FIR and the rape victim

A lot is being said and debated about the rape case involving a student of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, who was assaulted by her own peers.

A few things disgust me about the way papers reported the whole episode, and continue to report it.

Firstly, is a newspaper God? If not, why does it play like one? The victim, irrespective of her nationality, gave details of the most horrible thing that could have happened to her, to the police, in due faith. Not just that, she gave the details for the sake of truth, so that she could get justice. For a daily newspaper that found those details sensational, it only proved convenient to publish them - the entire FIR, in graphic detail! It is a First Information Report that is a mandatory document. At the moment, it is a public document on the basis of which crime correspondents write their news reports.

Instead, a newspaper went ahead and published it in its Page Two, with all insensitivity possible.

Has media lost its sensitivity to a rape victim's plight? Why do newspapers have to treat rape victims as sex objects whose story they can repeat and ramble off in graphic detail? So that they can sell a few thousand copies more?

I am sure even right-thinking men did not approve of such mindless display that a newspaper gave the FIR, with not as much as a word of approval from the victim. If the girl's friends turned beasts for a night of their animal fun, the newspaper was no less, in using her suffering for its own pages.

I thought that today's readers, numbed by sensationalism in TV channels and to an extent, papers too, would have been quiet about it. Thank God, for their response. For, the paper, had to publish its stand alongside some letters, the following day. The sad truth is, the paper's three line explanation showed it still feels justified in publishing the report the way it did.

As if to pepper the pscyhological trauma, another paper went ahead and published an anonymous quote from forensic experts, that the victim had consumed drugs on that night. A third newspaper had the audacity to publish a headline where the accused Vinamra Soni asked whe the victim was out with six people that night. And published in graphic detail, the version of the accused in the anticipatory bail application.

So, what was the paper trying to tell me, the reader? That the victim asked for it? That she should not have gone out to that joint or pub with those guys? That she was merely available?
Agreed that the accused should not have been let off hook and that the newspapers published their pictures, but by merely with-holding the victim's name and publishing everything else about her, the media is not doing her a favour.

I will not be surprised, if sometime in future, despite all this hype around the case, the accused get let off the hook. After all, we live in a society where not just aspiring film actresses, but even rape victims, are objects of desire!