“…if you speak to any, you know, women, trans people in this country, gender-based violence is a daily reality for almost every, you know, non-cis man and also many cis men actually in this country. So, we need to really understand the systemic nature of gender-based violence and when I say systemic, I mean that it’s common, it’s woven into our judiciary, it’s woven into our police systems, we need to understand the ubiquity of gender-based violence, and only then – only if we understand how common it is, can we start to treat it as a systemic problem, like as a societal problem that needs a holistic solution. We can’t just, you know, ask for the death penalty of this one case that has caught our attention where the perpetrators are very conveniently people, we don’t care about…”
— Ruchika on how ingrained is gender-based violence at both a social and institutional level in our society, in conversation with Vandita Morarka and Asmita Ghosh in this episode of the podcast.
News in India has undergone transformations faster than anywhere else. From newspapers to radio to television, media in this country has come a long way. Media was once touted as the fourth pillar of a democracy; it was supposed to aid the process of national development. Yet if we were to consider the most prominent contribution of media today, most would say it has been most instrumental in shaping public discourse and perceptions. This is especially true when it comes to the reportage of gender-based violence. Media can influence not only society, but also impact systemic change, as we saw with the Justice Verma Committee. In this episode, co-hosts Vandita Morarka and Ruchika sit with activist and communication consultant Asmita Ghosh to talk about the impact of sensationalist coverage of gender-based violence, the monster theory of perpetrators, what PLU stands for in newsrooms and more.
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 and welcome to the sixth episode of the In Search of Justice podcast. I’m Ruchika.
Vandita
And I’m Vandita. And today we’re going to be talking about conversations around gender-based violence and justice, in context to the news media. I think at this point it becomes extremely crucial for us to discuss this because as a society we’ve been aware of gender-based violence happening around us, most often because of the media, but seldom by the day, we don’t see a case of gender-based violence in the news. We don’t hear of it in local reporting, whether it’s in the newspaper or until you’re even on social media accounts of news media agencies.
Ruchika
Content Warning: Before we begin, I’d like to give a trigger warning for discussion of various forms of violence and rape culture. Please do feel free to step away from the episode for your well-being.
Vandita
After the 2012 global outcry against the gang rape that happened in Delhi, we’ve definitely seen a huge spike in coverage of gender-based violence in news media. Today we’re gonna be figuring out whether this increase in coverage is actually linked to us as a society moving closer to gender justice or is it more about feeding into certain ideas of honor patriarchy and not necessarily covering gender-based violence against all sorts of identities. So, we’ll also be looking at the failure of mainstream English media in covering gender-based violence that occurs against persons from oppressed castes or in certain geographies of the country, and also not covering certain cases unless they are sensational either in the way that they’ve occurred or in the sort of media or other attention that they garner.
Ruchika
Yeah, absolutely. And I think if one thing we can take from current times, it is that the media we consume and news media that we see around us shapes our perceptions of the world and therefore our responses especially to gender-based violence. So, it’s supremely important to understand the role the news media plays in our responses to gender-based violence and our conversation to justice as well. I have of course a lot more to say, but I think we should continue this conversation with the guests that we have for the day.
Vandita
Definitely. I think we couldn’t have found a more perfect person to have this conversation with. We have Asmita Ghosh with us. Asmita is a feminist digital campaigner who specializes in using tools of digital storytelling to spark social change. She’s led over 20 digital advocacy campaigns at Feminism in India and currently she works as a freelance communications specialist supporting feminist and youth-centric organizations with their digital advocacy. So excited to have you with us, Asmita.
Asmita
Hi, and thanks so much Rachika and Vandita for having me on this podcast. I’ve been following both of your work for a while, and so I think it’s great that we’re having this conversation together with feminist women that I admire. So, thank you.
Vandita
Thank you for agreeing to do this. I think we’re very excited about what we’ll get to learn from you today.
