The fear of conviction deters sexual violence

In our experience of working with thousands of survivors of sexual abuse over the last decade in Madhya Pradesh, we have realised that the only way to prevent a crime of sexual violence against children or women is through faster convictions.

On February 11, 2019, a local court in Sikar, Rajasthan sentenced a 28-year-old man to life imprisonment for raping a four-year-old girl. This was among the most expedited convictions in a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) case where the accused was held guilty within 12 days of filing the First Information Report (FIR).

In my experience of working with survivors of sexual abuse in Madhya Pradesh (MP), I realised that the only way to prevent sexual violence against children and women is through swift convictions and by ensuring that the maximum number of sexual offenders get punished.

Sexual violence against women and children remains one of the most pervasive human rights violations. In 2016, the number of reported cases of crimes against women in MP was 26,604; for children, the number stood at 13,746. Most victims do not report cases of abuse due to fear and a general lack of trust in authorities.

The solution is rooted in the psychological concept of “deterring demand”. The Massachusetts Treatment Centre Rapist Typology, one of the most robust typological systems, uses motivation as a dimension to describe different types of sexual offenders, such as: opportunistic, angry, sexually non-sadistic, sexually sadistic and vindictive, among others. A deeper look into these motivations suggests that a majority of offenders have the intelligence to differentiate between right and wrong. Experts believe that while multiple programmes and interventions can be designed to assist the victim and prosecute the offender, the victims remain mentally scarred throughout their lives. But can deterrence prevent the crime before it’s committed? Deterrence, a theory in behavioural psychology, talks about preventing or controlling actions or behaviour through fear of punishment or retribution. Taking from this theory, we believe that a higher probability of conviction, severity of punishment and public condemnation can actually help deter crimes of this kind.

My experience in MP also showed that capital punishment can lead to underreporting of such cases. It was observed that the fear of death sentences pressures victims to drop their cases. A recent survey by the Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan reveals that out of 150 children and women victims of sexual violence, 95% did not report it to authorities — despite the fact that the reporting rate has gone up in past few years. In cases of community-based prostitution, the community itself pressures the victims to drop the case as offenders — who sometimes are relatives of the child victims — could get the death penalty under the POCSO Act. We learnt that the only way out of this is through fast convictions as it was proved that news about fast convictions and a higher rate of them have proved to deter offenders.

Some of the basics need to considered are: Training of the police officers to file the correct charge sheet, mentioning the POCSO Act in the FIR; sensitising the legal fraternity to ensure faster convictions; supporting survivors through legal aid; better funding and setting up of more POCSO courts to decrease the case-pendency rate across all states.

Ashif Shaikh is convener of Rashatriya Garima Abhiyan and has led campaigns for eradication of the practice of manual scavenging, and empowerment of the Dalits, especially Dalit-Muslims and women

Source: Hindustan Times, 21/02/2019

One Bubble To The Other

Osho was asked why he didn’t write his autobiography. Osho replied: “All autobiographies are egobiographies. It is not the story of the soul. As long as you do not know what soul is, whatever you write is ego-biography.” Writing or speaking about oneself has not been possible for those who have known themselves, because after knowing, the person changes into something so formless that what we call the facts of his life — facts like his date of birth, events, — all dissolve. They cease to have meaning. Once you know your soul, an autobiography is only a dreamlike version of oneself, like writing an account of your dreams. So it is difficult for an awakened person to write. Reducing such an experience to words makes it seem insipid and absurd. A dying Buddha was asked: “Where will you go after death?” He said, “I have been nowhere, so where can I go after death?” The meaning of Buddhahood is nowhereness. One is nowhere, so the question of being somewhere does not arise. If you can be quiet, only breathing remains like the air inside a bubble. When there are no thoughts there is nothing but breathing. So Buddha says, “I was only a bubble. Where was I? A bubble has burst and you are asking where it has gone”. Buddha was right. Everything is like a dream sequence, like the rainbow colours formed on a bubble. The colours die when the bubble bursts.

