Last week, CNN released news of an investigation into a widespread online network that has been dubbed a “rape academy”. Through the use of encrypted chatrooms and even websites, members of this network were discovered exchanging material on how to drug and then sexually assault women. The investigation shows that the vast majority of members were using these platforms in order to commit acts of violence on their own partners. One pornographic website that propagated such information clocked an overall 62 million views in February alone, some of which went to what has been dubbed “sleep” content — pertaining to assault under sedation.
These revelations happen a year-and-a-half after the landmark Mazan rape case in France, in which 48 men were found guilty of raping a sedated woman over a period of nine years. That woman, Gisele Pelicot, waived anonymity and publicly testified against her husband, Dominique Pelicot, and his many accomplices. She did this while simultaneously processing the violence she had undergone without her awareness for years. The ongoing violence was unearthed after police found incriminating videos on her spouse’s device, following his arrest for harassing women in a supermarket.
What had seemed at the time, not so long ago at all, to be a particularly unusual crime, has been proven through the rape academy revelations to be something more common than many had imagined.
As women, we metabolise news about the rape academy alongside much else that breaks the heart: alongside all the feminist setbacks, we read about and hear about across the world, from femicide to the revoking of reproductive rights, and alongside so much news that is local and contextual to our regions, our societies, our own lives. For some, this latest news unlocks new levels of despair or fear regarding what may be happening in our own homes.
For some, it further deepens the existing faultlines of heterosexual partnership. Even the best of partnerships happen despite how the world is designed, and to know this is to feel guilt, grief, and gratitude all at once. That isn’t how much of the world lives, and to know it is to also remain committed to the cause of wishing for and working for better.
Here in India, where marital rape remains protected by the law despite concerted efforts to criminalise it, the idea that one’s own partner may be a rapist may be less shocking than it is in other places in the world, particularly those that do not traffic human beings in caste-or-equivalent gridlocked arranged marriage markets. That isn’t a good thing. That’s desensitisation. The fact that the vast majority of all violence has statistically been proven to occur within homes is something that is still denied. To challenge that denial is to challenge culture itself, as Indian lawmakers claim — and it is a worthy challenge, to strive to repair rather than to preserve uncritically.
The rape academy forces that confrontation on a moral, albeit not a legal level elsewhere in the world. It will galvanise incremental change, as all such reckonings do. The grief will continue, in the meanwhile. It is a necessary part of the revolution, too.