Ruchika
So I’m just going to start with the first question for you. What do you think Asmita, about how gender-based violence is covered in the news media currently?
Asmita
Yeah. So as you said, you know, after the Delhi gang rape case in 2012, the number of cases that the media started covering of GBV- gender-based violence- shot up almost fourfold. So, it was like an exponential increase, which was good in a way, of course, that we started seeing more and more just how common and how almost every day gender-based violence was, like what a common occurrence it was in the lives of women in this country but unfortunately it’s become more about, you know, getting clicks and grabbing eyeballs on television and in the race for that, as with everything else, as with the way that news media actually has progressed in general, but also especially in the case of GBV, it started to become more and more sensationalist and even if the initial, you know, intention was to shed a light on how ubiquitous GBV is in our country and maybe, you know, do something that which in a way that would help women access justice. The way that news media started covering GBV tended to, you know, push us back in the opposite direction, this kind of sensationalist coverage and we will talk a little bit more about that later, sort of reinforced a lot of harmful stereotypes that perpetuated rape culture and which then perpetuates GBV. So, there is a lot that the media could do better because this current coverage of GBV is not really a way that actually helps survivors, It doesn’t help women and there are so many problematic elements, but some key ways of it is, you know, apart from sensationalist coverage, which I mentioned was like reinforcing victim blaming, reinforcing this sort of safety discourse that you know, where we think that the only way to keep women safe from sexual violence is to keep them indoors, or keep them at home and not go out and limiting their mobility. All of the ways in which the news covers GBV right now reinforces a lot of these harmful things that actually make life worse for survivors.
Ruchika
I think that just because something is being given attention doesn’t mean it’s the right kind of attention it’s getting, and I think with the coverage we’re seeing, that’s definitely the case.
Asmita
So when the Hyderabad case happened in 2019, there were actually Twitter (X) polls from prominent media accounts asking if the perpetrators, who are still alleged perpetrators, deserved to be hanged or given the death penalty and this is not something the media should just sort of feed into this bloodlust, right? It was insanely unethical and insensitive, and it just really goes to show the way that they’re treating GBV as some kind of a tool or a political gimmick/ TRP raising gimmick which trivializes the entire gravity of the situation.
Vandita
Well, for sure I think what you mentioned around how media deals with certain types of cases can actually go towards dis-servicing those cases and in the long term just build like this public outcry for certain types of justice which may not even meet the needs of survivors. So in keeping with that, actually I’d love to know from you, what do you think responsible and ethical and reportage on gender-based violence could look like?
Asmita
There is so much to say about this, but I’m gonna try to limit my answer to one of the key things I think, which is we need to, I think, before the media starts writing about gender-based violence, it needs to understand gender-based violence and because a lot of the sensationalist writing stems from this very inaccurate understanding of gender-based violence, which looks at GBV as this very surprising or shocking thing that happened to you know- at that moment – that one particular woman or that one particular survivor. And then we will- like the way that it tends to focus on a single case, highlight the brutalization perhaps that the survivor faced and you know, like outrage sort of language around it. But honestly, if you speak to any you know, women, trans people in this country, gender-based violence is a daily reality for almost every, you know, non cis man and also many cis men actually in this country. So, we need to really understand the systemic nature of gender-based violence and when I say systemic, I mean that it’s common, it’s woven into our judiciary, it’s woven into our police systems. We need to understand the ubiquity of gender-based violence, and only then – only if we understand how common it is, can we start to treat it as a systemic problem, like as a societal problem that needs a holistic solution. We can’t just, you know, ask for the death penalty of this one case that has caught our attention where the perpetrators are very conveniently people, we don’t care about, as in the case of the Hyderabad 2019 rape case where the perpetrators were these disempowered, I mean alleged perpetrators, because they were shot before they even had a trial. Those men were these disempowered poor working class from marginalized religions and castes and it’s very easy for us to focus all our rage on those people, who we can other very easily with