” …when you’re an outsider, you don’t understand what the judicial system looks like. And that, to me, is where justice actually fails because you’ve created this whole barrier of people and systems between access to justice and the common person, and that is a failure of the justice process, but it’s also one of the reasons the concept of justice becomes so elusive, because instead of seeing justice as a tangible thing, as a tangible entity in our everyday life, we’re seeing it as something that is vested and situated only within courtrooms, only within the judicial system or in a police station.”
— Vandita Morarka, co-host of the In Search of Justice podcast, reflects on the inaccessibility of the judicial system in this episode.
The word ‘justice’ abounds in our daily lives. We want to achieve social justice, and to advocate for a world that is a just place for marginalized communities. In her book, ‘Are Prisons Obsolete?’ Angela Davis writes “The lawbreaker is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, a liable person whose duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair.” In her incisive critique of the military-industrial complex of carceral punishments, Davis brings to the fore several important ideas about reshaping our approach to justice. But what do we mean by justice? Is punitive justice the only way to obtain justice? How can restorative justice help communities? How do prisons aid and abet oppressive structures? In this episode of the podcast, co-hosts Vandita Morarka and Ruchika question carceral systems, discuss transformative approaches to justice and tackle these questions to find what makes justice so elusive and intimidating for the common person in our country.
Content Warning: This conversation includes mentions of assault, rape, and mental, emotional, physical and institutional violence.
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Love to read or want to revisit your favourite bits? Dive into the full transcript below!
Ruchika
Hello everyone, welcome to the first episode of the In Search of Justice podcast. I’m Ruchika.
Vandita
And I’m Vandita.
Ruchika
And we are your co-hosts on this journey to navigate what justice is. Now justice is quite a heavy and weighted word that is almost casually thrown around in various contexts— across the news, in our daily conversations online. In this podcast, we take a moment to pause and deep dive into what justice actually could mean for survivors of gender-based violence specifically and whether the current systems we have in place have the potential to deliver on the survivors’ expectations while also simultaneously exploring and critiquing what justice does mean under the current formal systems that we do have in place.
Vandita
Yeah, I think it’s very important that our conversations move beyond seeing justice as black and white, and I love that we’re doing this podcast because we’re exploring these ideas and notions of justice that we’ve always been taught. And before we begin, I’d also like to acknowledge, for everyone listening in, that while I know we will talk about justice for survivors of gender-based violence primarily, we also have to remember that this justice is intricately linked to human rights. It’s linked to justice at varying intersections of identity, institutional brutality and just general social injustice, right? Perhaps we will explore this going ahead, but even something as simple as affordable housing is a matter of gender justice, and it is linked to how survivors of gender-based violence can access justice. So, building these linkages is also a very key part of exploring and understanding justice and before we jump in this episode and the episodes going ahead, we would like to give you a trigger warning and a content warning about various mentions that will happen through the episodes of rape, sexual, physical, mental assault and also other forms of gender-based violence. We will be discussing justice specifically in the context of gender-based violence through this series, and what might happen is that it may get a little emotionally difficult for you to process this or to just listen in, and that’s completely fine. We would encourage you to be mindful while listening and to step back, take breaks as needed and also in some scenarios choose to opt out and not listen.
Ruchika
Vandita, I want to dive into the first question I have. So, we’ve spoken, we’ve established that for this podcast we’ll be focusing on gender-based violence and until a couple of years ago I myself saw gender-based violence with a very myopic and very binary lens and only saw it as sexual violence and violence against women and girls, but of course, I’ve grown to learn that that is not the case over time. So can we define gender-based violence or set a precedent for what gender-based violence is, from our lens for this podcast?
