Hold Your Story
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HOLD YOUR STORY HOLD YOUR STORY REFLECTIONS ON THE NEWS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN INDIA Edited by Chindu Sreedharan, Einar Thorsen and Asavari Singh Hold your story: reflections on the news of sexual violence in India Edited by Chindu Sreedharan, Einar Thorsen, and Asavari Singh For enquiries, please contact Chindu Sreedharan Email: [email protected] First published by the Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion & Social Justice, Bournemouth University https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/centre-study- conflict-emotion-social-justice ISBN: 978-1-910042-28-1 [print/softcover] ISBN: 978-1-910042-29-8 [ebook-PDF] ISBN: 978-1-910042-30-4 [ebook-epub] BIC Subject Classification Codes: GTC / JFD / KNT/ 1FKA /JFFE2 CC-BY 4.0 Chindu Sreedharan, Einar Thorsen, and Asavari Singh Individual chapters CC-BY 4.0 Contributors Cover design: Create Cluster Editoral coordinator: Shivani Agarwal Printed in India CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Foreword 1 Ammu Joseph Introduction 6 Chindu Sreedharan, Einar Thorsen, and Asavari Singh PART I MEDIA ETHICS AND RESPONSIBILITIES 1. The recipe for irresponsible coverage 17 Sourya Reddy 2. Just ‘facts’ are not enough 24 Tejaswini Srihari 3. When numbers become ‘just’ numbers 30 Anunaya Rajhans 4. What journalists owe survivors 36 ‘Anitha’, interviewed by Tasmin Kurien 5. Towards undoing silences 46 Urvashi Butalia, interviewed by Sanya Chandra, Maanya Saran, Biplob K Das, and Yamini Krishnan 6. An ethos of fearlessness 52 Nisha Susan, interviewed by Meghna Anand 7. A lack of knowledge mars LGBTQ+ reporting 57 Bindumadhav Khire, interviewed by Pranati Narayan Visweswaran 8. Journalists need more subject expertise 62 Jagadeesh Narayana Reddy, interviewed by Spurthi Venkatesh 9. How news impacts victims 68 Beulah Shekhar, interviewed by Harikesh P 10. The media are failing children 74 Megha Bhatia, interviewed by Saumya Agrawal PART II LANGUAGE AND REPRESENTATION 11. Real-ising rape 83 Saumava Mitra 12. பா#யl + சmபவm ≠ rape 94 Pranati Narayan Visweswaran and Ankita Mathur 13. The paradoxical language of rape in a Hindi 101 newspaper Saumya Agrawal 14. The creation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ victims 104 Pradyumna Pappu 15. Sympathising with the rapist 107 Aarathi Ganesan 16. Names and faces matter 112 Shahina Nafeesa, interviewed by Spurthi Venkatesh PART III BEHIND THE HEADLINES 17. The flipside of ‘sensationalism’ 117 Padmaja Joshi, interviewed by Aakanksha Singh 18. Taking a stand on the Kerala nun case 122 Korah Abraham, interviewed by Tasmin Kurien 19. Decoding the coverage of the Hyderabad 128 gang-rape Asavari Singh 20. How the Nirbhaya case changed India 138 Arkadev Ghoshal 21. When gender blinded the media to (an alleged) 142 rape Simran Singh 22. Digital platforms can amplify survivors’ voices 148 Bharat Nayak, interviewed by Saumya Agrawal 23. The good, the bad, and the ugly of social media 152 Yeshaswini Srihari 24. The anatomy of a ‘high-profile’ rape case 157 Karuna Banerjee 25. The rapes on Page 9 162 Saumya Agrawal PART IV CULTURE, SOCIETY, AND JUSTICE 26. ‘Safety’ and other oppressions 167 Madhavi Menon, interviewed by Zinnia Sengupta 27. Gender violence through the lens of economics 179 Lekha Chakraborty, interviewed by Ananya Gouthi 28. How journalists can take #MeToo forward 186 Sandhya Menon, interviewed by Sanjana Thandaveswaran and Sharin D’Souza 29. The silence of men 200 Anunaya Rajhans 30. Telling the stories no one else will 206 Rachana Mudraboyina, interviewed by Manisha Koppala 31. The missing ‘whys’ 210 Insia Dariwala, interviewed by Shreya Gautam 32. Capital punishment: The death of a debate 216 Sukanya Sriraman 33. Reforming the discourse on justice 221 Pranati Narayan Visweswaran PART V THE ‘OTHER’ INDIA 34. Curing a blind spot 229 Soni Sangwan, interviewed by Simran Singh 35. How the news media normalise rape in rural 233 India Shreya Gautam 36. Helping survivors speak up, from the grassroots 237 Meghana G S Contributors 241 About the editors 245 Notes 247 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book was made possible by the efforts of several colleagues from a number of institutions in India who came together to help publish NewsTracker (www.newstracker. maar.in), a single-issue web site that formed part of the MAAR project (www.maar.in). We wish to thank the following people and institutions for their time and efforts: Professor Vaiju Naravane, Professor Hariharan Krishnan, and Tisha Srivastav of Ashoka University, Sonepat (the co- publisher of NewsTracker); Anna Thomas and Dr Farman Ali of Docfort Meducation, Bengaluru; Professor Anita Patankar, Dr Shweta Deshpande, and Ananya Dutta of the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune; Vidhanshu Kumar of Amity School of Communication, Noida; Professor Padma Rani and Anupa Lewis of the Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal; Dr Parinitha Shinde and Arkadev Ghoshal of St. Joseph’s