no thought to who, what. Who cares what happens to them is the thinking, right? So, it’s very easy to focus our rage on on these people that we don’t care about and then say you know, lynch them, death penalty, castrate them but we are not going to look at all of the causes, the reason that rape is so common. This is why we talk about the rape culture pyramid. It’s a pyramid, is an easy way to sort of understand it, because at the apex of the pyramid, when I say rape culture and I say that India has rape culture, I do not mean that every Indian is a rapist, obviously, but it means that rape is a deeply embedded part of our society and not just rape, but all of the things that lead to rape, right? And we only want to look at, as I said, the effects of the pyramid where we see the most brutal cases of acid attacks and rape and domestic violence and these brutal things that are the ones that you know, catch our attention, but we do not want to look at the bottom of the pyramid, which is where we don’t look. We ignore the smaller in courts cases of sexual harassment, we have the court saying a feeble no doesn’t mean a ‘No’, we have you know ‘this boys will be boys’ sentiment or we have this phrase that we use for sexual harassment called ‘eve teasing’ which completely minimizes it, which makes it like a like this cute little thing that happens you know, and we are willing to overlook all of these things and then we are surprised that rape is so common. And here is a distinction that a lot of scholars before me have talked about which I have written about in the GBV Media toolkit. There are two lenses that you can use when you report a case of GBV, which is episodic reportage and thematic reportage. So, episodic reportage is what currently happens in the majority of our GBV cases, in the majority of the reporting of GBV cases, which is that, we have a very closed single focus view on a particular rape case, right, and we only focus on that. But when we focus on a single rape case, we don’t embed in that larger context and so when we are reading about that single case, when I am reading about it in the newspaper, I don’t think about the fact that, oh, I mean this is like one sample of a larger problem, and how do we fix that larger problem? I only look at that one case and I’m like, oh, that poorly poor woman who was raped. You know, maybe she could have done something differently, maybe she shouldn’t have gone out at night. And you know, that’s a very easy slope to go into this victim claiming route as well. As opposed to thematic reportage, which is a more wide-angle view of looking at rape. So, when we do a good thematic reportage of a GBV case, you would definitely focus on the case that you know, they are currently writing about, but then you include statistics, you include instances of more rapes that have happened. So, you can say this is like the fifth such case this month in this district, or you know, it includes some statistics about television violence in the country or in the state or in the district. So, you embed in that larger context which sort of changes the way that the public understands, right and that is very crucial to moving towards a society where GBV, you know, where we stop GBV or we solve GBV. If the media isn’t, you know, comfortable or doesn’t have the expertise to talk about GBV as a systemic phenomenon, then there are plenty of people who do have that expertise; there are women’s rights activists, there are experts, there are NGOs who’ve been working on this issue who can provide you that, new ones that you are lacking right now, so quote them, cite them because right now these reports, you know they’ll uncritically paraphrase what the police has said or what the court or the judge has said and that’s it. They leave it at that and often these quotes by these men and authority are extremely patriarchal, you know, those are just uncritically paraphrased without providing the context that you know, hey, you know, it wasn’t her fault, if that is what they are saying or this is like a larger problem that we need to tackle at the root and how do we tackle it at the root? And also, the language that the media uses to report rape, like I said, it’s either super sensationalist or trivializes it, right? So, and when I say trivializes it- I mean the use of the word scandal right when we’re talking about rape instead of Sexual violence, which is what it is like, I mean all of us remember the DPS, MMS scandal, but what it actually was, was non consensually sharing someone’s private images. So, I mean if it had been framed in that way, maybe the way we would have understood that, the way we would have understood, you know, consent in terms of taking photos, in terms of sharing photos would have drastically been different. But when we frame it as this, you know, scandalous piece of gossip, which is what happened at that point, all we know it is as a scandal, as “that girl” and “that guy” who did something. And then you know, their lives were ruined because everyone in the country knew about it and we don’t think about it as a case of violation for that girl whose face was spread all over the country.
