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Society
The
Outrageous Response to a Child Murder
by Pratiksha Baxi
The police in
Uttar Pradesh have produced an outrageous scandal while "investigating"
the gruesome murder of Arushi Talwar, 14, and the domestic worker,
Hemraj, 47, a Nepali immigrant in the employ of a couple who are
doctors, in NOIDA.
The first scene of the scandal opened with the police alleging that
Hemraj had killed Arushi. However, the discovery of Hemraj's brutally
murdered body at once falsified police sociology that all urban murders
are naturally committed by domestic help.
The police are not embarrassed by the fact that their assumption has
converted an entire class of domestic workers into a suspect community.
Yet, the vulnerabilities of domestic workers to everyday forms of
exploitation, abuse, violence, suspicion, and indignity hardly ever
finds redress. Nor is the murder of a domestic mourned similarly. No
candles were lit for Hemraj.
The second scene of the scandal followed the assertion by the law
enforcers that it was Arushi's father, Dr Rajesh Talwar, who killed his
daughter and the domestic worker. The 'act' was described as an 'honor'
killing and/or a crime of passion.
The use of this form of sexist police sociology is extremely startling,
if not confusing. The language of crimes of passions or so-called honor
crimes has historically denied justice to women who have been murdered.
In this case, the term has been used to address a spontaneous fit of
rage against one of the victims. Traditionally, crimes of passion have
been used to describe cases involving sexual transgressions, for
example, where husbands murder their wives on grounds of sexual jealousy
in a fit of rage and as acts of spontaneity that find reasonable
husbands turning murderous. The grave and sudden provocation defence has
helped many husbands to get a lighter sentence for murder.
Women have been the paradigmatic suspect community in Indian society.
Honor crimes are not a category of criminal law, they are a popular
category that describes certain kinds of killings which are described
from the perpetrator's viewpoint.
A murder is described as an honor killing when patriarchal fathers [or
families] kill their unmarried daughters for exercising their right to
choice to marry or engage in consensual sexual relationships, which are
perceived to bring disgrace to the family. Since the police often see
the right to choice as an instance of a crime against the honor of the
father, there have been many cases when the police have assisted in
hunting down a runaway couple, putting the couple's life in danger. Or a
daughter may be murdered after she has been raped, since women are
routinely blamed for provoking a man to cause him to rape her.
To clarify matters further, a dowry murder is not perceived as an honor
crime since the father's honor is not lost if his married daughter is
murdered, nor is the honor of a husband diminished by the murder of his
wife.
The category of so-called honor crimes has been criticized since it
describes the crime according to the motives of the perpetrator rather
than the rights of the victim.
Since the police are not concerned with the rights of the child victim,
it is able to sexualize the child's body by proclaiming that the father
killed his 14-year-old child on suspicions of an objectionable
relationship with the 47-year-old domestic help. Hence, the police are
able to claim that a dead teenager was "characterless", just as her
father supposedly is.
As in the Scarlett Keeling case here, too, the child's body has been
sexualized. Arushi Talwar did not fit the police pictures of a "modest"
child. Rather than combating the colonial construct of a "seductive
child" whose nature is to willfully attract sexual attention of adult
men, the police endorse this dangerous model.
Such sexualization of children's bodies encourages the vibrant rape
culture, which promotes sexualized violence and places the blame on the
naturally seductive child for the wrongs of adult men. It also naturally
assumes that a class of men is responsible for all the sexual wrongs in
our society.
The claim of the police, akin to the claim of the medical expert in rape
cases, that they can read signs of "consensual" sexual relationships
from a dead body, is breathlessly voyeuristic. It has nothing to do with
technique or science.
The voyeuristic gaze on the so-called characterless child in public
discourse signifies the fact that crimes against children are understood
through heterosexist adult categories. Their lives are not understood
through their voices, or the traces of their voice.
It is appalling that we accept adult categories of sexuality, which
defame and defile a dead child, whose voice represented as a trace in a
scrapbook and a video, is so opaque to us.
There is something very wrong with a public, which consumes images of a
sexualized child to debate whether this is the limit of a new urban
pathology.
It is really distressing that we accept the framework of honor crimes as
appropriate to this case. Not only does the use of the categories of
honor crimes or crimes of passion obscure the facts, but it also allows
the police to sexualize children's bodies as being "characterless".
If we wish to grieve for the terrible murders of Arushi and Hemraj, we
must challenge the practices of policing that frame a child as a
sexualized child-adult and the domestic as the sexual transgressor or
potential criminal.
If we wish to truly mourn these deaths, we must refuse the voyeuristic
gaze forced upon us by the police framed by the camera.
(The writer is Assistant Professor,
Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi.)
June 8 ,
2008
By arrangement with
WFS
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