Source: Economic Times, 21/02/2019

American Sociological Review: Table of Contents

Volume 84 Issue 1, February 2019

Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions Eduardo Bonilla-Silva First Published January 11, 2019; pp. 1–25 Abstract Preview

Articles

A Theory of Racialized Organizations Victor Ray First Published January 25, 2019; pp. 26–53 Abstract Preview

Women in the One Percent: Gender Dynamics in Top Income Positions Jill E. Yavorsky, Lisa A. Keister, Yue Qian, Michael Nau First Published February 8, 2019; pp. 54–81 Abstract Preview

Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett First Published February 1, 2019; pp. 82–114 Abstract Preview

Encultured Biases: The Role of Products in Pathways to Inequality Clayton Childress, Jean-François Nault First Published December 12, 2018; pp. 115–141 Abstract Preview

The Organization of Neglect: Limited Liability Companies and Housing Disinvestment Adam Travis First Published January 25, 2019; pp. 142–170 Abstract Preview

Getting to Know You: Welfare Fraud Investigation and the Appropriation of Social Ties Spencer Headworth First Published January 11, 2019; pp. 171–196 Abstract Preview

What is 'Turkheimer’s laws' in Biology?

This refers to a set of laws regarding the heritability of various behavioural traits and the relative influence of genes and environment on human behaviour. The first Turkheimer law states that all human behavioural traits are heritable. The second law states that the influence of genes on human behaviour is greater than the family environment. The final law argues that a significant number of behavioural traits may be explained neither by genes nor the family environment. Turkheimer’s laws were proposed by American psychologist Eric Turkheimer in his 2000 paper “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean”.

Source: The Hindu, 20/02/2019

The importance of being humane

Opposition parties must make a new anti-torture legislation part of their common programme

Custodial torture is global, old and stubborn. Dismemberment was a method of torture practised with vigour in ancient India, crushing-by-elephant-foot another. The Arthashastra prescribes mental torture through swear-words with or without physical assaults. Death by a thousand cuts was ancient China’s speciality. The Tang Code (652 CE) describes judicial torture in detail. Ancient Japanese methods of torture numb the human imagination. Their modern avatar in Japan’s World War II of biological and chemical experimentation on humans — prisoners, mainly Chinese — in Unit 731 stop the blood-flow to one’s heart.

Cautioned by history

So, does that mean sadism is an inherent part of human nature? It certainly shows that the inflicting of pain is an inseparable part of human history. More specifically, the history of power, of authority and control.

The practice of custodial power is about men — and sometimes, women — who are in positions of power, even if for a brief while and over a limited terrain, having custody over a powerless person. It is about the use of custodial opportunity to torture the captive’s body and mind. And there, in that arena of wantonness, it becomes something of a sport for the human “Gods” that rule mere humans. “They kill us for their sport,” Shakespeare said of “the Gods”.

Custodial death, when not ‘natural’, is the extreme end-point of custodial torture. The death penalty, notwithstanding ‘due process’, is a close kin to this lawless and heartless game.

In Greece, the pinnacle of culture, Socrates was in 399 BCE sentenced to death by hemlock, which was known to act slowly, incapacitating the person in stages, climbing from the lower extremities limb by limb to the heart. A little further to the east, around 30 CE took place what is ironically the only hallowed case of plain torture. After being stripped and scourged, the victim’s palms, known in anatomy to be among the most sensitive of human limbs, were nailed to the cross’s horizontal beam, his feet to the vertical. “I thirst,” Mary’s son said.

Torturers are invariably sadists. Mary Surratt is not a well-known name. She was the first woman to be hanged in the U.S., in 1865, under due process. Her crime: being part of the conspiracy that led to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Minutes before her end, she complained to the hangman that her handcuffs hurt. They won’t hurt long, he said. Peering down the ‘drop’, she then said she hoped they would send her down neatly. Sure thing, they said. Sure enough they botched it. Her frame doubled up. “She makes a good bow,” the hangmen jested. Lincoln must have screamed in his grave.

Hitler’s torturing of his prisoners would shame Satan, if such a creature exists. He was as real as his poison gases, tooth-extractors. Stalin’s, Pol Pot’s, ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s examples would have embarrassed Hell, if such a place exists. The power-centres of these tyrants were hellishly real.

Apartheid South Africa had its torturers trained in Algeria to inflict pain without leaving any signs on the body. Imam Haron, Steve Biko and the Naidoo family are among the better known of the many less known and unknown brutalised by the apartheid regime.

The butchering last October of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi tells us custodial torture and killing are no country’s, creed’s or culture’s monopoly. Nor that of any clime-time. Torture seems to be, like the roach, co-terminus with Time. And co-extensive with homo sapiens.

