Victims brutalizing women in the cities

The gang rape of a Mumbai journalist bears eerie resemblance to many other recent gang rapes of young women in the Indian metropolises.

The female journalist had been photographing a particular site for a Mumbai magazine; she was accompanied by a male colleague. As was the case with the gang rape of the physiotherapy student in Delhi late last year, the male colleague was beaten and tied up, while the perps dragged the woman to a nearby area and raped repeatedly.

All of the perps were mid to late teens who lived in what journalist Robert Neuwirth would call (fancifully) "shadow cities," or in plain old English, unauthorized shanties. 

In short they hail from poverty, and sub human living and life-conditions. They are victims of the great Indian poverty which like a ever-expanding juggernaut is rolling on side by side with an economic boom. 

The inequality between the boomtowns and the shantytowns are growing by the hour, as it were. Worse still, the shantytowns too are booming, in a purely physical and numerical, not economic, sense of growth, in the shadows, literally of luxury high rises and obscenely opulent hotels and office buildings. 

In the India of the old economy, the poor used to live in spatially segregated colonies or slums: the "jungles" of poverty, as an Indian saying goes, signifying everything chaotic or poor with the metaphor of the jungle, grew in the outskirts of affluence in a Jagirdari style. This was horrific in and of itself, but the new economy has brought hordes of the "jungle" dwellers smack into the midst of the oases of extravagance.

One theory (mine) is that this spatial yoking of extremely unequal and therefore culturally heterogenous life conditions and peoples is accentuating the victim status of those already victimized by poverty. The young men who resort to gang rape emerge out of shantytowns and take out their anger at the system and whatever apparatus the system is supported by on young women, usually of the educated and the upwardly mobile kind. 

I hate to oversimplify, but it looks like the "janwaars" as Indians would describe men like these--poor, psychically anarchic and sexually voracious and brutal--are living in too much proximity of their economic better halves and venting their wrath through sexual violence on women.

Why not brutalize the system, instead of the women?

Maybe, just maybe, distorted gender relations and patriarchy, aren't the only causes behind this emergent culture of sexual brutality against women in the cities.