Monsters or men? Woman who interviewed 100 rapists in India said they had ‘power to make you feel sorry for them’
‘In my experience a lot of these men don’t realise that what they’ve done is rape. They don’t understand what consent is’
In India, many consider them “monsters”.
Madhumita Pandey was only 22 when she first went to Tihar Jail in New Delhi to meet and interview convicted rapists in India. Over the past three years, she has interviewed 100 of them for her doctoral thesis at the criminology department of Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom.
It all started in 2013, first as a pilot project, months after the highly publicised gang rape and murder of a woman now known as “Nirbhaya” meaning “Fearless One”.
Nirbhaya brought thousands of Indians to the streets to protest the widespread culture of rape and violence against women in 2012.
That year, gender specialists ranked India the worst place among G20 countries to be a woman, worse even than Saudi Arabia where women have to live under the supervision of a male guardian.