Vandita
Definitely. Thank you so much, Asmita. I think these are excellent points and I love that you started with building that systemic understanding because so much of our media coverage also comes from how we as a society treat gender-based violence or how our institutional system treats gender-based violence. Thank you for that.
Ruchika
One thing I just want to observe here before we move on to the next question is that I mean, upon to now with all the conversations we’ve had, it’s been a recurring theme where our response to gender-based violence, whether it’s in the media, whether it’s in our personal spaces anywhere really has always been individualistic, which has always been to a point where we don’t understand that these are systemic issues- it’s not isolated. There’s a culture that perpetuates these violent systems and that allows for these individual incidents of violence to happen- from the conversation that we’ve had so far in the other episodes as well. It’s not surprising to me that even in the media, sort of the systemic issues are overlooked and forgotten almost or ignored. Really one of the things that we’ve talked about and we’ve understood so far is that we need to learn to center survivors of gender-based violence in our responses to gender-based violence. How do we sort of center the survivors’ needs and survivors’ stories without crossing into trauma upon or voyeurism when covering gender-based violence in news media?
Asmita
Well, I think your question itself is an aspirational thing because I don’t think survivors are centered at all in the existing way, right. So, how do we center survivors without crossing into a trauma point is already a reach. Like nobody actually- right now the way that GBV is covered centers survivors or things about them, It’s just about the story, it’s about the gory details of what happened to her. An example that I cite in my GBV media toolkit is the Balan Shah rape case where the media accosted the family of the survivor and you know their father- her father so much on TV that he literally broke down and just begged them to stay away because they were re-traumatizing the family so much. So, nobody really thinks about rape as this thing that happened to, you know, this woman or this person, that could be, you know, hugely traumatic event for them. And so even just keeping that in mind, keeping in mind that A you are writing about a person and another violation of a person which probably has a lot of traumas attached for them, and B on the flip side, you’re also writing for an audience that has at least 50% of people who have experienced gender-based violence, right. So not only are you writing about a survivor, you’re writing to survivors and keeping that in mind I feel could would- I mean should at least change the way you write. I mean, this starts right from, you know, the way that survivors are interviewed the way survivors are talked about. So, when you’re interviewing them, like you know, in India of course it’s illegal to you know – unless the survivor herself wants to step forward- It’s illegal to share her details, her name, her location any kind of identifiable information which is just to protect survivors from the intense stigma that they face in in society. So but even if as a journalist or media person, if you’re interviewing them and to you know anonymously report the way you do, that needs to be so ethical like so careful and then when we’re writing about it, there’s really no need to delve into these gory details because this goes back to sensationalism because I think that you know that’s the biggest problem with GBV reporters today because why do we need to know about all of the brutalization that happened to this person in order to care? I mean, do we not care if someone said that they got raped? Do we need to know that you know, this was done to them or that was done to them?
Vandita
I think for sure, Asmita. With everyone I know, I think just the way we consume news has changed so drastically. I’m just going to share a small incident that a friend shared with me, she said when she was reading a news article about a rape case- and it was reported quite factually, so there wasn’t much of emotional urgency to it- she said she felt nothing. And then as someone who works in this field, she spent the day thinking about why she didn’t feel something. And then she completely broke down because even as someone who works in the sector, she’s just gotten used to being sort of reeled in with certain details of the case and definite need for introspection. I think it’s happened to so many of us. It could be people who work in this space, outside of the space. I know that a lot of lawyers that we work with have said things like we listen to so many cases every day that sometimes we just want to hurry them on because there are so many other cases to hear as well. So that desensitization seems to have happened across the board and it definitely seeps into how the media powers here. Thanks for articulating, that’s beautiful.