Vandita
I’m always a little wary of defining concepts because concepts can be very fluid based on our social positionality, and just how we’re interpreting the world. I would say that at One Future Collective, we have, over time, developed a certain understanding of gender-based violence and that does tie into what a lot of organizations across the world follow as well. Gender-based violence is primarily about violence that takes place against an individual because they’re of a particular gender, or it is violence where a certain person or a certain category of people are more vulnerable to being subjected to violence and this vulnerability stems from their gender. This is when it becomes gender-based violence. This can be emotional, mental, physical, sexual, economic harm that can be caused to someone directly or indirectly because of their gender identity and while traditional definitions will look at women and young girls as the primary focus of gender-based violence, that understanding is flawed because it can happen against multiple other gender identities as well. I’m just gonna give you a slight data point about how prevalent gender-based violence can be. So, the National Family Health Survey suggests that 30% of women in India in the age group of 15 to 49 have experienced physical violence since the age of 15. And while this is reported data, as someone that works on-ground, and I mean this is the experience of people across board, these numbers are realistically way higher and data can be highly unreliable. There’s an unavailability of key intersections as well like there is no intersection or understanding of caste and gender-based violence. What about gender-based violence against persons who are not women? So, these data points are missing, which is why our understanding of gender-based violence can also be restricted, and I hope that through this podcast series and even otherwise, we continue to explore what gender-based violence can also look like and how it can manifest in our spaces. Something I would like everyone to hold on to is that this is violence that is either caused or linked or where a person is made more vulnerable because of their gender identity.
Ruchika
This also ties into the next sort of segment of the question; the big question I have: Since violence is so multifaceted and violence is so layered and violence doesn’t look the same for everyone, I’m guessing that justice also has to be layered and multifaceted. So, what is justice? I mean, we’ve seen people chant ‘No justice, no peace’ at protests. We use hashtags, you know, #JusticeForXYZ online, but what do we mean when we use these words? What do we mean when we ask for justice?
Vandita
That’s a very interesting and a very loaded question and one I will straight up say I have no answer to, but I will link it to my personal experiences, and explore how justice and the meaning of it has shifted for me over the years. So professionally I’m a lawyer, and I’m someone who wanted to be a lawyer since I was six years old and the reason for it is that all around me, the only pathway to justice that I could see or that I was even told about, was one that was legal. Any wrong that happened, any injustice that happened, even from like a highly dramatised soap opera, right, or a movie, or like conversations at home, the pathway to it was through a formal judicial system and that’s how I learned what justice was. And then, over time I had multiple different experiences and for example, when I was 18, I used to volunteer in a community in Bombay. I used to run a project with about 120 volunteers and we used to do a lot of after-school training programs and I went back to this community like after a month maybe, and I was talking to this group of kids that I would teach, and they didn’t want to learn that day, which is fine. I just asked them what do they want to be when they grow up, and they gave me answers that, you know, makes the heart of any naive person like me, at least at that age, really happy. A lot of them wanted to be doctors, engineers, lawyers, and that made me really really happy, but one kid who I was extremely fond of gets up and says that, you know, ‘didi aap jaante ho ki agar humaare basti mein koi mechanic ya driver ban gaya toh bhi bohot badi baat hai’. So, like if in our vicinity, in our community someone becomes like a driver or mechanic, that’s also a big thing. Two things really stood out for me, right? One was just the dignity of labour, which I might have always propounded, but I don’t think I ever internalised as much as I did that day. But second was that, my after-school English language training program or education, all of these have a massive scope for furthering social justice, but they are limited in the ways in which they exact justice. Formal systems don’t always work and this is a more non-legal example. Another case that I worked with in that same community, there’s a six-year-old girl who comes up to me and tells me about a new mother that she has, and I assume it’s a second or third marriage, but she tells me that her mother faced domestic violence while she was pregnant, and she lost her life because of the violence she faced. And now, the young girl has a new sibling and the father married within a week for someone to take care of that girl. There’s a hospital 200 meters from where all of this happened, not even going into the fact that domestic violence in and of itself should have not happened, so is having a formal body right there really doing it? Is justice, and access to justice only about the geographical presence of entities? Is it only about providing a certain service or education? And while I ask you these questions, I don’t have answers. And at 18, it really, really shifted my understanding of what justice could mean, and you could say that I’ve been looking for that meaning since then. There’s no, like, one-size-fits-all definition of justice, not for me and I believe not also for the world. On a larger scale, yes, we would be able to define certain parameters for structural justice, even when it comes to survivors of gender-based violence, but our lens towards this is, as you said, very myopic. We’re thinking only of the present, we’re only thinking about punishment. We’re never thinking about what justice can truly look like because it’s always completed with punishment, with retribution, and for many of us, you know, justice can be like consequence. Like when we’re kids, and if you hit a child in a playground, they’re gonna, like, punish you and remove you from the class or, you know, give you a mark in your calendar or something. But when does a teacher or a parent truly sit down with the child and say ‘Why did you do that?’ and makes them understand why they did that and then helps them move towards the pathway of apology, of repairing the harm that the harm doer might have done. It’s always focused around retribution. It’s around punishment. It’s never holistic. We have a very unitary idea of what justice looks like. There’s a very ideal sort of scenario that we’re all aspiring for, but justice can and should take on different forms. Justice can mean so many things. It can mean a voice, it can mean recognition, acknowledgment, for some people, it can mean consequences, for some an apology. And I will also add that justice structurally can look like universal basic income. So if I’m someone facing abuse, I can leave my abuser and I’m not stuck in that situation because I don’t have financial access. Affordable housing, protection, just so many things, access to education, these things in silos cannot lead to anything. You need all of these things to work together to really build a true idea of what justice can look like.
