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Decoding the Deviants: Tara Kaushal On Why Men Rape

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Why Men Rape author interview

In her new book Why Men Rape, Tara Kaushal sets out to understand the reasons through a detailed investigation which includes meetings with nine men who have an inclination to commit acts of sexual violence.

But what about the woman who conducted these meetings? Who is she? And what was it like to come face-to-face with these men who have committed unspeakable acts of brutality? We decided to investigate the investigator – Tara Kaushal tells it all in an exclusive interview with HarperCollins India.

You specialised in feminism in your undergraduate degree, and gender studies was a part of your Master’s curriculum. How has your education contributed in shaping your views on gender violence, and on your decision to write this book?

I think I’ve always been a feminist (though, obviously, not fully formed and still evolving)! So there is no question about what came first—the interest certainly preceded the education. Learning about feminism, gender, post-colonialism as a part of English degrees was just great—I learnt so much there and since, I have so much to say, and have the tools to disseminate it.

Gender violence, specifically, was not part of the curricula. It was part of my life, however, and was an overriding theme in my early writing—something I realised in retrospect, when writing the conclusion of the book. To be able to analyse the causes of gender violence beyond first-person narrative and layperson opinion, I spent four years (2013-17) reading exclusively about it, before embarking on the undercover research and writing.

The backgrounds of the nine rapists are vastly different – from an experienced doctor to an unemployed youth. Do you think this serves as a rejoinder to the #NotAllMen argument?

There are several rejoinders to the #NotAllMen argument. #NotAllMen but #YesAllWomen. #NotAllMen but enough men for women to be afraid of all men. #NotAllMen rape but all men benefit from the patriarchy that sexual terrorism enforces.

One of the ways to interpret #NotAllMen is that men from ‘good’ families don’t rape. And that it’s only certain types of men who do—the Shakti Kapoor idea of men who rape; ‘the Other’, strangers lurking in the bushes, waiting for a savarna virgin to come along; stranger danger! This interpretation is false. Men across social strata perpetrate sexual violence; I believe their reasons for doing so, the circumstances that allow these things to happen, are different across classes. This is the framework through which I’ve explored the answers to the book’s title question.

On what basis did you select these men? Were there any common characteristics they displayed?

When I had set about searching for subjects, the first avenue I pursued was finding their identities through their survivors. I received most responses from the call I put out on Facebook, where my audience is mostly as privileged as I am. Then there were all the friends who had told me their stories over the years; and also, strangers who sought me out, unsolicited, at parties, online, even at a tile shop(!), upon hearing about this project. I spoke to seventy women who have been raped. (At that point, many more since.) Now, since gender violence usually follows class lines (a theory I unpack in the book), I had the names of seventy-two elite men who have raped.

But, as much as I didn’t want to only promote the Shakti Kapoor idea of rapists, these elite men weren’t representative of India either. For me, finding the former type of subject was the far more challenging task.

To find men from other social classes who had raped, I knocked on every door I could—from NGOs to the police to local contacts to detective agencies to local media. Eventually, I found subjects across social classes and locations across the country.

There were several commonalities I found with these men. Patriarchy, of course, the idea that the genders are different and unequal. They also all had power and anger issues.

What role do you think society and social backgrounds play in the making of a rapist?

Much ink has been spilt about the nature versus nurture debate. Before the twentieth century, the theory that the criminal was someone who was just ‘born bad’—from Cesare Lombroso, considered the father of modern criminology—dominated thinking about criminal behaviour. In the last decades of the 1800s, the introduction of psychology and psychoanalysis courtesy Wilhelm Wundt and Sigmund Freud set the ball rolling to the question—are criminals born or are they formed?

The reigning opinion in academia at the moment is that absolutely everything related to sexual violence comes down to nurture. Decades of research illustrate that people’s behaviour is a response to incentives and training: “Every bird sings in the way it was raised,” a psychologist I was seeing told me. While there are loopholes in a nurture-only position and, I believe, neither nature nor nurture tell the whole story as human sexuality is too complex and complicated—I do believe nurture plays a large role in the creation of a human being. Home, community, society, culture all play important roles in the shaping of a mind.