Ruchika
I actually want to tie all the points both of you made into like one sort of overarching point that we’ve seen repeatedly when we talk about gender-based violence is the idea of believing survivors when they speak up. And then essentially ties back into why we don’t need to publish details or publicize the details of the violence that happened. More point of believing is that hey, this person has said something violent happened to them. Now where do we go from here? And I think that also ties into the point of thematic reporters that you made earlier, Asmita, that the point is not to sort of individually detail the account of what exactly went on, or what was the violence that happened, but how do we respond to it? Where do we go from here? And a thing like this and this layer of nuance with the whole point of believing survivors is also lost, especially when it comes to the coverage in the news media of gender-based violence.
Vandita
I think when it comes to believing survivors is that it often becomes about who the survivor is right, what is their identity. And when that comes up, how do we then address a lot of socio-cultural biases that we have that often also dictate the perception of gender-based violence in the news, from cisgender heteronormative perspectives to very misogynous, brahmin capitalistic ideals that sort of form the length of how we look at gender-based violence, even as persons who might be a part of media houses. And is representation always the answer? Is it enough when it comes to addressing this process?
Asmita
That’s a great question because it’s so relevant actually, because, and I just want to take the case of the Delhi 2012 gang rape case to illustrate this point, I mean, representation is a part of it for sure. There was a report recently, I think by Oxfam and News Laundry that surveyed the cast composition of newsrooms and it’s almost overwhelmingly upper class, upper caste not upper class, middle class upper caste, Hindu journalists, editors and when newsrooms are full of people from a certain demographic, the people that they care about and the people that they write about tend to also come from that demographic and there’s this report again that I did as research where this scholar interviewed ‘Times of India’ journalist and he actually told her that they have this concept of ‘who to write about’ and they know that they write about people like us ‘PLUs’ and stories about people. So, they only cover stories about people who match that demographic of both their readers and their, you know, newsroom. So, what tends to happen is that there is a huge urban bias in whose case gets talked about- here the 2012 Delhi gang rape case is very relevant because why have we thought about why the 2012 Delhi case was the case that sparked this revolution all over the country and not like the millions of other cases before that or after that? So, when her rape case broke the news, she was coming back from the Saket Mall which is like this high society sort of mall in Delhi. She was with a man and I think her name gave off no certain caste markers, so people assumed she was middle class. People assumed you know- and that galvanized people. People are like ‘India’s daughter’- she’s someone like us, she’s someone that, like, could have been my daughter but we don’t care if it could have been someone else’s daughter, right? If it was, if it’s the daughter of our domestic worker or an informal worker, construction worker. Those daughters we don’t care about. But since you know, she captured the country’s imagination because she was a PLU, she was a person like us. What happens is that we only like again, we tend to only care about these cases, and the rapes of Dalit women, of Adivasi women, of women you know in under occupation, in different parts of the country, those are completely ignored. And that’s just sad and a little bit ironic because those I mean, marginalized women face much higher degrees of sexual violence because they are targeted not just for their gender but also their caste location, their religious identity. If they live in a conflict state then the army or the police force uses rape as a tool to to dominate that community, or like sex workers for instance. Sex workers face so much sexual violence, but I don’t even remember a single case that has caught like national media outrage even though they are like routinely violated by the police, by their clients, but no one talks about that.
Ruchika
There’s so much to unpack here. It’s gonna take me like a second to like, process but everything you’ve said is so, so pertinent and so, so relevant and so important to note. But I want to specifically talk about how you said that representation is not enough. And this isn’t one of the questions that we have for you, but it is something that I have thought about quite a bit, and maybe I’d throw it out to both you and Vandita, to figure this answer out to the best of our abilities if we can. I think that where representation sort of stops working is where the purpose of the media is to make money. Like it is at the end of the day ratings and the ad sales and that’s why the whole people like us idea even exists. You know that okay, it’s people like us who are consuming this media. So, people like us will give us the money that we need to keep running this media organization. And why does the media cover gender-based violence? Like why the media should cover gender-based violence is an entirely different conversation to have. But currently at the moment why does the media cover gender-based violence? It seems purely for sensational purposes to get TRPs? I could be wrong, I don’t know. But until we understand why and then we move to OK, this is why we should cover gender-based violence and not because of the reasons we happen. I think that’s what sort of fills the gap that representation won’t be able to fill the gap, in better reportage.
