When Rituparna Bhowmic contracted COVID-19 last April, she turned to teleconsulting with doctors and practising prone-positioning to manage her illness. Even when her oxygen level dropped, the software company employee resisted going to the hospital.
“I knew people might call me an idiot for risking my life even when I had access to the best of the hospitals in the city,” says the 25-year-old who lives and works in Delhi. “But I didn’t want to venture into a territory that was beyond my control. Nobody is there to take care of you and as an independent woman, the feeling of loneliness had me in panic and (was compounded) by with the news items that said women were molested, sexually assaulted, and even raped by hospital staff.”
Indeed, media reports indicate that certain circumstances created by the pandemic have made more women in India vulnerable to sexual violence. According to the reports, as COVID-19 continues its rampage across the country, a growing number of women are being sexually assaulted or raped, some of them despite the fact that they were known to be infected by the virus, and with far too many of the perpetrators turning out to be medical frontliners.
The increasing reports of sexual assault of women are nothing new, but they have reached more deplorable levels as even patients as young as 17 years old to women in their 60s have reported being raped or molested by no less than the frontliners themselves. (Photo for illustrative purposes only.)
For example, in Delhi, a 25-year-old working in Deen Dayal Hospital who tested positive for COVID-19 alleged that a doctor attempted to rape her in the hospital’s isolation ward. A doctor also tried to rape a minor female patient being treated for COVID-19 at the Padampura COVID Center, run by the Municipal Corporation in Aurangabad; the girl was rescued by the staff who heard her loud cries. In Rajasthan’s Jaipur, a 25-year-old nurse was allegedly raped by a male colleague in a private hospital.
A ward boy in a hospital in Gwalior meanwhile allegedly tried to rape a COVID-19 female patient. In Maharashtra, a 17-year-old girl said that she was sexually assaulted in a quarantine center, while in Gujarat, a 60-year-old woman alleged that she was raped in a COVID hospital. In Kerala, a driver was supposedly the culprit in the rape of a COVID-19 patient inside the ambulance. A driver of a private ambulance also allegedly attempted to rape a COVID-19 patient at a government hospital in Karnataka. And a 14-year-old girl in a COVID-19 quarantine center in India’s capital Delhi was allegedly sexually assaulted by another patient within the facility
Danger in every corner
Women have not been safe in their homes or in the streets either, with lockdowns offering criminals the luxury of having few or no witnesses. In Odisha, a female minor was allegedly gang-raped by police personnel at gunpoint in the state capital during the lockdown there. In Assam, a woman who had just recovered from COVID-19 was raped on her walk home. A teenage girl in Bihar was allegedly gang-raped by two men who lured her to a deserted house with the promise of a vaccine.
In Madhya Pradesh, a visually-impaired banker was allegedly raped by a still unidentified person in her flat during the lockdown, while other perpetrators in similar crimes have turned out to be relatives of the victims. A girl living in Madhya Pradesh, for instance, has claimed that she was raped by her father twice during the lockdown while her mother watched in silence. In Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam, a father allegedly raped his minor daughter repeatedly and impregnated her.
“Situations such as the COVID pandemic that puts different people under close proximity, surrounding situations of power struggle, have always meant the worst for those who are by virtue of our social conditions vulnerable,” observes student activist Neha of Ambedkar University Delhi. “Situations of war or any form of armed conflict have obviously had a long history of sexual violence. But situations like the pandemic, where one so starkly realizes one’s position in a larger machine of institutional exploitation, also mean that the vulnerable section of the society — and if we are talking about the pandemic and closed space of a household in lockdown, that would be women and children — are under great threat.”
“Ever since the outbreak of COVID-19, several reports have shown that violence against women and girls has intensified,” admits Rekha Sharma, head of the National Commission of Women (NCW). “The pandemic has already been testing us in several ways, but one of the darkest features of COVID-19 has been showing mirror to the society.”
According to Sharma, incidents such as the assaults in hospitals “reflect the status of women in our society, where she is unsafe even in the midst of a global health crisis.”