A lot of people may find it unnerving to spend time with men who have been accused of such brutal crimes. Did you at any point feel threatened, uncomfortable, or overwhelmed during the process of interviewing them?

For the most part, I was just excited, flying on the adrenalin of it all. It was Sahil, my spouse, watching my location on a WhatsApp group at home, who was most concerned. There were a few times I was uncomfortable—like when the three of my subjects who were sexually aroused when we were discussing the intimate questions obviously, overtly touched themselves in my presence. There were also a couple of times I was actively afraid—when I found out there was a trap being laid for me by my subject in the village in the district of Kathua. Another time was when I was alone for a long period with a sexually aroused political henchman in Bhopal who had told me that punishment, even phaansi, wouldn’t deter him from doing something he wanted to do; and that he could “take an army anywhere, 200 people can surround the building right now.” I was terrified. But I was okay for the most part.

What emotional impact did this process of analysing a rapist’s mind have on your own mental health? 

I was dealing with rage and depression as soon as I started going undercover, and had a complete meltdown nine months after I started working on the project full-time. In December 2017, after five subjects, I’d hit rock bottom, unable to sleep, having blackouts, lashing out. Fortunately, I took a break from research and went abroad to write for a few months.

I resumed the undercover research in July 2018. It coincided with major loss and grief on the personal front, and I was in the depths of hell, crying on the floor for days on end, unable to get out of bed. There was personal stuff; plus, it was during this period that I interviewed the doctor who raped one of my closest friends and left her paraplegic at the age of 12, so that didn’t help. I was semi-functional for a while. I was glad to be done in December!

It’s hard to stare into the abyss and not have it stare back at you. I thought I had emerged unscathed, but I’m recently discovering that I have not. A couple of months ago, the lock to my room jammed, and Sahil was trying to open it from the outside. I found myself, stupidly, irrationally, in tears, so triggered was I by the banging! So, I’m in therapy now, for the first time in 13 years.

Having said that, it’s not like I’ve emerged jaded, believing all men are capable of or nurse the desire to rape. I wouldn’t have been able to do and survive this without the love of my spouse, and of friends and family, many of whom are men. I would not have been able to do this project without the army of friends and family that stood behind me.

You began writing this book in the aftermath of 2012 Delhi Gang Rape. Since then, have you seen any significant changes in the legal system? What would you suggest we do differently now?

Look, I don’t believe in a law and order approach to solving crime—I’m of the ‘prevention rather than cure’ mindset. Whenever we demand action, the first thing that the government does is change the law. It’s the easiest thing to do. In 2018, the Madhya Pradesh government decided child rapists would be hanged and that was the new law. We bay for blood, and we want quick and easy answers to complex problems—and we get them. Change the law, it’s simple! No one wants to do the heavy lifting, of changing culture, society, media, mindsets… that’s too hard to do.

If you want to talk about the law, I’ll say this: There are cracks and crevices in the law, but I wouldn’t want to focus on them. The problem in India is not so much the law. It’s the execution of the law. It’s the law enforcement. From the police to the judicial system. We do need legal reforms, but we don’t need it in the laws, we need it in the way it’s executed.

Women don’t report cases of sexual violence because they believe nothing will happen and most times that’s unfortunately true. And it’s a catch 22. We don’t report it and the men get away and the burden is back on the victim to prove it. The only way to solve this is with police reforms but more importantly, men have to stop doing it.

By virtue of the research you’ve put in to this book, your understanding of abusive men is better than most people. What message would you give to survivors of abuse?

There are so many things I want to say to survivors that it could be another book altogether! Off the top of my head:

I don’t know whether this makes you feel any better, but you are not alone. #YesAllWomen.

You bear no blame or shame. Your vulnerability is irrelevant. Your clothes, the time of day, the type of neighbourhood… are all irrelevant. One could be physically and mentally incapacitated by everything from intoxication to exhaustion to grief to handicap, or simply being a malnourished or smaller-sized woman, or a child. Far from an excuse for exploitation, the weakest should evoke our best instincts, of empathy, support and kindness. That this is not the way of the world does not make it right.

