Vigilante Gender Violence

Social Class, the Gender Bargain, and Mob Attacks on Women Worldwide

Rebecca Álvarez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000174137
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, mob attacks on women by men have drawn public attention to an emerging social phenomenon. This book draws upon concepts from critical race theory and sociocultural evolutionary theory to examine this specific form of gender violence, which takes place outside the law and is a vigilante form of enforcing traditional gender norms. The author positions vigilante gender violence as a global issue produced during specific periods of sociocultural change in conditions marked by intensified social stratification.

The catalyst for vigilante gender violence is the formal state's breaching of the "gender bargain," the tacit psychological wage even non-elite men earn by at least not being female. When the state threatens to end the gender bargain by promoting women's rights, the die is cast for low-status men to enforce this bargain themselves in mob attacks against women who are perceived to be violating the patriarchal order.

Seen through independent case studies in different national settings, this book provides empirical evidence that demonstrates the existence of vigilante gender violence in times when societies are shifting from one phase to another and the social hierarchies present within are disrupted. With greater understanding of when and how to predict the occurrence of this phenomenon, the author posits notable ways to prevent it from happening altogether.

Part I

Vigilante Gender Violence

Chapter 1

Defining the Problem

Vigilante Gender Violence and its Global Reach

One Sunday in mid-December, 23-year-old Jyoti Singh left her parents’ home to meet a friend, Awnindra Pandey, to see a film. It was early evening in New Delhi, and the weather was foggy, smoggy, and cold. The film was Life of Pi, a Hollywood epic about the strength of a young boy who is shipwrecked and lost at sea with a tiger for company. The boy, Pi, survives a harrowing journey and triumphs against the odds. The Odyssean narrative of personal strength appealed to a young woman living in a middle-class neighborhood and on the rise in India’s capital city. That year, Jyoti was a physiotherapy student, a profession that in India confers significant social status. She had just finished her final exams and was slated to start her internship the following day. As a highly educated professional, her life would be different from that of her mother, who had moved to New Delhi to support Jyoti’s ambitions. Jyoti dreamed of one day building a hospital in her family’s ancestral village, where no medical facilities existed. Her entire family was counting on her to succeed in her chosen profession; her father had worked two jobs to support her education. These familial expectations were very different from those that had been placed on the women in her family and in her society for generations. In the past, the assumption had been that girl children would grow up to become wives, then mothers, and focus their effort on bearing more children, preferably boys. If a woman was so unfortunate as to birth a girl child, the child would be trained to replicate her mother’s life of housework and childbirth. This cycle had repeated itself since time immemorial in the farming communities surrounding New Delhi. But on this night, Jyoti was in defiance of the stifling norms of her parents’ village. Not only did she have a male friend, she also was out in a public setting without a chaperone after dark, something that women in rural areas did not dare to do. But in New Delhi, in this vast bustling metropolis, a woman might flout tradition to see a film and even spend some precious time alone with a young man.

After the film, Jyoti and her boyfriend caught a private bus. The bus was nearly empty, with only a few male passengers aboard. The driver was a man from a rural village much like that of Jyoti’s parents. His younger brother and a few friends were hanging out with him to pass the time, joyriding the bus. The friends, too, were men who had recently moved from rural areas to take advantage of the myriad opportunities that awaited them in the gargantuan city. Most of them lived in the same shantytown on the outskirts of the city. The men had been drinking heavily. Earlier that evening, they had already robbed one man, a carpenter, by luring him onto the bus and beating him, then taking his valuables. They had anticipated committing another robbery, but a female victim afforded other opportunities as well. What was a well-dressed young woman doing out and about at 9:30 in the evening, and with a man no less? It was time to teach her a lesson, as the driver, Ram Singh, would later say. “What are you doing with a girl so late?” came the question, directed at Awnindra.