College, Bengaluru; Professor Anjali Monteiro, Professor K P Jayasankar, and Nithila Kanagasabai of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences; and Professor Gopalan Ravindran of the University of Madras, Chennai. We wish to thank our colleagues at UNESCO New Delhi, for all their support and encouragement. Our thanks also to the many, many journalists — friends, former colleagues, and well-wishers — whose kindness we drew on for this project. And finally, our gratitude to the Global Challenges Research Fund for providing the funding that made the MAAR project possible. CS, ET, AS FOREWORD AMMU JOSEPH would not be exaggerating too much if I said Hold Your I Story is a dream come true for me, after nearly four decades of engagement with its subject matter. In a 2014 article on reporting rape I had called attention to the “urgent need to step up and institutionalise ongoing efforts to improve media coverage of sexual violence”. I believe this book could catalyse the process of mainstreaming a critical concern that has for too long remained a niche preoccupation. For me, and many in my generation, the ‘Mathura rape case’ — or, more accurately, the strongly worded open letter to the Chief Justice of India written by four professors of law in 1979, criticising the Supreme Court’s infamous judgment in the case (Tukaram vs. State of Maharashtra) — was a call to arms. As young journalists then, we participated in public demonstrations, helped organise public meetings, and tried to create more public awareness through our professional work. I was Assistant Editor of Eve’s Weekly, a leading women’s magazine of the time, in the early days of that initial campaign against rape. The International Women’s Day 1980 2 | HOLD YOUR STORY edition included a special supplement flagged on the cover with a banner that declared, “It’s time we looked rape in the face”. Leafing through that issue now, I cringe at many of the illustrations — visual representations of the kind I and many others have been criticising for more than a few years. However, I note with some satisfaction that we were probably the first in the popular press to publish articles on rape as a means of social oppression (based on caste, class, religion, etc.) and rape within marriage. I am also chuffed to be reminded that we had reproduced the script of a one-act play written by two members of what was then known as the Forum Against Rape, and performed at the first-ever public meeting on rape in India, in order to enable anyone anywhere to make use of it and join the ongoing campaign, which eventually led to the first set of changes in the law relating to rape in 1983. I recall sessions on the media during the first two National Conferences of Women’s Movements, held in Mumbai in 1980 and 1985, with journalists and activists sharing perspectives (often arguing, of course!) about what can be done to improve media coverage of rape and other concerns. Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues, first published in 1994, included a detailed analysis of the coverage of rape (among other issues) in the press in English and four Indian languages between 1979 and 1988. By the time the second edition was published in 2006, the media in India had undergone a sea change; the new Introduction was titled, “The Media and Gender in the Age of Globalisation”! Revisiting media coverage of sexual violence in the new millennium to update the (then) new edition, Kalpana Sharma and I found that it was “something of a mixed bag, ranging from the serious, concerned and gender-sensitive Foreword | 3 through glib, superficial and celebrity-oriented to sensational, irresponsible and intrusive”. That assessment is still more or less applicable today, nearly 15 years later, although heightened competition in the burgeoning news media space has added new dimensions to the coverage. Privately owned Indian television news channels — with their characteristic high-pitched reporting and confrontational panel discussions that invariably generate more heat than light — now play a dominant role in setting the public agenda. So does social media, with predictably polarised “debates” making it increasingly difficult to have thoughtful, nuanced dialogues. The double whammy has, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, had an impact on the style and substance of news coverage in sections of the print media as well. The status quo persists despite the fact that considerable work has been done over the years to change the situation — at many levels, in different parts of the country, by various individuals (including journalists), collectives, and organisations. In the early 2000s, when I was teaching a course on Covering Gender at a journalism school, reporting on gender and sexual violence was the first of the four modules I included in the syllabus. It appeared to be a logical starting point since students related easily to the subject; it also seemed to make sense to promote awareness and encourage critical thinking among young would-be journalists.