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.
“Everyone was thinking the same thing,” said Pandey, who at the time was on the other side of the world, in England, finishing off her master’s.
“Why do these men do what they do? We think of them as monsters, we think no human being could do something like that.”
The protests forced a national conversation about rape, a topic which still carries huge stigma in India. Pandey, who grew up in New Delhi, and saw her city in a new light after the Nirbhaya case, said: “I thought, what prompts these men? What are the circumstances which produce men like this? I thought, ask the source.”
Since then, she has spent weeks talking to rapists in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. Most of the men she met there were uneducated, only a handful had graduated high school. Many were third- or fourth-grade dropouts.
They don’t understand what consent is
“After you speak to [the rapists], it shocks you – these men have the power to make you feel sorry for them,” Pandey said.
“As a woman that’s not how you expect to feel. I would almost forget that these men have been convicted of raping a woman. 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.”
“Then you ask yourself, is it just these men? Or is the vast majority of men?”
In India, social attitudes are highly conservative. Sex education is left out of most school curriculums; legislators feel such topics could “corrupt” youth and offend traditional values.
“Parents won’t even say the words like penis, vagina, rape or sex. If they can’t get over that, how can they educate young boys?” Pandey asked.
In the interviews, many men made excuses or gave justifications for their actions. Many denied rape happened at all.
“There were only three or four who said we are repenting. Others had found a way to put their actions into some justification, neutralise, or blame action onto the victim.”
One case in particular, participant 49, sent Pandey on an unexpected journey.
He expressed remorse for raping a 5-year-old girl.
“He said ‘yes I feel bad, I ruined her life.’ Now she is no longer a virgin, no one would marry her. Then he said, ‘I would accept her, I will marry her when I come out of jail.’”
The response shocked Pandey so much that she felt compelled to find out about the victim. The man had revealed details of the girl’s whereabouts in the interview. When she found the girl’s mother, she learned that the family had not even been told that their daughter’s rapist was in jail.
Pandey hopes to publish her research in the coming months but said she faces hostility for her work. “They think, here comes another feminist. They assume a woman doing research like this will misrepresent men’s ideas. Where do you begin with someone like that?” she said.
