[Reader-list] Mumbai: Roundtable discussion on the issues surrounding the marine drive rape crime

[abshi at vsnl.com]

PUKAR Gender & Space project invites you to a discussion on the wider issues around the Marine Drive rape crime
 

Date: 29 April     2005

Time: 6 pm

Venue: PUKAR Office, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Opp Stand Book Stall, Sir. P M Road, Fort, Mumbai 400001. Tel: 5574-8152

 

 

The recent incident of rape at the police chowky at Marine Drive has seen the city and citizens respond with anger and outrage, underlined by the upper class area where the crime took place and the fact that it involved a college girl and the perpetrator was a police constable. The rape and the policeman’s attitude are both a matter of grave concern, as is the insistence of the Mumbai police that this is an isolated incident. 

 

It is disturbing to find that senior police officers have repeatedly called the rapist constable a pervert or perverse suggesting that these crimes are not just an aberration but also the product of an abnormal mind. Furthermore, the excessive focus on the drunken state of the policeman suggests that a sober policeman (or indeed any other sober man) would not commit such a crime. While it is important to focus on drunkenness among the police, this is not the real issue in this rape. 

 

During the last one and a half year that we have been researching women and public space in the city, we have often walked into police stations across the city and found varying reactions from helpfulness to sneers. One question however, was asked over an again “Why should women be out in public space when they had no work there?”

 

It is just this attitude that defines women’s location in private spaces (where statistics on domestic violence have proved time and again that they are NOT safe) which underlies the article in the Samana suggesting that not only do women invite sexual assault through so called provocative clothing but also that they have no business being out in public in the first place. 

 

During an elective course which we taught at an architecture college in the city, in an exercise students were asked to map spaces they perceived to be safe and unsafe. One student mapped an area of marine drive – the space located exactly opposite the police chowky where the rape took place as an unsafe space as it was hidden from the road and was dark and deserted. Our research suggests that the material aspects of city design and planning have an impact of women’s sense of safety and comfort in public spaces. It is important to ask at this point if it may be possible to view public spaces in the city and suggest ways in which they might be made safer. In another assignment, a student re-designed the information-kisok opposite CST station to make it transparent (precisely the move the police is now taking with the police chowky). Is it possible to examine these spaces and enact preventive changes rather than wait for a crime to happen? 

 

It is a source of comfort to find many voices raised against this crime and the demand that the city be made safer for women. Women’s groups have also demanded that the SC ruling which overturned the previous Bombay High Court ruling that a woman could not be arrested after sunset and without the presence of a woman constable be reviewed and changed. They have also asked that a women’s desk be instituted at every police station. These are important issues that we unreservedly support. 

 

We at the Gender & Space project hope to take this discussion beyond safety to take on full frontally the challenge issued by the Samana piece to assert that women, all women, sex workers, bar dancers, spaghetti strap clad, sari clad and burkha clad have the right to access public space as citizens. This is the time to challenge the ideological assumptions about a woman’s proper place that normalize women’s anxieties in relation to public space and at the same time to make a strong claim for women’s right to experience the varied pleasures of the city as flaneurs who may choose to take risks and as individuals who have not just a conditional right to protection but to a fuller and more meaningful citizenship.

 

We would like to invite you to a discussion of the wider issues surrounding this crime, a first of a series of monthly discussions that we plan to institute at the PUKAR Gender & Space Project. 

 

 

Date: 29 April 2005

Time 6 pm

Venue: PUKAR Office, 2nd Floor, Kamanwala Chambers, Opp Stand Book Stall, Sir. P M Road, Fort, Mumbai 400001. Tel: 5574-8152