Firstpost

“Girls can be raped. Boys can not. It’s as simple as that,” my mother would say each time I fought as a kid to go out to a late night party or just venture alone to the corner store after dark. It marked the end of the argument: an unassailable fact that sealed the issue.

Of course, she was lying – to herself more than me. Boys can and are indeed raped, vulnerable to brutal sexual violence that we choose not to acknowledge. We guard our daughters’ bodies with zealous attention, caution them over and again from a very young age to beware. But we leave our boys to fend themselves, unfettered and unaware. And in our wilful silence, we ensure that if indeed our son were to get unlucky – at the hands of a stranger, acquaintance or a fellow student – he will have no words to even speak of what he has endured.

But why this double standard in a society that prizes boys far higher than its girls?

Part of the answer may lie on the other side of the world in a sex crime scandal uncovered at the Pennsylvania State University. To recap, for nearly two decades, defensive line coach Jerry Sandusky sexually abused young boys he was supposedly mentoring through his charity Second Mile – with the alleged knowledge of the University administration and football program, including its most famous coach, Joe Paterno.

The worst case of negligence occured in 2002 when a graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year old boy. He just left the locker room and later informed Paterno the next morning. No one took any action, including Paterno or the university authorities. Sandusky was merely barred from bringing children to the campus.

What is shocking – and illuminating — is not the conspiracy of silence which is de rigeur when it comes to paedophilia, be it in churches, schools, or families. What is exceptional here is McQueary’s decision not to intervene in that very instant, to at least stop the rape in progress.

Of this unforgivable paralysis, Daniel Mendelsohn asks a simple question: “What if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?” Writing in the New York Times, he argues:

Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl?… Mr McQueary’s reluctance to treat what he allegedly saw as a flagrant crime, his peculiar unwillingness to intervene “physically,” the narrative emphasis on his own trauma (“distraught”) rather than the boy’s, the impulse to keep matters secret rather than provide rescue, all suggest the presence of a particularly intense shame, one occasioned less by pedophilia than by something everyone involved apparently considered worse: homosexuality.

If we were to relocate the situation to India, the case for gender difference becomes murkier if only because we tend to look the other way when it comes to all sex crimes, be it against men, women, boys or girls. But it is also true that we are more “comfortable” when dealing with or speaking of sexual assaults on girls than boys. Male-on-male violence remains the ultimate taboo. There’s an added layer of revulsion that ensures neither those in the know nor the victim himself will speak up. The conspiracy of silence runs deeper.

We never acknowledge the possibility that a male servant or relative can be as much a threat to our son as our daughter. We speak out on girls being sold into sexual slavery but say little about the exploitation of street boys. We call it “ragging” not sexual assault when it happens within the confines of a college hostel or boarding school. And when it comes to paedophilia within the family, we hide behind safely un-gendered words like ‘children’ because the thought of a father who rapes his own son is more horrific than if he assaulted his daughter.

The other reason for this silence is our construction of masculinity on a notion of sexual invulnerability. Men are – or should be – the aggressors. As victims, they become effeminate:  someone’s ‘bitch’. It’s the singlemost important reason why boys are far less likely to report abuse than girls. Where girls lose their ‘virtue’ in rape, boys stand to lose their very identity as males. The only way to assert masculinity then is to endure the assault and just “get over it,” as “real men” do. Journalist Nihal Singh’s memoir, Ink in My Veins, recounts being “buggered” by a fruit vendor – but with a stoicism that denies the trauma.

Much of the this sexual violence remains mostly unacknowledged, bobbing into view either in newspaper headlines —usually involving safely foreign tourists — or in the form of ragging. Women hostels have their problems, but ragging acquires an unconscionable ferocity in male institutions. Freshers are forced to strip, hold each others genitals, masturbate, enact rape scenes and in extreme cases, insert objects in their anus in the name of proving their mardangi. As one senior told anti-ragging activist Shivam Vij, “You call this harassment? In [school name redacted] a hockey stick was shoved down my arse. That is harassment. All this has toughened me.”

Those who cannot embrace this twisted version of machismo are left with little or no support. Lucknow student Anoop Kumar committted suicide in 2002 leaving a note that cited “unspeakable” sexual acts. Vij notes, “He had told his parents that he couldn’t even tell them what he was being subjected to. It was the shame of sexual abuse. It’s amazing that a society that does not approve of homosexuality looks the other way at sexual ragging.”

Here then is my version of the Mendelsohn question: Would the parents have been as insensitive if Anoop were a girl? Would a girl be as unable to ‘speak’ of the sexual assault as a boy? And if a college kid cannot tell his parents then what hope do we have for a 10-year-old child?

All children pay a huge price for this misplaced, corrosive sense of shame. Let’s just accept the fact that our sons are no different.