Photo courtesy of Sri Lanka Brief
Look up “schoolgirl” and “rape” and “Sri Lanka”. There are many stories which are posted by Google Search with those taglines. We have to refine the search for the most recent atrocity by location and date. Location: Thanamalwila. It is difficult to determine the date because the case involves a situation of ongoing multiple incidents of rape over the course of several months. These incidents were brought to light only when the young girl became pregnant and gave birth to a child and a report was then made concerning the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy.
Twenty two perpetrators were involved in ongoing sexual assault, abuse and coercion of the minor girl. Police are interviewing and charging the students involved, the principal and deputy principal of the school, some of the teachers and some of the parents who sought to cover up the incidents to protect the school’s reputation, their own professional positions in the case of the teachers and the status and reputation of the perpetrators and their families.
The case is being called a “gang rape”. And that is the aspect of it I want to focus on in this article: particularly “gang” behaviour as part of male subculture. In many cities all over the world, teenage boys join gangs in their local neighbourhoods to establish solidarity with their peers and to gain protection and support and a sense of power for themselves. The emotional vulnerability of boys, and particularly in the age group in their teens and twenties, has been highlighted in recent times by many sociologists, focusing on the relative social and psychological isolation of boys, their difficulty communicating their inner feelings and the toxic masculinity culture which surrounds them and makes it hard for them to express or respect vulnerability in themselves or others.
They are also growing up in an online culture which is saturated in pornography where women and girls are routinely objectified, reduced to their physical appearance and characteristics and treated with scorn and disrespect. The most violent of these pornographic films and stories and images both portray and encourage sadism, where pleasure is derived by viewers from seeing acts of dehumanising cruelty inflicted on women. It must be said that this culture of pornography is readily accessible to anyone who has a phone, tablet or computer and that it exists and flourishes and is normalised within a general culture in Sri Lanka in which the status and dignity of women are unacceptably debased.
Gang rape is more prevalent in South Asia than in other countries and India and Sri Lanka report more incidents of such atrocities than other countries in the region. This reflects on the status of women in these countries and highlights the urgent need for the upliftment of girls and women in every aspect of life.
What makes this case stand out in a terrible way is that because of the age and context of the victim and her attackers, what is exposed is not only the breakdown of moral awareness and accountability on the part of the boys, but the dereliction of the duty of care of many of the adults involved from the teachers in the schools to the parents of the schoolboy perpetrators and allegedly some of the medical personnel who were initially presented with the crisis.
Smartphone penetration
It costs about Rs. 10-25,000 to get a basic smartphone which has the capacity to take photographs and make videos and share the images via WhatsApp or other forms of messaging. Even children in regional schools would be able to afford such a device. How they use it is up to them. Sri Lanka, despite its overall economic challenges, has one of the highest rates of smartphone usage in the world and has one of the cheapest rates payable for digital data in the world. Children from the smartphone generation may be technically proficient but show deficiencies in other areas of social and psychological knowledge, empathy and relational awareness in what are called “soft skills”. The very term suggests that these skills are fragile and undervalued in a vision of a harsh and challenging world.
Sri Lanka recently passed legislation to empower women: Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality Bills. It is difficult to think of any situation which could be more disempowering than the crisis in which this young girl has been involved. The references in the news articles to tuition and tuition teachers opens up an insight which we need to register while thinking about this case. The age of the students is significant because they were Year 11 students, 15 or 16 years of age, meaning they had finished or were finishing their O’Levels. Many students after O’Levels in Sri Lanka seem to lose any motivation for academic achievement and are bored and disengaged, relying on tutoring to get them through their school coursework. The focus on rote learning, and lack of teaching of critical thinking skills, and the absence of Civics as a subject in the school curriculum contribute to the lack of relevance of the formal education, from the students’ perspective.
School is therefore not for them a focus of learning but more a social forum in which they can engage with their peers. A’Level students are already geared for academic success and are from aspirational families who encourage their progress. The danger of stagnancy in those who are merely going through the motions of education is not only intellectual but moral. Students who do not see any future for themselves via academic routes still must attend school and it is in the Years 7-10 (up to the age of 14) prior to O’Levels that such moral education should be encouraged. This of course includes contemporary sex education focusing on consent, which is surely best understood in the context of moral responsibility to one’s fellow citizens. In other countries and in urban areas the students of this age group might be focusing on entering their A’Level courses, planning on further study at university and obviously not wanting to disrupt their own career development and prospects in any way.