There is no such thing as the ‘perfect victim’. The world over, people and the police have low trust in survivors: an abiding scepticism of women who report being raped. What kind of woman is she? Was there a prior relationship? It appears that a woman who didn’t know her assailant, who fought back, who has a clean record and hadn’t been drinking or offering sex for money or drugs—that woman will be taken seriously. The idea of the ‘righteous or ‘perfect’ victim ties in to the patriarchal construct of who is a ‘good woman’ and who is a ‘bad’ one. Her ‘character’—that boils down to her sexual life—is all-important, and determines some women as good, and worthy of our sympathy and empathy; and the rest as deserving of all bad things that come to them. That’s rubbish.

Your actions during the assault are all valid. Also, most people believe fighting, screaming, shouting is the only valid response to assault, in the ‘bachao, bachao’ fashion that we’ve seen in movies. Truth is, fighting is only one of the many responses victims can have to being attacked. People also freeze, unable to move or respond. And there’s also what is called the ‘friend’ response, an attempt to speak to the assailant and appeal to their humanity, to disarm them through kindness. All four responses —fight, flight, freeze or friend—are valid.

As are your actions after the assault… they’re all valid too. There are as many ways to process child sexual abuse and rape as there are survivors of child sexual abuse and rape. Contrary to popular belief, not all victims behave—or feel—like zinda laashes after. I’ve met women who’ve stayed with their abusive husbands for socioreligious and economic reasons; and some who didn’t. Being gang raped in front of her husband made one woman die of shame, literally, jumping off a train; being gang raped in front of her friend in Mumbai made Sohaila Abdulali write an article about it in the eighties and then a bestselling book over thirty years later… There is no prescribed way for a victim to be or behave.

What has been your personal takeaway from the interaction you’ve had with these men?

I believe these men are not monsters. Men who rape look like normal men.

The Shakti Kapoor idea of men who rape is a pervasive and dangerous myth… as is the myth that rich men from ‘good families’ do not rape.

As #MeToo and #MeTooIndia have revealed, this is not the case. Many media and movie men, some more senior than others—from former editor and then Minister of State for External Affairs MJ Akbar to actors like Nana Patekar and Alok Nath; directors; artists; lawyers; comedians; journalists; musicians—have been accused of a wide range of inappropriate behaviours, some more serious than others. Although it was meant as a movement to highlight workplace sexual harassment, enraged survivors raged across social media recounting their abuse at the hands of intimate partners, family, friends. These are ‘normal’ men, men you may well know.

I agree with the feminist philosopher Kate Manne when she writes that calling men who rape ‘monsters’ has damaging results. “Monsters are unintelligible, uncanny, and they are outwardly frightening. What is frightening about rapists is partly the lack of identifying marks and features, beyond the fact that they are by far most likely to be men. Rapists are human, all too human, and they are very much among us. The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature.”

When we call these men ‘evil’, ‘crazy’, ‘mad’, we situate them as abnormal and irredeemable. This absolves society of any responsibility for their creation, thus allowing us to remain blinkered to the need for social introspection and systemic change. Sexual violence is not some special type of crime—in which the motivations are subconscious and uncontrollable—rather than overt and deliberate as with other criminal behaviour.

Will you continue to write on social issues? What are you currently working on?

I don’t know what else I would do! I have always written about gender, sexuality and sociocultural issues, and that’s what I will continue to do.

As I envisioned it at the start and as it currently stands, Why Men Rape is a multimedia gender journalism and activism project that spans two books, a documentary and an active online presence. The documentary is in the works. The second book will take some time: I’m only now starting to stew on it. In the meanwhile, I am co-authoring another book in the human-rights and gender-justice space, also with HarperCollins.

I always imagined my life and career would be divided into before and after this book, and it certainly feels like a couple of months after the launch. I am open to exploring all the things the universe sends my way…

Why Men Rape
About the Book - Why Men Rape

In Why Men Rape, Tara Kaushal sets out to understand the reasons through a detailed investigation which includes meetings with nine men who have an inclination to commit acts of sexual violence. The men interviewed for the book belong to…

About the Author - Tara Kaushal

Tara Kaushal is a writer and media consultant based in Mumbai, India. She received the Laadli Media Award for gender-sensitive writing in 2013-4, and won a Femina Superwomen of the Year Award in 2018.

To read more, order your copy of Why Men Rape, by Tara Kaushal today!

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