Custodial torture is about the here and now. As I write and the reader reads this, we can be sure that not far from wherever we are, someone is being tortured by somebody. I am not referring to criminals torturing their captives, but of that somebody who has ephemeral custody, semi-legal, pre-legal, legal, over that someone’s body and mind.

India has practised and continues to practise the ‘third degree’ with impunity. Let only him deny it who has cause to hide it.

But if torture is real, human revulsion with torture is also real. And it has shape, definition. It has scope.

Meeting on December 10, 1984, the UN General Assembly stirred the world’s conscience. It adopted the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Better known as the UN Convention against Torture, it sought to prevent torture around the world. More specifically, it “required states to take effective measures to prevent torture and forbade them from transporting people to any country where there is reason to believe they will be tortured (refoulement)”. Most significantly, the Convention made state parties to undertake that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” will be “invoked to justify torture, including war, threat of war, internal political instability, public emergency, terrorist acts, violent crime, or any form of armed conflict”.

In other words, it foresaw every possible subterfuge and subversion by states.

The Indian case

India took 13 years to sign the Convention, but sign it did, on October 14, 1997, during the 11-month-old Prime Ministership of I.K. Gujral. Hat’s off to him. He did what Rajiv Gandhi, V.P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar, P.V. Narasimha Rao, H.D. Deve Gowda could not, did not, do. But signing is only the first step. Unless a convention is ratified and followed or preceded by domestic legislation that commits the ratifying party to compliance, the original signing carries no meaning. India has not ratified.

India’s non-ratification of the Convention is both surprising and dismaying. What is the constraint? A state which signs the Convention has to have a domestic law on the subject to outlaw and prevent custodial torture. Without such a law, there is no meaning to signing the Convention. And so, late as it was, the UPA II government introduced a Prevention of Torture Bill in the Lok Sabha in 2010 and had it passed in 10 days. The bill as passed by the Lok Sabha was referred to a select committee of the Rajya Sabha. The committee gave its report recommending the Bill’s adoption later the same year. Citing National Human Rights Commission figures of reported torture cases, the report said the figures showed custodial torture was rising. It also pointed out that the number of reported cases being only a fraction of actuals, the situation was serious.

But that Bill was unlucky. It lapsed with the dissolution of the 15th Lok Sabha. And was not revived by the 16th, the present Lok Sabha. Ratification of the Convention remains in limbo. Custodial torture remains in position.

In reply to a question (May 11, 2016) whether the government was planning to ratify the Convention, the Minister of State for Home did not answer either in the positive or negative but spoke of amending Sections 330 (voluntarily causing hurt to extort confession) and 331 of the Indian Penal Code. The nature of these amendments has not been delineated and so, almost nine years after the report of the Select Committee and 21 years after signing the Convention, India is yet to legislate a law that will outlaw torture an enable it to ratify the Convention.

What is the constraint? Why is the Indian state unwilling to say, ‘no custodial torture in India’? The answer can only be that the power over a captive’s body and mind is not easily given up.

Waiting for a nudge?

Senior advocate Ashwani Kumar, former MP and Minister, moved a PIL in the Supreme Court in 2016 asking it to get Parliament to move forward in the matter. After a full day’s exclusive hearing in the case, the court has reserved its orders. Can the Supreme Court indeed “nudge” Parliament? It knows best, in its wisdom and experience. This much, however, one can hope: In a matter that concerns ‘life and liberty’, the Supreme Court is the guardian of the Constitution’s guarantees. And when the one being guarded says, ‘I thirst,’ the guardian can only bring to its parched lips the waters of life. Whatever be the outcome of Mr. Kumar’s PIL, it is imperative that the democratic opposition makes the ratification of the Convention and a new anti-torture legislation part of its common programme. The 17th Lok Sabha must take a stand on this matter. It has a choice: to join the civilised world in moving away from ancient barbarism or stay in the dungeons of blinding, benumbing brutality.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and governor

Source: The Hindu, 20/02/2019

Facebook and Google face another costly battle

EU’s view is that free social media is not a public good if its business model hoovers up user data without consent.

For many people, it probably sounds a little rich to hear the European Union (EU) accuse Silicon Valley of being a graveyard of innovation. But that’s where we are in 2019. Regulators are hitting the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. with a flurry of antitrust fines and data-privacy probes, implying that they regard tech billionaires as more John D. Rockefeller than Nikola Tesla.