But the personal disengagement of the children in this age group and these regional areas must be noted and addressed. Observing the responses to the reporting of this case on social media, which range from suggestions of punitive actions against the rapists, to harsh sentencing, treating the perpetrators as adults under the law, despite their young ages, we see that this case seems to have created shame as well as shock and horror and disbelief on the part of the general public.
Interestingly, while media outlets are updating us about the case, there appears to not be much commentary about this case on Facebook, the social media platform of choice for most Sri Lankans. Perhaps people have no words. They are asking “How did our society become so broken? Our systems are failing us”. The responses by public institutions such as the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus show that public authorities have early identified the collapse of proper protections for the minor child in this case. However, rectifying such a situation will be complex and challenging, where damage has been so multi-faceted: punitive measures and calling to account people who are fearful of their own reputations and have already chosen to ignore the rights of a vulnerable child in their care are the first step but may fall short of what the child herself requires. Does she know what help to ask for? Are these resources and supports available to her? Her ongoing health and well being need sensitive and consistent empowerment.
Psychologists are required to skillfully, patiently and with sensitivity help this child rebuild her sense of self: her dignity, her worth, her boundaries and her ability to trust not only others but her own judgment and to generate a sense of optimism for her future. In this case, the victim and the perpetrators all live in a small community and are known to each other. The degree of shame and stigma applied to her, the public speculation about her relationship with the young man with whom she was in love and who lured her into a situation of vulnerability, the repeated blaming of her as a victim rather than the calling to account of the perpetrators, are thus amplified. There is no protective anonymity in her immediate community.
Rape is not about desire, it is about power
In recent studies done in Australia where domestic violence and gender based violence are sharply escalating, 90% of young women surveyed said they felt unsafe and disempowered in relation to men. In this case, the 22 perpetrators were abusing the power their gender confers on them in a patriarchal society, and the power of numbers, against one defenceless girl, forcing her to drink alcohol to diminish her capacity to resist, bonding with each other through the shared outrages they committed against her,leveraging the vulnerable state in which her regard for the boy with whom she was in love placed her and harnessing the power of technology to shame their victim into repeated compliance. Her humiliation clearly made them feel powerful. They must have felt a cowardly, roaring sense of affirmation and victory to be able to trap this young girl into a situation of chronic shame, worthlessness, panic and helplessness, effectively making her into what they seem to see her and other girls and young women to be: a sort of caged and defenceless, subhuman being, with no autonomy and no power of consent, whom they could terrorise and subjugate to their collective will.
The facts of this case seem to come straight from a vision of hell, a world where innocence and humanity have been eroded. We are all the losers every time such incidents occur. Many are saying, “How have we come to this? The country is damaged beyond redemption”. However, people who live and work in such a society and still continue to strongly adhere to the highest personal standards continue to work to raise awareness of the urgent need for improvement in child protection and the status of women. In a way, the dark context revealed by the emergence of cases such as this illuminates those who are working to improve the situation, by contrast.
We live in a world in which people are hyper aware of their own rights. In this context, responsibilities towards others, including respect, courtesy and the upholding of their rights and dignity, need to be modelled by adults to children and applied with integrity and consistency by those in authority. If the children of a country are its future, we need to support and protect them far better. They are all, including the perpetrators of these acts, showing the impacts of the dereliction of duty of care which is owed to them under the UN Charter Of The Rights Of The Child.
They are becoming desensitised to the rights of others, particularly those most vulnerable. Just like a personal health crisis shows the need for immediate improvement in the self care of an individual, so a case like this shows us that a total re-evaluation needs to take place in both the way such cases are handled by authorities concerned and the provision of pre-emptive measures via education and awareness of youth in regard to matters concerning sexual conduct as well as attention directed to ongoing support and care of those affected by abuse and attack.
We all, as individuals and collectively, look in the mirror at stages in the process of our development and at times like this we do not like what we see. What we then do next is what determines the outcome. We could transform our shame into action; we could make Sri Lanka a case study of radical improvement and positive change, just from citizens’ activity and collective conduct. Social media and online communication platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are powerful instruments. Such a use of online resources to inform and uplift our community would be a remedy for the abuse of technology we have seen in this case where smartphone capacity was unconscionably abused, to shame and degrade one of our children. Punishment after the fact is not enough; pre-emptive education is needed.