Ruchika
That’s really well said. I mean, one thing that really stood out for me, and I think that’s what for me personally, makes the concept of justice so elusive and intimidating, is that usually when you see incidents of violence occurring, they have very personal impacts on individuals and their lives but the violence usually stems from systemic and greater larger inequalities within our society. So, we have to strike a balance when we address justice, when we talk about justice, we have to strike a balance with addressing an individual who has been harmed and their needs and also addressing what systemic inequalities caused the harm in the first place. And I think that is one of the greatest challenges while talking about justice that we face.
Vandita
I think, and I also see this from having worked, especially with young children, young adults, that the harm that they might end up doing is also often a result of the harm they might have received and there’s so much research around this, right? Like ye cyclical abuse hoga ki agar aapke saath ho raha hai (it is cyclical abuse, if it’s happening to you then, you will go on and do it to someone else). These cycles of abuse will be perpetuated and this is not to stigmatise someone who may have faced abuse. It is just to say that as a society we are failing to provide healing, we’re failing to correct the trauma that has been inflicted and we’re failing to show that person that there is another way to exist, and that happens repeatedly. We’re not thinking about society’s role. We’re not thinking about how we can hold space for survivors of harm to us, how we can reach points where reparations can be made in a way that strengthen community, that strengthen relationships and that do not always fall back on a punitive system of balancing the scale, so to say.
Ruchika
Yeah. So you’ve spoken quite a bit about the punitive and retributive system and that’s how our formal legal systems work. What are the other forms of justice that we have at our disposal currently that can be explored further and that’s something we will explore through this podcast as well?
Vandita
So, there are, I would say in India also more of a, I wouldn’t say maybe like a trend, or just something that we’re bending towards and I find that really beautiful is towards thinking about what reformative or transformative justice can look at in different situations. And transformative justice and reformative justice is very different from your general idea of legal justice, right, because your legal justice is focused on correcting harm through punishment mainly or through retribution, even if it might say things like we’re focusing on reform. Like a lot of Indian laws actually say that we want this piece of legislation to be reformatory in nature, but then the systems they design within it are not reformatory in nature. For example, if you look at transformative justice, you can think of it, like for people listening in, you can think of it like as a framework, a set of guiding like principles to approach what justice can mean and it’s a way for people and communities to respond to harm, to abuse, to violence, and at the very core, if you think about it right, it’s very simple to say but very difficult in practice. It just seeks to not create more violence as a result of existing violence. How can we do harm reduction to lessen this violence and not necessarily respond to any violence that has happened and only correct it by perpetrating violence against another person? That’s the basis of it. So, it seems very simple in principle, but in practice, it becomes so difficult because we’re not seeing multiple stakeholders as part of a larger system. We’re seeing every stakeholder individually and we’re not seeing how interlinked justice and healing for each person can be to that of another person. Having said that, I would also say that there is concern when we’re talking about transformative justice and reformative justice, or even when we’re trying to bring in restorative justice practices into everyday life. To ensure that we are not using this language to cover up not providing justice to the survivor, we’re just not capitalizing on this language to create further barriers to survivors accessing justice and that is something that as practitioners, as everyday people, that we all need to be really careful about.
