Everything SRFTI Needs to Know About Rape is in this Court Verdict!

When i came across this report of the Mandi Gray rape case, all i could think was that this judgement is the answer to the whole of SRFTI. What judge Marvin Zuker did in his verdict was dispel a lot of myths about rape. Each and every myth he had cited was something i had heard myself for having complained against a professor who raped me. Will go over it one by one and the befitting reply the judge gave.

SRFTI (by SRFTI i mean the group of students, faculty and administrators who lodged a vicious attack against me and other sexual harassment complainants in the institute) told me that

Disclaimer: Shit ahead

• I was making it up- said that i was a boy calling 'tiger tiger' owing to my exposing of ragging practices in the institute the year i joined. 
• I asked for it- Since i was in a relationship with the professor (i was not, and again no one asked me if i was) and was seen buying liquor with him, there was no way i could have been raped by him. 

Please read the judge's reply to this load of bullshit.

It doesn’t matter if the victim was drinking, out at night alone, sexually exploited, on a date with the perpetrator, or how the victim was dressed. No one asks to be raped.

The report says that the judge underlined the last line literally. It brought a smile to my lips because i have the habit of putting things in bold when i feel that nobody is getting it despite it being a universal truth. 

More shit.

• They couldn't believe i was raped because it took more than a year for her to complain. 
• I am someone who updates her blog regularly mentioning even the smallest of things. I never wrote about this rape so it couldn't be true. 
• I never told any of her friends that she was raped 
• I was ruining the reputation of the institute. 
• I shouldn't be washing SRFTI's dirty linen in public [from Chairperson Partha Ghose]

The reply:

Does the woman rush to the police right away or wait days, weeks, months? It doesn’t matter, Zuker said. There are plenty of reasons why victims wait or don’t report at all. Does she remember every gruesome detail in “a piecemeal fashion, rather than in a neat chronology?” It is understandable, people only remember the gist of what happens and trauma causes memory fragments, he said. Does she lie stiff with fear, and not claw at her attacker or scramble desperately for the door during her rape? And if she doesn’t, should she be disbelieved later?
“This is ludicrous and contrary to the way in which victims behave when attacked,” he said.
“For much of our history the ‘good’ rape victim, the ‘credible’ rape victim has been a dead one.”

Shit: 

• I provoked the man
• Taali ek haath se nahi bajti [You can't clap with just one hand] said by the highest authority of the institute, Chairperson Mr Partha Ghose

Answer to shit:

The night of the assault, she’d texted him from a bar to “come drink and then we can have hot sex.” He came, they shut the place down and then walked back to his place.
Her testimony, which Zuker ruled as the truth, was that he berated her on the way home, calling her “an embarrassment” and “a slut” until her self-esteem crumbled. Once he got there, he jammed his penis into her mouth and then raped her. She lay frozen in fear. The version Ururyar told from the witness stand was they’d gone home happily, he’d broken up with her and then they’d had consolation sex

Shit

• This bit was told by the sexual harassment committee which was formed to look into harassment complaints against students. They said that my accusation could not be proven because there were no eye witnesses to what had happened. What was the charge? That the student had forcibly kissed me on my lips on one occasion and had tried to have sex with me on two other occasions. All these inside rooms in the hostel. I should've invited fifty people who could later be eye witnesses to these rooms then. Too bad that i didn't have the clairvoyance.

Reply to shit:

Like in most cases, there were no witnesses to the rape. There were no obvious physical injuries detected by a sexual assault kit Gray had done the next day. There were just the two people’s words.
Zuker ruled Gray “very credible and trustworthy” and Ururyar’s evidence “a fabrication, credible never.”
He slammed him even for his defence tactics: “He went or tried to go to any length to discredit Ms Gray, if not invalidate her. Such twisted logic.”

But what mattered to me most was what the woman said. That i am writing one such post today applauding the decision, that everyone is happy about the verdict and its content, this is all pointing fingers at our faulty system. It's bad enough there, it's worse in india. I don't know what will happen to my court case against the professor who raped me. I hope i win but chances look bleak. I am not the optimistic kind. But these words by Gray did make me feel better. It just means that there are plenty of people around you fighting similar battles.  

“It’s really sad that the legal system is doing what it is supposed to and we are all shocked,” Gray said after the ruling was made.

some days in SRFTI