She says that NCW has taken action on several of these cases, however. Narrates Sharma: “Some of the suo motu cases taken by NCW include cognizance of an alleged gang rape of a COVID-19 patient at a private hospital in Patna in May this year. The Commission had written to Chief Secretary and Director General of Police, Bihar for immediate intervention and registering an FIR (Freedom of Information Report) against the accused. In April 2021 NCW took cognizance in the case of a 60-year-old woman who was allegedly raped at Rajkot COVID Center in Gujarat. The Commission had taken up the matter with DGP, Gujarat police. Last year in October, NCW took cognizance of a 21-year-old patient’s allegations of being raped while on ventilator in a private hospital in Gurugram. The Commission had also directed the hospital administration to take action in the matter.”
Alarming numbers
For sure, even before the pandemic began last year, statistics on crimes against women had already been alarming. Government data showed that a girl was getting raped in India every 20 minutes. National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics also revealed that 32,033 rape cases were reported in 2019, which translated to 88 rape cases a day, while overall there were 405,861 cases of crime against women, or 7% more than the 2018 figure.
This year, data released by the Delhi Police covering January up to June 15 show that the national capital alone had 833 reported rape cases. More telling is that reported crimes against women in Delhi increased by 63.3% in the first six months of 2021 as compared to last year.
And yet far more crimes against women actually go unreported. When the online publication Mint did a combined analysis of the data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2015-16 on actual experiences of crime victims and that of crimes recorded by the police, and the ones compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), it concluded that an estimated 99.1% of cases of sexual violence cases are not reported in India.
In large part, this is because survivors of sexual violence — and even their families — are often shamed and subjected to social and mental abuse. A rape survivor’s daughter in Bihar recounts, “Everybody in the locality knows my mother was raped. They gossip about us. They say my mother ‘wanted it’ as her husband has passed away a few years ago. Life has become hell.”
A Bihar doctor also tried to defend his hospital staff who were accused of rape of a COVID-19 patient by saying the woman was not that beautiful to be raped. Says Nivedita Jha, working president of the women’s group Bihar Mahila Samaj: “Such comments are utterly shameful and anti-women. Should it mean that only beautiful women are raped? Such comments are deeply patriarchal.”
“A systemic ‘rape culture’”
Jha says as well that in most cases of crimes against women, the police are slow to act. This was what happened in the Bihar hospital case, where the rape victim eventually died, she says, adding, “Even after such serious allegations, why did not the police act immediately? Neither did the police take a statement from the victim nor was the post-mortem done. It could have helped establish the case better.”
But the police’s attitude would probably not surprise Ritika, Associate Editor at Feminism in India, a leading website that discusses women’s issues and intersectional feminism as a priority. She says, “Women are not seen as an individual but as an object or possession for men. And that is the reason why India has a systematic ‘rape culture’ with a huge number of unreported cases.”
Violence against women seems to have intensified during the pandemic. In some health care situations, the power hierarchy between physician and patient has never been more imbalanced; and it seems even some female doctors and nurses are not spared from sexual assault from their male colleagues. (Photo used for illustrative purposes only.)
In truth, there are several laws in the country meant to protect women and their rights, such as the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act; the Dowry Prohibition Act; Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act; the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act; Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act; and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act. Punishment in these laws ranges from meager fines to imprisonment, to capital punishment. Notably, though, the conviction rate in crimes against women in India is a mere 23.7%, based on NCRB data.
Unfortunately, this is a situation that can be seen not only in India, but also in other parts of the world. Points out Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization: “Violence against women is endemic in every country and culture, causing harm to millions of women and their families, and has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. But unlike COVID-19, violence against women cannot be stopped with a vaccine.”
“We can only fight it,” he says, “with deep-rooted and sustained efforts — by governments, communities and individuals — to change harmful attitudes, improve access to opportunities and services for women and girls, and foster healthy and mutually respectful relationships.”●
Rohin Kumar is a roving reporter attempting to chronicle humanitarian crises. His areas of interest are environmental justice and human rights. His book on the Kashmir conflict, Lal Chowk, is set to hit stands soon.
