UNEVEN POWER
Last month, Justice N. Kirubakaran of the Madras High Court recommended castration as a means to control sexual offences against children. He noted that the present law is ineffective and incapable of addressing the “menace” of sexual violence and “castration of child rapists will fetch magical results”.
To be fair, Kirubakaran was only echoing the sentiments of those,who, in recent times, have asked for measures like greater surveillance, harsher punitive laws and a more expansive legal definition of rape in order to curb sexual violence. An extreme form of their argument has been to insist on the harshest bodily punishment for sexual offenders. They, it seems, would settle for nothing less than either death penalty or castration as the most suitable form of punishment for rape-convicts.
Castration, be it chemical or surgical, is currently practised in several parts of the world, including many advanced democracies. The Czech Republic has a surgical castration programme which includes the removal of the tissue in the testes that produces testosterone. Poland, Germany and certain states of the United States of America allow chemical castration, in which hormonal drugs are administered in order to reduce the sexual urges of the perpetrator. Whether or not castration does curb the incidence of rape, the demand for it reveals something deeply disturbing about how we tend to conceptualize sexuality, the human body and gender relations.
A particular subject of debate is whether rape constitutes physical violence or sexual violence. When a rapist is punished, is he punished for the physical injury or the sexual assault? Finally, by insisting on castration, do we not automatically give in to the misleading notion that sexuality is something that we locate in the human genitalia alone?
Many would argue that even when we think of sexuality in cultural terms, we cannot ignore the biological realities of the human body. The very fact that rape requires the insertion of the penis into the female orifice (vagina, anus or mouth) means that all men due to anatomical design are potential rapists and all women perpetual victims. It is perhaps this biological truth that prompted scholar, Susan Brownmiller, to conclude that the very fact of differentiated male and female bodies make rape a possibility, irrespective of whether or not the socio-cultural environment promotes gender violence.
Women, being marked by a biological disadvantage of having no penetrative organ of the retaliating kind, will be construed as vulnerable. This notion of rape has proven to be immensely influential in the realm of punitive law. Legal definitions of rape insist on penetration as its most conclusive evidence. As such, for some castration seems to be a justifiable demand.
But if we try to envision sexuality as something that is not just located in the genitalia, then the very idea of rape as merely a penetrative act and the demand to castrate (whether literally in surgical castration or hormonally in chemical castration) seem to falter. We also begin to see how laws against sexual violence punish only the convict, while keeping the skewed power structures that legitimises violence on the female body undisturbed. This is precisely why Michel Foucault had warned us against treating rape as just a sexual act. We must be able to rise above our desire to locate sexuality in the body alone. We then might be able to see sexual violence as an outcome of misogyny and patriarchal ideologies that refuses female subjectivity and naturalizes violence on women. Castration, or for that matter any other form of corporeal punishment, will not do any good if we are unable to undo the existing order of things.
