trauma of publicity, and media representations of sexual violence:

"The trauma is aggravated by publicity, peer pressure and the fear of loss of employment. Hence, counselling must accompany legal assistance. Publicity often produces stigma and the loss of narrative control. Publicity and its pornography, far from doing justice to survivors, re-enacts the trauma literally by reproducing the contents of the complaint or visualising the crime. The logic of publicity is to convert testimony into spectacle, where the ways of looking itself produce pleasure, excitement or entertainment. 

Media representations of sexual violence make sexual violence sexy. Alternatively, tabloid shock and horror fills print and visual columns. Voyeuristic representations of violence act as the pedagogy of rape. Gender, ironically, becomes an instrument for the politics of patriarchy. 

In the aftermath of the Delhi protests, the nature of journalistic practices in relation to representing sexual violence did not really find serious discussion or action (other than the need to blank out the name of the survivor). Nor did the discursive shift in the streets, which resounded with the slogan of "azadi", mean greater dignity for women journalists in their workplaces. Many women journalists who covered the Delhi protests experienced sexism in their workplaces — male dominated studios or offices — as rape stories went to press. Women journalists spoke of sexualised banter about rape in their workplaces as they worked on their stories about resisting sexual violence. It is lacerating that the debates on rape law reform did not infuse new life into the ethics of the profession, its code of conduct or its policies.

After the Delhi Nirbhaya case, many journalists accept that redacting the victim's name is a must. This requirement also has legal force, since revealing the identity of a victim is punishable with up to 2 years jail time. 

But if we took a step further, and asked if details of the sexual assault-- the act itself, the clothes the victim wore, what the scene was-- should at all be revealed in excruciating detail, it stirs a hornet's nest.

Some argue that the Tehelka journalist's email should be publicised for the public to know the gravity of the crime, which the accused Tarun Tejpal tried to underplay by calling it "drunken banter". But as Baxi argues, shouldn't the victim have some say over what she wants revealed to the public? After all, she did courageously report the crime. Also, this is a high profile case, and one that occured in the media's own backyard, so the pitch is shrill, and the analysis scathing. In such a case, anonymity is far from guaranteed. There are blogs with the victim's pictures. Some voyeurs disguised as do-gooders are mass-circulating the journalist's initial complaint to Shoma Chaudhury, without even removing her name. In fact, they have highlighted it in red. Regional newspapers carry her father's name, her friends' names, and guessing from her surname, where she is from. These are not aberrations - a shameful majority of social and mainstream is doing this.

In this environment where privacy is not yet assured, should we not be more careful with the details of the sexual assault? In a media industry this competitive, I can imagine this question creating a huge argument in the newsroom. Cynically, or perhaps realistically, I am aware that few editors will be ready to hold back information for the sake of sensitivity. No journalist loses his/her job for being insensitive. You don't go to jail for being insensitive. It is the journalistic quality that most easily dispensable. 

In the past week, a quote has been haunting me. A few days ago, a friend, a TV reporter, narrated an incident. She covered the Pascal Mazurier case, where a Bangalore-based French diplomat was charged with raping his child. When she asked Ms Mazurier, the mother who filed a complaint against her husband, whether she believed justice would be done, this is what the woman said:

"This man might go to jail, but thanks to Google, my child will never ever forget what happened to her."

The interviewee

When he told me of stories of how he 'fooled' this guy, and 'won over' that man, I often wonder if I am one of those stories to someone else. After some years in reporting, it becomes second nature to tell when a person is lying, or when he/she is pulling at heart strings, or playing to the media pitch. Lying is a part of the game. Almost everyone exaggerates. Justifies. Withholds. Decorates. You learn to glean motives for these actions. Someone more vulnerable, or desperate for help, or in danger, gets a lot of room. A man or woman in a position of authority gets less leeway.

When I can't know for sure, I tell myself this: Stories are stories, aren't they? Listen.

But sometimes, the idea of being subtly manipulated by an interviewee is so strong that I find myself impossibly torn from the actual words, drawing more meaning and motive than is immediately apparent. Like today, when a long anecdote about A Great Escape from Great Danger involved the projection of innocent eyes. The same kind of innocent eyes I've often seen.
I listen with a filter, but do I still understand? I care still, but do I trust?
I doubt, but do I still believe?
Ah, the interviewee must laugh at how the tables have turned.

Separate lives

Tossing and turning in bed, hearing time move on, second by long second, I often try to make lists, hoping that the effort of organising will exhaust me, bore me to a slow slumber. But sometimes, I pick the wrong topics: the places where I have had the best coffees, the movies that defined my idea of love, the clothes I used to have forever but one day disappeared, the number of times they relaid the road to the house I grew up in. These lists kick off an enjoyable reminiscing that drives sleep further away. The most stunningly failed list, however, has been one I've never completed: the list of lost books.

It frustrates me, the (lack of) memory of a book I was stupid, careless, or angry enough to lose. Where must my first, maroon hardbound copy of Heart of Darkness be? Swimming underneath the used book towers at Darya Ganj when I absently put it down to free a hand and fish out the G book in the Sue Grafton series?
(Oooh, what was a 'Gumshoe'!) Untraceable: the Margaret Atwood collection from Eloor library I read way past the due date, and then kept, justifying that they who charged obscenely from even students did not deserve it to be returned, given away by my spring cleaning father along with his Robin Cook paperbacks to his "friend's son". That might be where it went, unless it walked back to the Commercial Street library when my back was turned, infuriated at my disrespect and betrayal.

There is guilt too, guilt and reruns of scenes that are vivid and cruel like nightmares. Of my Alice Munro flying away, from Copenhagen to Dubai, sharing the seat pocket with the safety instructions, as I run like a fugitive on the slippery floors of the airport and beg the amused flight attendant to stop the flight. "I have to get my book back!" I screech. For most of that defeated walk back, I hate Copenhagen and transit stops with a certainty I rarely feel for anything.

Another time, a passenger may have found a more willing book in the seat pocket. A previously half-finished book, misplaced in a house move, searched for and purchased at the airport, read rapidly in the 2.5 hrs from Delhi to Bangalore and left behind accidentally on purpose. With a desired ridding starkly opposite to the seawind-coaxed calm and oneness with the world I experienced leaving the Yeats poetry collection in a Gokarna hotel room, the page folded at The Second Coming, a pencil arrow still drawn at the line "Things fall apart".

The greatest insomnia comes from the frustration of books unreturned. The $1 review copy of Curfewed Night that my husband bought at The Strand in New York, its fourth page saying 'A map of Kashmir will be added here' (or words to that effect) and its author picture a white frame with no portrait: the borrower of this, I cannot recall despite several baseless accusations flung around. The Disgrace that crushed hope and joy from my being for months on end, the fat brick of Suitable Boy that restored it. Snitched physically from my life, they resurface in nightly lists, conjured up with ghostly lives-- some with coffee stains and yellowing and lustful reading, some with dust and cold possession. Their lives remain attached to mine in my most sleepless moments. Perhaps they will leave me alone if I introduced them to my lost umbrellas.