Ruchika
I’m gonna just talk about a personal experience of mine here. When I approached the formal legal system for justice in my situation, I did it with the anticipation that I’d get to talk about what happened to me in front of an unbiased third party, and I would be asked what I want and my needs would be addressed, but the more I sort of went through the process and the deeper I got into it, I realized that no one was gonna ask me what I wanted, and no one cared really what I wanted. It was just looked at as a crime was committed in society, so our society has become unsafe. So, we need to punish the person who caused the harm. I mean not even, they don’t even look at it as it caused the harm, they looked at it as a crime and punishment usually means shunning or isolating the person who has caused the violence. And in essence, what you said about causing more harm and causing more violence and creating more violence in response to the violence that has already occurred, which just doesn’t add up in a lot of ways to me and it really sort of made me wonder that who should be centred around conversations around justice.
Vandita
That’s a very powerful question and experience Ruchika, and thank you for sharing that. I do feel, and this is maybe a personal belief, right, that till the point communities have evolved enough to hold space for restorative justice the way it needs to be held, we can’t focus on community care beyond the needs of the survivor. And while I say this, I will also say that centering the survivor is also centering your community because they are the person against whom harm has been perpetrated, and they have to be at the centre of the solution. They have to be at the centre for your solution-making, about thinking ki aage kya karna hai, what is it that they want to do ahead. The survivor has to be centred there. In the long term though, as communities become more resilient, as they evolve in terms of the nature of relationships they have, in terms of the general sort of social norms that govern these communities, there is a possibility to think of other forms of centering of stakeholders, but I would definitely say, right now, it has to be survivor-centric and survivor-focused. We often just see justice as the end result but justice is also about the process and if the survivor is not at the center of the process, it’s not a just process. And there is going to be so much more trauma added, so much more that is added to their lives, a burden that they do not need to carry. It is a burden that is placed on them because we don’t see the process as something that needs to be changed as well.
Ruchika
We’ve broken down various forms of justice. We’ve discussed what justice looks like in the formal legal system. What is it that makes justice so elusive and intimidating? What is it that makes us so confused about what it could look like or what it could mean? Why is it so hard for us to sort of wrap our heads around? It is because it is hard to decipher justice and why is it so?
Vandita
No, definitely. I mean, first of all, it’s just that justice is always seen as a result of the formal justice system. Like jabse hum bachhe hote hai hume justice ka matlab yahi hota hai ki jo aapko court jaake verdict milega toh justice hogi (since we were kids, we’ve known the meaning of justice as a verdict given in the court). And that’s not the only way of seeking justice. The system is so intimidating, like someone who’s not a lawyer, someone who’s not a judge, someone who’s not a police officer, basically, when you’re an outsider, you don’t understand what the judicial system looks like. And that, to me, is where justice actually fails because you’ve created this whole barrier of people and systems between access to justice and the common person, and that is a failure of the justice process, but it’s also one of the reasons the concept of justice becomes so elusive, because instead of seeing justice as a tangible thing, as a tangible entity in our everyday life, we’re seeing it as something that is vested and situated only within courtrooms, only within the judicial system or in a police station. And that makes it difficult, that makes it intimidating. I mean, I’m a lawyer. Main vakeel hoon but mujhe bhi police station jaate vakt dar lagta hai, aap log khud soch lo, like police ko dekh ke, judge ko dekh ke, sabse pehla feeling jo aapke andar aayega vo dar ka hi hoga (I’m a lawyer myself but even I feel fear when I go to the police station. Whenever we look at the police or judge, the first feeling we all feel is fear). Like the first feeling you will feel when you see a police officer, even if they’re in place to help you, is ‘have I done something wrong?’ Just like checking around that, “Have I done something?” Like even when I’m driving, right, like at 2 in the night, I’m like, “Have I done something? Why are they stopping me?” And it could just be to tell me that the road is shut and go take another road. But it’s just how justice becomes intimidating because of our interactions with it. One, the system is really formal, it’s really bureaucratic and then our interactions with it also happen in a situation where power is very clearly skewed at one end. And then that’s what our idea of justice becomes, that it becomes a power-over idea. It’s never that we can have power with a police officer, power with the judiciary and get to justice. It always becomes that if you want justice, agar mujhe justice chahiye toh (If I want justice then) I’m going to have to go over these people, over these barriers and then get justice, and that makes it extremely inducive and intimidating as well. And then second, I think something, at least that’s also something that I’ve experienced is that, I mean do you really have a personal idea of justice? I mean to everyone listening in, think about it, is it something that you believe in or is it something that was talked to you? Like this is what justice looks like and it can sometimes be really confusing also to place your finger on it, that what is it that you want from a perpetrator? When was the last time that you heard that a survivor was asked what they wanted and not that they were told that this is what you should want? Like when survivors report a case, when survivors take up a legal case, what do you hear? You hear that they’re so brave for taking this person on. The moment you link bravery to reporting, you are telling every survivor that if you’re not reporting, you’re not brave. If you’re not reporting, you are doing a disservice to every other survivor elsewhere, and that in itself is a more public notion of what justice means, because that’s not really what you may believe. You may believe that, which is fine, but have you ever questioned that? And finally, I think as a culture or just in terms of how we are as a people, hum baat kahan karte hai, like we don’t have conversations, at home, with friends. Anything that’s uncomfortable is hidden or it is buried under a set of really stupid jokes that you are at a party or in a dinner table conversation, we never really have conversations about wrongdoing, about accountability. Even just, I mean, I think about like even between intimate partners, when was the last time you said these are my expectations from me? Like, I did that very recently to say these are my expectations and they can be really small, silly things as well that, ‘Oh, you know, we have to have dinner together.’ It doesn’t matter and this is just a really small example, but when it comes to intimate partner violence, for example, it has taken me a long time, because of the culture of shame associated with my sexuality, to be able to even say that this is something I’m not comfortable with, to be able to set those expectations. And then, of course, the power dynamic is often so skewed in favour of one particular gender that others can’t articulate it as much. And even moving away from this a little bit, when I talk about conversations, it’s also about conversations related to hurt and to sharing how we feel when we’ve been hurt or why we are hurting someone. We’re so invested like, jab kuch galti ho jaati hai kisi se, jiske khilaaf voh galti hui hai, pura, (when someone is hurt, the person who is hurt) like all society is so invested in ensuring that person gets justice. So, whenever harm happens against one person, we’re all very invested in making sure that whoever the survivor is, they get the form of justice that society believes is the right form of justice for them, but there is no investment in everyday actions. On an everyday basis, you’re perpetuating rape culture. You’re perpetuating a culture where no one takes responsibility for any harm that you do. Like what are you teaching your son when you look at someone dancing on the screen and say, agar koi aise kapde pehnegi toh iske saath to yahi hoga, ya agar voh aise kapde pehnegi toh (if someone wears such clothes, this is what will happen to them or if they wear these kinds of clothes then) how will other people not get attracted to her? And this is a small example of when you do this at home, you are teaching your child that, because someone’s clothing is linked to how much control other people have over their body and that’s bullshit. People get to decide what they want to wear and people get to decide how, when, and if they want to have sex with somebody. And these two things are completely different concepts. But these are also conversations we don’t have at home. So, I think that’s what is something that I find personally also distances and makes justice so difficult because asaan hai sochna justice ek insaan ke liye (it’s easy to think about justice with respect to one person). And that’s what happens when we don’t have a culture where we talk about things; we start thinking about justice in terms of individual cases, but we’re no longer tackling larger systems of oppression, which is why this gender-based violence is happening. And as a result of this, we also end up putting a lot of undue burden on the survivor and also on the harm-doer in certain places.
Ruchika
Yeah. There was this one day where I was, so I was having like a sort of “feminist” existential crisis and I went on MeToo’s website and I was reading through their mission and their mission has always been about healing and addressing survivors’ needs. Not once do they mention naming or shaming perpetrators. Not once did they mention punishment in their mission statement, but somehow, we’re so intrinsically trained and it’s so culturally imbibed into us that punishment and retribution is the only form of justice that even outside of our formal systems we tend to replicate that and we forget to address, like you said, the systems that have caused the violence and perpetuated that the violence. We focus on one particular individual’s case while ignoring how that case is actually part of a larger system and a part of how society functions and it’s not an isolated incident. And I think all of that is extremely important to address when we talk about justice.