As Ram Singh guided the bus through the streets of New Delhi, his brother and friends switched off the light in the bus and began their tutelage. First, Awnindra was beaten with an iron bar, then stripped. Terrified by the gang of men, he cowered under a seat. They dragged Jyoti to the back of the bus. Then, as she screamed for help and fought back with all her strength, the men took turns raping her, stopping only to switch drivers with Singh so that all of the friends on the bus could participate. They beat her with the iron bar and bit her face and body. The youngest, only 17, used the iron bar to penetrate her rectum so savagely that when he replaced the bar with his fist, a long piece of her intestine came out. Mercifully, by this time, Jyoti was unconscious with pain. Spent, the men pushed Jyoti and her boyfriend out of the moving bus by the side of the highway. The naked couple were discovered by male bystanders, one of whom described Jyoti as looking like a cow that had just given birth. Speeding away, the youngest attacker wrapped Jyoti’s intestines in a cloth and threw the bundle off the bus. Later, in the hospital, Jyoti survived long enough to identify her attackers. She died 13 days after the attack, after having been airlifted to the best transplant-specialty hospital in Singapore in an attempt to reconstruct her internal organs and save her life. [1]

What happened to Jyoti Singh shook Indian society to the core. Protests over the prevalence of rape in India broke out, and the justice system imposed the death penalty on the adult rapists. A documentary film was made [2], then banned when the authorities decided it would be too inflammatory to the Indian body public. Laws intended to deter and punish the rape of women and other forms of gender violence were strengthened. [3] In the Western world, a few people paid attention, at least until the next horrifying rape report from the developing world broke. Activists spoke of feeling numbed to the recent spate of news items about extreme violence toward women. Why were these kinds of stories suddenly proliferating? Violence directed against women has always been a part of all societies everywhere. What made these cases so different, so terrifying?

All human societies known to history have carried a greater or lesser undercurrent of potential for violence against the bodies of women. However, until relatively recently, this threat was expressed primarily in a domestic setting; the violence was directed by the husband against his wife, the father against his daughter. The kind of violence experienced by Jyoti was different. It was public, and it was directed by multiple strangers against a seemingly random victim. In terms of the extraordinary ferocity of the attack and the intent of terrorizing a victim perceived to be overstepping her social bounds, it bears more than a passing similarity to the lynching of African-Americans in the U.S. South. [4] It was a textbook example of what I will call vigilante gender violence. By this term, I mean the types of crimes against women that have grabbed headlines in recent years, defined by violent, extralegal, and public punishment of individual women by mobs or gangs of men who see their victims as violating traditional gender norms. The stories of these crimes have sometimes been dismissed by those in the West as simply due to a generalized hatred of women in non-Western countries, or more frequently, as a part of religious doctrine. They have been used to cast the Western world as a morally superior place where secular humanism and/or Christianity inures women to the threat of vigilante gender violence. They have also been used, in some instances, to bolster Islamophobia. A more accurate narrative is more complex. In this chapter, I will examine several more recent and more well-known incidents of vigilante gender violence. In each case, we will see that the motives of the perpetrators are not primarily religious in nature, though religion may become an ancillary justification for public retribution against women who dare to challenge patriarchal authority. We will also see that these cases bear a striking similarity in terms of the backgrounds of perpetrators and victims, and the urban settings in nations which, until relatively recently, had primarily rural populations.

Our first case study takes place in Kenya, in the capital city of Nairobi, a large metropolis that has formed through migration from the rural countryside in the way that cities do across the globe. Over the last 40 years, the population has grown by 600 percent to over 3 million people in an area that is about half the size of Los Angeles. Like many large cities, in what people in the West term ‘developing nations,’ but which might more accurately be called ‘formerly colonized nations,’ open-air markets coexist blocks away from formal urban-style shops. While women are a critical part of Kenyan market life and are often the primary sellers of such goods as fruits, vegetables, and khat, the streets themselves present a gauntlet that must be traversed by women on their way from home to market. The streets of Nairobi have long been a public space that in theory is available to both men and women, but in practice, is dominated by men. Lower-income and unemployed male residents of Nairobi congregate streetside to vend their wares, to pick up passengers on the ubiquitous motorcycle taxis, or simply to socialize. The high density of males in the streets confers an implicit power on men. Women who must walk to their destinations are subject to constant comments on their appearance or their sexuality. In this, the low-grade background noise of sexual harassment is no different from that found in, for example, sections of Manhattan. [5] However, within the last decade, a new and more disturbing form of street harassment has emerged in Nairobi. Women have been stripped naked and sometimes paraded in public or beaten by gangs or mobs of men. [6] This new phenomenon has also been observed in urban areas of Malawi and Zimbabwe, African nations that also share a former history of colonization by the British. [7, 8]

