On the face of it, it is easy to see why the proposal to have rape trials heard only by female judges has come into being. Conviction rates in rape cases are low, and the trial itself is in most cases a no-holds-barred inquisition of the victim. The entire judicial process is heavily loaded against the victim. Starting from the immediate aftermath of rape and spanning the investigation, the media attention and the trial, the victim is often exploited at every stage under one pretext or another. It is not helped by the fact that male judges are a product of their own past and are unable to see things from the woman's perspective. There have been enough instances of judicial pronouncements that are shockingly regressive in nature and this move is an attempt to redress that anomaly.
But is this the solution? To isolate women and their problems, to hermetically seal off half the population from the other half in order to provide justice? This is a troubling premise on several grounds. The notion of justice is predicated on its universal standard of presumed impartiality. A judge is not deemed a man, woman, Brahmin, landlord, Punjabi, refugee or Congress sympathiser; at least not when it comes to dispensing justice. Now this may not be an entirely valid premise but it forms the basis of our belief in the judicial system. Take this away and tomorrow only Dalit judges will oversee issues involving Dalits, Christian judges for crimes against missionaries and so on.
In any case, to believe that a woman, by virtue of her gender alone, will automatically rise above historical and rooted gender biases is naïve in underestimating the power of the patriarchal order. There are enough instances of women oppressing other women; there are few dowry deaths that do not involve the complicity or indeed the active participation of women. Ekta Kapoor, accused of proliferating extremely regressive shows, is a woman with an independent mind. It is simplistic in the extreme to confer blanket gender sensitivity on any one gender and condemn the other to frozen insensitivity.
Worse, in an implicit way, it legitimises male biases. It makes rape a problem owned by women instead of being a blot on society. It introduces a notion of ?gender-determined justice wherein men can point to the gender of the judiciary as a factor affecting the ?judicial outcome.
In a larger sense, the urge to solve complex problems by official fiat needs to come under more critical scrutiny. The prevailing tendency is for every societal ill to become a branded cause that attracts its own modular solution without regard to how it affects other constituents of society. Every problem seeks to transform itself into a cause, upon which it strains every sinew to secede from society at large and become an island, off limits for the rest of the world. Special solutions are sought and history is sought to be reversed in a legislative sleight-of-hand. Reservations, bans on all manner of things and now female judges for rape cases are all signs of this need to create partial and accelerated solutions for complex problems.
The trouble with change is that it is a slow and difficult process. People owning causes cannot wait for society as a whole to catch up and seek to hasten the natural process of change with interventions that seek to compress time.
Justice is an idea that works within the boundaries of societal norms; what appears to be an absolute is in fact nothing but a social convention. We have implicitly agreed that kidnapping is a worse crime than illegal abortions which, in turn, is worse than stealing. The truth is that unless society as a whole is ready to accept change, attempts to speed things up through direct intervention can result in a new set of unintended consequences.
Partitioning women from men in the name of enlightened justice could well perpetuate the gender divide in the name of coping with it.
Even as I write this, I wonder if some readers will be sceptical about the views expressed simply because of my gender; after all, what does a man know about these things? Exactly my point.
Source - The Week
But is this the solution? To isolate women and their problems, to hermetically seal off half the population from the other half in order to provide justice? This is a troubling premise on several grounds. The notion of justice is predicated on its universal standard of presumed impartiality. A judge is not deemed a man, woman, Brahmin, landlord, Punjabi, refugee or Congress sympathiser; at least not when it comes to dispensing justice. Now this may not be an entirely valid premise but it forms the basis of our belief in the judicial system. Take this away and tomorrow only Dalit judges will oversee issues involving Dalits, Christian judges for crimes against missionaries and so on.
In any case, to believe that a woman, by virtue of her gender alone, will automatically rise above historical and rooted gender biases is naïve in underestimating the power of the patriarchal order. There are enough instances of women oppressing other women; there are few dowry deaths that do not involve the complicity or indeed the active participation of women. Ekta Kapoor, accused of proliferating extremely regressive shows, is a woman with an independent mind. It is simplistic in the extreme to confer blanket gender sensitivity on any one gender and condemn the other to frozen insensitivity.
Worse, in an implicit way, it legitimises male biases. It makes rape a problem owned by women instead of being a blot on society. It introduces a notion of ?gender-determined justice wherein men can point to the gender of the judiciary as a factor affecting the ?judicial outcome.
In a larger sense, the urge to solve complex problems by official fiat needs to come under more critical scrutiny. The prevailing tendency is for every societal ill to become a branded cause that attracts its own modular solution without regard to how it affects other constituents of society. Every problem seeks to transform itself into a cause, upon which it strains every sinew to secede from society at large and become an island, off limits for the rest of the world. Special solutions are sought and history is sought to be reversed in a legislative sleight-of-hand. Reservations, bans on all manner of things and now female judges for rape cases are all signs of this need to create partial and accelerated solutions for complex problems.
The trouble with change is that it is a slow and difficult process. People owning causes cannot wait for society as a whole to catch up and seek to hasten the natural process of change with interventions that seek to compress time.
Justice is an idea that works within the boundaries of societal norms; what appears to be an absolute is in fact nothing but a social convention. We have implicitly agreed that kidnapping is a worse crime than illegal abortions which, in turn, is worse than stealing. The truth is that unless society as a whole is ready to accept change, attempts to speed things up through direct intervention can result in a new set of unintended consequences.
Partitioning women from men in the name of enlightened justice could well perpetuate the gender divide in the name of coping with it.
Even as I write this, I wonder if some readers will be sceptical about the views expressed simply because of my gender; after all, what does a man know about these things? Exactly my point.
Source - The Week