Vandita
No, definitely, Ruchika, you bring up some extremely important points and I will share some thoughts on some of that. One is that, you know, when we stop, even with the MeToo movement, the focus on the perpetrators became so much that nobody paused to say that, “Oh my God, every woman I know, every person who probably belongs to a gender or sexual minority that I know is saying me too, is saying that ‘I face sexual violence as well’ or ‘I have faced X form of violence as well.’” And it became about like these few famous celebrities who had perpetrated violence. And I will not take away from the experiences of survivors who were at the receiving end, right, in the cases that became more “famous.” But literally, nobody talked about what about the survivors? What about the collective trauma of millions of people across the world who live with the aftermath and the PTSD of sexual and gender-based violence? And that’s a conversation that nobody had. That’s not a conversation that people picked up, like gender-based violence and sexual violence is considered a public health pandemic across the world, but no one talks about how MeToo is a way of signifying and showcasing how large scale this problem is and how much intervention is needed and what different forms of intervention are needed to support this. So, none of that happened, which to me goes back to saying, do people really want to change something? Or do they just want like these 4-5 headlines, you know, like headlines grabbing cases, which builds a lot of public outcry? Which is good, it works in some cases. But again, this is also part of feminist leadership that we can perhaps explore at a later point is that you don’t need one person to be the face of a movement or the face of change. It has to be multiple people because it’s never a result of one person. And the very idea that we seem to need individual cases for solution-building is a result of how we continue to see masculine ideals and I don’t mean ideals perpetrated by men. I just mean what I’ve seen as masculine ideals of what justice can look like, of what reform and harm repairing can look like. And all of that continues to be so masculine that we can only see it as doing it on a case-by-case basis and dependent on how much media support the person had.
When we started thinking about justice and we started exploring the idea of bringing this to you all, there’s a poem by Meena Kandasamy that really stood out to me. It’s called Lady Justice, and it encapsulates a lot of what speaking about a lot of what a lot of us are feeling. So, towards the end of this episode, (and every episode!) we’ll be sharing a poem.
Ruchika
That was a really beautiful poem to start our first episode with. That’s it for today’s episode. We will continue to probe and explore what justice means for survivors of gender-based violence through this season, through art, personal explorations, and by way of conversations with survivors of gender-based violence and those who work on supporting them.
Ruchika
Until next time, I hope to see you on our journey as we search for justice.
| Lady Justice by Meena Kandasamy You are sad and you start out sluggishly, Shedding your gypsy skirts and learning To dress up in gold and Valentino gowns. You are playing Patience to pass the time And you believe every feud has to die out When the fighters die. You wait for that. You later learn it does not work this way. Sitting still in a songless court, you watch Backlogs and bribes and middlemen grow. You are unfazed by all the hard work that Sob stories demand and so you dictate your Judgements by picking out from a tarot deck You give the Ten of Swords to the woman Paraded naked and to the gang-raped girl.Self-defeating, dangerous if they ever won. The Five of Pentacles to a labourer duped Of her lifetime savings and that old trader Who wears his losses like a brass talisman. Finally, you hand out the Three of SwordsFor a habeas corpus from a maudlin ex-king Looking for his kidnapped princess-bride. Your courtroom turns to an ominous circus. Two shows every day, entry free. As the High Priestess, you let hope elope with justice. The rebellious righteous unite against you. You are handed a Hanged Man and bathedIn bullets. Your sinuous body is cast in stone, And, to make sure that you never turn blind Or bored, or fall asleep, each plaintiff applies A paste of bloodred chillies on your open eyes. |
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About the In Search of Justice Podcast
As we strive to collectively build towards social justice, it becomes imperative to challenge and reorient the very conceptions of justice. Justice, in popular culture and the zeitgeist overall, has been synonymised with carcerality, which presents a very myopic perspective of justice and diminishes the significance of justice as an intrinsic human right. Further, in the case of survivors of abuse, pathways to justice are further limited and often don’t include the survivors themselves in the process. Justice thus, becomes a destination, an outcome, rather than a collaborative, collectively-built journey or process. Through this compilation of the transcripts of the In Search of Justice Podcast, we aim to explore this discourse surrounding justice, particularly in the context of gender-based violence, in bite-sized episodes. Co-hosted by Vandita and Ruchika, these conversations seek to navigate the multiple meanings of justice, especially when it is considered the penultimate goal by questioning carceral systems, introducing alternative justice systems and leading the conversation into how we can build justice systems that are receptive and responsive to the various needs and desires of survivors.