Asmita
Yeah, I think that’s a great point and it also fits in with what you were saying, like capitalist ideas also influence our GBV reportage. Who is paying for the news, and who does the news serve? Who is the news talking to? Definitely important questions.
Vandita
So I agree. Just to add into what Asmita said, I think representation is a definite must have, right? I think it’s a first step to even ensuring any of the other things can happen. However, representation can’t end like that, it can’t be the only thing we do to make media rules more inclusive or to make sure reporting is more sensitive or it covers a wider array of issues in a wider range of people. I think a lot of new models of media reporting that have arisen, especially community based and community funded which are really shifting this around because they’re showing that people like us can mean different things. So, people like us can also be the people that for so long have been completely invisibilized in any sort of reporting and that funding for media can also come from there or other forms of support for media houses can come from there. So, I feel like that is a great way also to move just beyond representation, to shift in a way where ownership, funding, support for your media house or your media entity comes from this aggregated sort of different range of people and it comes from a wide variety of people. So, to be able to build that sort of system I think is really helpful in ensuring that media shifts and I think in relation to that, it automatically also covers gender-based violence, right. When you cover more kinds of people, you automatically also give space for survivors. You give space for different kinds of survivors, and I think that can definitely help make media more inclusive.
Asmita
And I think social media and citizen journalism has done so much to shift this sort of balance. I mean, it’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough. Like obviously we may be on social media with my parents are still watching, you know, on TV news and there’s hardly any of that shift of balance happening over there yet. But yeah, I mean hopefully, you know, we’re on that path. Although currently in India, I don’t know what the future of journalism or news media is but let’s see.
Ruchika
So I want to go into a more specific question now which specifically pertains to gender-based violence- that we see especially with gender-based violence. Can you tell us a little bit more about the monster theory of perpetrators in news media and how that works against survivors and is actually anti gender justice?
Asmita
So the monster theory of rape, or GBV, is basically this tendency for all of us to characterize rapists as monsters. I get the impulse. It’s a very natural impulse. You’re empathizing with the survivor. You’re shocked and saddened that this has happened to them, and your first instinct is obviously to call the person who did it a monster and sure like they are there, it’s horrible. They’re horrible for having done that to someone and I’m not taking away from that at all. But this kind of framing, I want to, like, go back to that thematic, episodic distinction I made or even like the conversations we were having about sensationalism. What this kind of framing does is again, we’re sort of creating what is the word, we’re creating an image of what a perpetrator looks like right, and that’s a monster. But unfortunately, as a lot of women will be able to tell you, perpetrators don’t really look like monsters, they could be like our family members. They could be our uncles, they could be our neighbors, they could be our professors or our bosses, right. When we create this framing of you know, rapists are monsters, we create this image in our head of what a perpetrator should look like and that is very often very different from what perpetrators actually do look like. This is what I was saying, like GBV or rape is ubiquitous, it is so common. It is so everyday. It’s so mundane, almost in a horrible way like that, that creating the sort of bogeyman of this perpetrator, sort of takes away from that everydayness of it. And we need to acknowledge that everydayness of it if we want to, really grapple with it or solve it or fix it or make life better for survivors. And there’s more to this, actually, because what is this image? What is this monster imagery that we’re creating? Very often it echoes upper caste biases and discriminations that are inbuilt within us because you know, when my family tells me not to go out at night, you know, to be safe, who are they thinking of is going to attack me, right? It’s a very, very specific framing of a perpetrator that’s in their heads and in most people’s heads, which is a lower caste, Muslim man, disempowered man, like in the Hyderabad rape case that I was talking about, and this kind of monster theory reinforces that only these kinds of men can be perpetrators. It reinforces these harmful stereotypes about them being more violent or more dangerous. When we know that honestly anyone and everyone is violent and dangerous, right, there is no one kind of person or one community obviously that is more violent or dangerous. That’s obviously not true.