A large public movement of support, #MyDressMyChoice was born in 2014 in Kenya as a response to horrifying videos which were taken by mobs of men and posted on social media forums as warnings to women who wear short skirts in public. Women have been targeted for stripping, followed by public beating or even rape with a beer bottle after insisting that a man owed 70 cents at an egg stand, or after simply riding a public bus. Victims are frequently too ashamed after these mob attacks to allow their faces to be shown on television. The women who have been targeted for this form of vigilante gender violence have uniformly been chosen as victims because of their attire in a male-dominated public space. The men involved have openly stated that they are enforcing a traditional dress code. These women have been wearing pants or, more frequently, skirts deemed too short. Frequently, the attackers appear unafraid of social or legal consequences; they often film their attacks, which are then posted to Facebook or YouTube. The pattern is the same: a woman in an urban area is spotted violating gender norms shared by most in the rural population and is then attacked by a large group of men who aim to intimidate and terrify not only their victim, but by extension, the female population as a whole. While civil society in both Kenya and Malawi has been vocal in counterprotest, the risk of mob attack causes many women to restrict their wardrobe options as a preventative measure. Legally, there has been an effort to reinforce women’s right to dress as they please; however, as with all laws, the real test lies in enforcement. In many parts of newly industrializing nations, vigilante street justice trumps formal legislation.

Another case study in which a nation’s law dictates one thing while traditional norms dictate another is found further to the south in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the rapidly urbanizing nation of South Africa, the formal laws surrounding a woman’s right to choose whom she wishes to partner with are the most progressive on the continent. In South Africa alone, among all other African nations, the law defends same-sex marriage. This legal anomaly has led to a small-scale migration of lesbian women from neighboring countries who face severe social and legal oppression at home. Although the laws lead many to believe that South African cities are a beacon of tolerance on issues of gender and sexuality, the reality is very different. It is in the largely Christian South Africa that the practice of so-called ‘corrective rape’ has emerged.

Corrective rape is the term perpetrators use to describe the act of raping lesbian women in an attempt to convince them to ‘be straight.’ This concept is widely accepted by many men in South African society, the justification being that lesbian women simply need the experience of penetration by a man in order to ‘change their ways.’ Corrective rapes are almost exclusively perpetrated by groups of men rather than individuals. Though the modus operandi may vary, the rapes often occur in public or semi-public settings and are accompanied by beatings and/or other forms of humiliation, such as urinating on the victim. Survivors speak of perpetrators yelling threats such as “We’ll teach you to be a real woman.” The fiction of the intent of corrective rape may also be entirely dispensed with, as it was in 2007, when the tortured bodies of prominent lesbian rights activist Sizakele Sigasa and her partner Salome Masooa were found in a field in an impoverished suburb of Johannesburg. Both had been brutally gang raped and shot. [9] The laws that made it possible for them to be public with their relationship and to even marry each other legally if they so wished did not protect them from the wave of vigilante gender violence washing over South Africa’s cities since the establishment of these laws. Female relatives of lesbian South African women, such as daughters, mothers, or even grandmothers may be subject to rape or other lesser types of retaliatory punishments purely because of their association with a woman daring to flout patriarchal relationship norms.

Moving to Central Asia, we find a third case study in the circumstances surrounding the public lynching of a female Islamic scholar in Kabul, the largest city in Afghanistan and its capital. When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, one of its stated goals was the emancipation of women from the fundamentalist Taliban government. While the U.S. became bogged down in the same morass of tribal loyalties and neocolonial blowback that the Soviets and, before them, the British also encountered, there was some real success in raising the social status of women—at least on paper. Although Afghanistan is one of the very few nations in the world where women have a lower life expectancy than men on average, girls went from a legally 0 percent participation rate in primary education under the Taliban regime to a conservative estimate of a 35 percent participation rate—in just a decade. Women also made significant strides politically: an electoral law mandated that a quarter of all provincial council seats had to be filled by women (a greater percentage than the equivalent political body in the U.S.).

But this rapid social change was enforced at the point of a gun; the United States military h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I Vigilante Gender Violence
• Part II Case Studies
• Part III Where We Go From Here: Possible Solutions for a Global Problem
• Index