A Documentary of Thoughts

For all I can say, the BBC4 Documentary by Leslee Udwin was completely over the top, completely left me cold and flat. But the choice to watch or not was mine. The comments or problems occurred such as, “tourism is affected”, “a situation of tension and fear among women in society is created”, and then documentary was banned by the government. Banning the documentary was not the solution. It was like covering mindsets and crime again.

Despite tougher laws, there is a 69% increase over the past decade in crimes against women including molestation, rape, and domestic violence. We need to ask how and why 44% college students in modern India responded to a recent survey by agreeing that women have ‘no choice’ but to accept a certain degree of violence. We need to understand why our sex ratio in the 0-6 year old age group is the lowest in six decades. These are facts that shame any civilized society. But how do we even begin to start dismantling these horrific statistics unless we first try and understand the culture that allows them to thrive?

Protests on streets, signature campaigns, and changing the law, that was the easy part. But as anyone who grapples with patriarchy knows, changing the mindsets is far, far harder. To change the mindset it is important to know the mindset. That is why one needs to watch Udwin’s film. The one-hour long film reportedly includes a nine-minute interview with one of the rapists and interviews with two defence lawyers. This is a documentary of thoughts of a criminal, two government officials who were fighting the case and some people.

There were equally reprehensible statements made by lawyers and criminals. In the days following the December protests we’ve heard some astounding comments from a variety of politicians, university heads, religious cult figures, police chiefs, and other people. Each statement brings with it a torrent of protest on social media and elsewhere. And the statements made in the documentary fit part of that pattern.

There are interesting and valid questions being raised in the debate on Udwin’s film. But none of these should detract from the main crux of the debate, which is tackling misogyny and ending a culture of rape. The main crux is that there is a certain mindset that allows violence against women to flourish with impunity. Those whose national pride is wounded by the fact of a foreigner claiming to make a documentary that exposes an ugly truth might want to consider that the fight against patriarchy is a global fight that knows no borders.

Violence against women is the conversation across the world from North Kivu to Washington DC. In June last year, 1,700 delegates from 123 countries met to discuss how to end sexual violence in conflict in the US; the government is cracking down on an apparent epidemic of campus sexual assault. Everywhere, women and men like us are saying ‘Enough’. We lit a fire in December 2012. We started a conversation. Every bit that adds to that conversation, every scrap that leads us to think, every effort to end violence should be welcomed, not banned.