India witnessed one of its most gruesome rape and murder cases in 2012 when a 22-year-old girl was gang-raped inside a moving bus in Delhi.
The infamous incident’s brutality shook the nation and was later named the 'Nirbhaya ("fearless") case'. As it left people around the world shocked and outraged, a wave of public protest was staged in different parts of India.
The courts later sentenced the culprits to death, but it took almost nine years to execute them.
The protests also laid the foundation of the People Against Rapes in India (PARI) organization which seeks to support rape victims and help them bring their assailants to justice.
In an interview with Sputnik, PARI's founder and well-known anti-rape activist Yogita Bhayana talked about the reasons she launched the organization, steps that have been taken to prevent rape cases, and more.
Bhayana works for victims of domestic violence and marital rape, as well as helping children who suffer sexual abuse.
Sputnik: What motivated you to leave a lucrative aviation job behind and take up the cause of rape victims?
Bhayana: I quit my job in 2007 and started my NGO. However, I was not working with rape victims at that time. I was doing a lot of other social work related to road accident victims and working to understand the health infrastructure, which is so poor even till now. I was very motivated to work on bringing reforms in the health infrastructure.
Since I was working for women also so some cases of rape victims started coming to me. I understood the severity and gravity of the issue after the Nirbhaya case occurred in 2012. I realized that the issue of rape victims needed to be addressed as a top priority.
So, that was the turning point that I quit everything else, and started focusing only on this issue. Other things continued but working for rape victims absorbed 80 percent of my time.
Sputnik: Could you please tell us about your organization – People Against Rapes in India (PARI).
Bhayana: The idea of People Against Rapes in India (PARI) evolved in 2012 while we were protesting to seek justice for 'Nirbhaya' (the name given to the rape victim to hide her identity) at Jantar Mantar, the central protesting place of Delhi.
There were various groups who weren't even familiar with each other at that time. The protest gained huge support as not only Indians but a lot of foreigners also joined it.
A lot of people started fizzling out after the death of Nirbhaya, and only a handful of us were left. But we persisted. During our protest, we were trying to figure out what could be done to stop rapes since we continued hearing rape cases every single day. People started coming to Jantar Mantar seeking support from us and it became our running office.
So, we thought that whatever we were doing was not enough, and we needed to reach out to the victims too and work on prevention of rapes. It was felt that we needed to become an advocacy group, and forming an NGO won’t be that impactful. So, we decided to make it a campaign. Then PARI was launched.
We were trying to understand the issue and trying to push our ideas to the government. At the same time, I was attending many victims and trying to get them every kind of help even from the government.
In order to get medical and judicial help for the victims from the government, I had to be very cordial with the government.
However, the release of the juvenile accused in the Nirbhaya case came as another turning point for me.
I thought of staging a protest outside the jail. I went there and asked a lot of people including Nirbhaya’s mother to join the protest. Initially, she resisted but later she joined. From the moment she arrived, the whole protest became very big and soon thousands of people came on board.
At that time, a parliamentary session was on. During our interaction with the media, we said that we want that law related to rapes, which was in Rajya Sabha (upper house of parliament) for consideration at that time, to be changed.
Within 24 hours of the protest, a lot of politicians - including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then Foreign Affairs Minister late Sushma Swaraj and even politicians of opposition parties including Rahul Gandhi (of Congress party) - called us to meet.
We made the same request to them and within 48 hours we got the amended law passed.
That was another motivation that if we want something to happen, it happens and it just requires remaining united for a cause. From there, we thought of working more aggressively.
So, PARI has been very active. Like, we have been doing public awareness programs, a lot of things on prevention of rapes, and providing every possible help to the rape victims.
Sputnik: Despite punishment in place, we hear about rape cases in India. What needs to be done to stop the sad trend?
Bhayana: Basically it’s a mindset issue and social conditioning that women and children are easy pick and one can take out his sexual frustration. Even boys are not safe in that way.
So, this has gone into the minds of certain segments of society or men, you can say. It has to be taken out. But that will take a longer process.
The immediate discourse is to give them strict punishments so that the main message is loud and clear.
However, unfortunately in our country how do you give a loud and clear message because it took almost nine years to punish Nirbhaya’s culprits? The message will only be clear if the culprits are punished in a time-bound manner.
As I said earlier, that mindset needs to be changed. But sadly, the government is making zero effort towards this.
A lot of NGOs are working but they have limitations. So, I think parallel efforts are needed from the government as well as NGOs. And the government needs to understand that merely changing laws may not transform things.
It is very easy to say “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” (Save and Educate Girl Child, the federal government's popular slogan for young female welfare). But it has to be defined, an action plan has to be made to make it [the intended feeling behind the slogan] a reality.
We have speedy trials and stringent laws but the implementation of those laws is very poor. Implementation is poor because of the lack of infrastructure.
There is a scarcity of Forensic Science Labs (FSL) [as such the] testing of samples of rape victims takes time. Then the case is heard in a lower court which again goes on for years.
So, these are part of the problem. We want that there should be no rape, and efforts should be made to stop such sexual crimes. So, we need to place all the things in the right order.
Sputnik: It is a well-known fact that a lot of victims don’t even report the tragedy out of fear that society will judge them, and not the rapists. Is PARI doing something to help rape victims speak up?
Bhayana: Yes, we do campaigns where we hold separate sessions with boys and girls. We have only one request to all the girls that they should speak up when something like this happens to them.
However, with extreme sadness I would say that we have not received the kind of response we expected. It's because the infrastructure is not present. It is not about legal infrastructure. In a lot of cases, police don’t even attend to the rape victims and don’t file their complaints. So, getting their complaints registered is the toughest task for rape victims.
Despite this, we keep on motivating them that if they are not being heard by the police, they can reach out to us.
Sputnik: Apart from rape victims, you have also worked for road accident victims, taught underprivileged children and even helped elderly people. However, incidents of acid attacks and child abuse are also a big concern in India. Are you also planning to do something for such victims?
Bhayana: I have not worked a lot on acid survivors but I support other groups linked to it.
However, child abuse is very much part of PARI because 90 percent of victims whom I have met are children. So, I have been working very aggressively against child abuse. In fact, if given the choice, I would like to attend a child first because that is where we are specialized.
It is also because such traumatic experiences stay with children for long. They can’t even speak about it and culprits get away because of this.
It is very difficult for a child to move on from such things because in most cases they don’t get proper counseling. Not even a single victim with whom I have been working got a counselor. We do the counseling ourselves. This is a sad situation.
More than women, I always say our kids are not safe and nobody understands the seriousness of it. In most cases, the victim child doesn’t speak and the memories of traumatic experiences remain with them forever.
There are a lot of repercussions to it and I have seen people suffering in their 40s, 50s, and even 80s with these experiences. In one of my personal surveys, out of 400 people, at least 350 were abused in their childhood and they carried the trauma when they were even in their 80s.
Sputnik: What message would you like to give to India's youth so that they can also come forward and contribute to similar social causes?
Bhayana: I just want to tell them that they don’t have to give up their jobs or business to contribute to a social cause. You only have to choose a cause, a purpose and contribute in whichever capacity you can. Helping out even one victim or an underprivileged person will solve the problem.
We all have heard about corporate social responsibility. But I believe in individual social responsibility or youth social esponsibility.