From the monster theory, comes very closely the stranger, which is again, this excuse that is, I mean or this justification that’s used to keep women indoors to limit their mobility because where we want to, you know, not talk to strange men because strange men are the ones who are going to harm us. But the data overwhelmingly show that- actually, according to NCRB data from a certain year, 94% of rape cases were where the victim or survivor knew the perpetrator. So most rape cases, like an overwhelming majority of rape cases, happen by someone that is known. It is often within the family. And you know, we are coming from a country here that doesn’t even recognize marital rape. So, imagine the percentage of marital rape was also counted. It’s often your husband. It’s often your uncle or your dad or or your neighbor or, you know, like, yeah, like I said, someone you know. Most times rapes happen within the same community of the perpetrator but if we look at, you know, the cases that are reported in the media, again, this is completely skewed like the way that the media overemphasizes stranger danger cases because it’s very convenient actually to focus on this myth of stranger danger because it allows us to, you know, tell women to stay indoors for their safety, it’s very convenient bogeyman that we create without actually addressing that women are not safe anywhere, you know, including inside their homes. What that does is lead to this villainization of the Dalit, Muslim, Adivasi man or someone you know, who’s poor because we think that only those kinds of men are capable of sexual violence, which is very, you know, untrue.
Asmita
So, I think that what I want to sign off with is and and you know hopefully there are some media people listening to this, it is the responsibility of the media. The media has a massive responsibility and like impact in the way that our country and our society understands gender-based violence, which is currently so flawed, and if the media could, you know, just get its act together and start reporting more sensitively, I think it would make a huge difference in the way, you know, GBV is even played out in this country. The best example for this is again the Delhi 2012 gang rape case because the reason that became a big deal is because- I mean it happened a little bit organically both, you know, I mean, civil society always protests, but the media actually caught on to it and blew it up and that changed the game because that led to the Justice Verma Commission being set up, which if any of you have a chance to read it you should. It’s one of the most progressive pieces of legislation that’s come out of our country or not legislation but one of the most progressive, you know, Judgements, that led to the rape laws being amended to include you know, non vaginal penetration as rape. So it expanded the definition of rape, which was so important. All of that happened because the media decided to focus on this issue. So the impact that the media can have is huge and sensitive reportage could do so much for our country.
Ruchika
Thank you so much Asmita for coming on the podcast today and sharing your thoughts and knowledge with us. Thank you especially also for creating this supremely valuable gender-based violence in media toolkit that you did with Feminism in India. It has definitely made me more conscious as a content creator and also it has changed how I consume news media as well and what I consume when it comes to news media. So really thank you for that. I think everyone should- I’ll link it in the description – I think everyone should have a look at that toolkit, even if you’re not a professional journalist or in the news media.
Vandita
Thank you so much for joining us as I think this is a great conversation. I think it left me with so many tangible learnings and there’s so much more that we can do with what you pointed out.
Ruchika
Please leave us any questions you might have as voice notes on Anchor or in our DMs, we’d love to hear from you. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook @onefuturecollective and @onefuture_india on Twitter (X).
Vandita
You can keep an eye out for our future episodes every second and fourth Thursday of the month. This podcast is brought to you by OFC and it’s produced by Ruchika. We hope to continue to keep seeing you in our future episodes where we converse with various guests in search of justice.
| Won’t you Celebrate With Me by Lucille Clifton Won’t you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life.I had no model.Born in Babylon, both non-white and woman.What did I see to be except myself?I made it uphere on this bridge between star shine and clay,My one hand holding tight, my other hand.Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. |
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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.