She's Crying "Rape": An Indian City's Response to the Rape Crisis

December 2012 in Delhi, India, a 23-year-old boards a bus with a male friend after going to the cinema. They are attacked and she is brutally gang-raped, dying shortly from her injuries as “Nirbhaya” (“Fearless,” a title bestowed by the media). The nation mourns the latest face of its underreported rape crisis; according to the National Crime Records Bureau, at least 93 women report rape per day. Nirbhaya’s death sparks mass outrage in India, drawing attention to the nation’s failure to ensure the safety of its women. The Indian government has responded to the rape crisis with legal and procedural reforms, the most famous of which are the 2013 anti-rape amendments. The city of Jaipur, Rajasthan has innovatively responded to the crisis with women-only police stations and crisis centers operated by both police and activist organizations. Yet, skepticism around rape claims seems to have grown, with the police and media alleging that half of Jaipur’s rape claims of  2016 are jhoota (“falsehood”). Stereotypes of the rape victim have been well-studied within the Indian courtroom, but little scholarship exists on post-2013 legal reforms or on rape victims as seen from the crisis center. My ethnography reveals that for Jaipur’s police, a rape claim can only be true or false, not inconclusive; jarringly, no third term is used to describe rape cases. Grounded in interviews with police, physicians, and activist-counselors, I propose that stereotypes observed in the courtroom emerge earlier in the investigative process, resulting in a (publicly visible) dichotomy of truth and jhoota used to undermine the rape claims of women who conform least to the stereotyped victim. By providing medical “evidence” for a victim’s character, forensic physicians are unwillingly complicit in this labeling. Finally, I assert that in response to the obsession with the truth-jhoota dichotomy, crisis centers have prioritized legal justice over the therapeutic needs of clients by pressuring police to take greater action.