The endgame, according to Brussels’ top data watchdog, is to make sure new startups aren’t blown out of the water by Big Tech (or gobbled up), which should ultimately benefit consumers by allowing them more choice.

Tackling this so-called “kill zone,” where fledgling tech companies are acquired or copied out of existence by deep-pocketed incumbents, is a prime ambition for European Data Protection Supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli, nicknamed “Mr GDPR” after the data-privacy law. When I met him in Brussels recently, Buttarelli checked off the barriers to entry for a startup: It needs to first outbid the likes of Amazon.com Inc., Facebook and others for engineering talent; then sell its product through an app store probably run by Google or Apple Inc.; and finally compete against big players with established networks and huge cash piles. And even it clears all these hurdles, it’s still vulnerable to being taken out.

There’s a connection between this dominance of Big Tech – which is proven by the decline in venture-capital financing for upstarts, as my colleague Noah Smith has written – and harm to consumers. The EU view is that the “free” price tag of social media and apps is not a public good if it’s underpinned by a business model that hoovers up data from users without consent. And if the profits from that are spent on blocking competition, there’s less chance of a market-based alternative. Google and Facebook rebut this view, insisting that a disruptive rival could unseat them anytime. But regulators have given up waiting for one.

The recipe for fixing things, according to Buttarelli, is threefold. He wants more competition through antitrust enforcement, more data protection through GDPR, and more fairness and transparency for customers from the tech giants themselves.

None of this would destroy Facebook or Google. GDPR is estimated to have inflicted a negative impact of 2 to 3 percent on the two companies’ total ad revenues, according to Bank of America analyst Justin Post. The running total of EU antitrust fines against Google is about 6.7 billion euros ($7.5 billion), while the company’s yearly sales are more than $100 billion. Still, Eric Leandri, co-founder of French search engine Qwant, says he’s confident that recent fines against Google on competition and data-privacy grounds – which the US firm is appealing – will have had a chilling impact.

Defenders of the Silicon Valley faith will grumble about mission creep in Brussels. It’s certainly true that regulators need to be careful not to muddy the waters with inconsistent or unclear regulation. The recent German competition ruling against Facebook uses data privacy as its main argument, but without a prior ruling on GDPR infringement. That’s a potential problem because it’s hard to separate the need to enforce user privacy with the need to safeguard competition. Indeed, both things might be in conflict one day, says Ariel Ezrachi, a competition specialist at Oxford University. Imagine the right to keep your data private under one law alongside the need to share your data in a competitive market under another.

Another thing not covered in Buttarelli’s plan is where investment comes from. It was no surprise when Sweden’s music-streaming giant Spotify Technology SA decided to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange last year. If Europe fails to unify its fragmented capital markets, especially after Brexit, the fruits of Buttarelli’s labour will end up in America regardless.

Source: Hindustan Times, 20/02/2019

A Small Vedic Hymn

The following is a very brief but powerful hymn from the Rig Veda, “Aum Avrikey Ksheshyanta”. Avrikey means the man who is above malice, lie (falsehood) or treachery. In other words, the person who is plain, truthful, simple, straight and pure in his thought and action is ‘avrikey’. He is a person who is without any unnatural and unnecessary turn or twist in his thinking or conduct. Ksheshyanta means the God always resides or stays in the heart of such a man who is Avrikey. A man comes alone into this world. When he leaves this earthly existence, again, he exits alone. However, when God is with him, he enjoys all the benefits of being in a majority, even if he is secluded in this world or the next. Only a wakeful, modest, resolute, consistent, determined and watchful seeker can achieve the status of being ‘Avrikey’. He should strive to be tolerant like a tree and humbler than dust, for this will help him to attune his conduct perfected with the practice of forgiveness. Politeness, forbearance, patience and restraint are the prerequisites to become Avrikey. There should be no disagreement, within and without, in thought, speech or action. Accumulation and assimilation of these virtues takes the devotee on a fast track to liberation. The Vedas, so full of insight, say, “Prehi Prehi pathebhi purvaybhi” — O incessant traveller, you may tread the worldly path with the help of eternal truth”. As an ‘Avrikey’, the evolved person will savour the import of the sweet but powerful Vedic hymn, “Aum Avrikey Ksheshyanta”.

Source: Economic Times, 20/02/2019