Breakthrough India tried to reset the narrative on imaging rape, sexual violence through a social media campaign \u2013 #RedrawMisogyny<\/em><\/p>\n

On a balmy\u00a0Sunday<\/span>\u00a0in April, a few dozen designers sat at a pub in South Delhi scrutinizing a projection screen. It showed an illustration of a woman in a torn violet shirt. A pair of bangles hung off her wrist. She cowered close to the floor, her head sunk between her hands. On the wall behind her, a man\u2019s shadow loomed menacingly.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s being shown as a weakling,\u201d someone in the front row said. \u201cWe need to show her as a survivor.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few designers objected to the artfully ripped clothing, which had a cinematic quality, conjuring the image of a heroine roughed up, yet still glamorous. But there is no universal idiom for assault. \u201cYou could be in perfectly okay clothes and still be violated,\u201d a young woman pointed out.<\/p>\n

$\"One$ <\/a>
One of the stock images Indian news outlets have traditionally used to depict sexual assault. Courtesy of Breakthrough India<\/p><\/div>\n
In India, press laws prevent media outlets from identifying victims of sexual violence, or using any photographs that might lead them to be identified. So, drawing from a tiny common-domain database news agencies rely on a set of stock images to illustrate reports of assault. But these newsroom images, featuring a half-dozen variations on near-identical themes, reinforce harmful stereotypes surrounding sexual violence, skewing perceptions of accountability.<\/p>\n
Women are depicted as helpless (though still potentially culpable) victims, huddled on the ground with their faces buried. Perpetrators lurk in doorways \u2013 dangerous, powerful, and unseen. The images reflect prevalent attitudes in India around assault that are mirrored in Indian popular culture, including film. A taboo around rape means that survivors are often stigmatized. In representations of violence, women are reduced to inert objects, attractive prey to be pursued and captured.<\/p>\n
\u201cImages are a very strong part of an article. They reinforce our own conditioning constantly,\u201d says Priyanka Kher, head of communications at Breakthrough India, a human rights organization that uses media and pop culture as outreach tools.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about planting a seed of doubt, questioning the narrative.<\/p>\n
This past spring, Breakthrough India saw an opportunity to reset the narrative by developing updated news illustrations and sharing them with media outlets. The group devised a social media campaign\u2014#RedrawMisogyny\u2014and enlisted designers and volunteers to develop an alternative bank of images. With its own database of stock imagery, the first part of which was released earlier this summer, Breakthrough is determined to counter regressive media tropes and portray sexual and gender-based violence in a more informed light.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf every time you do a search for rape<\/a> and find images that are politically correct, that goes a long way,\u201d Kher says. \u201cIt\u2019s about planting a seed of doubt, questioning the narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were more than 34,000 reports of sexual assault in India in 2015, according to the most recent figures released by the National Crime Records Bureau. But since rape remains starkly underreported, actual numbers are hard to gauge (in the US, where rape is also underreported, a sexual assault occurs more or less every minute.) In Delhi\u2014dubbed India\u2019s \u201crape capital\u201d\u2014the rate of reported sexual assaults has risen since 2012, when a 23-year-old medical student was fatally gang raped aboard a moving bus, drawing mass coverage around the world. The so-called \u201c Nirbhaya case<\/a>\u201d\u2014named for the Hindi word for \u201cfearless,\u201d which the press used as a pseudonym for the victim\u2014made violence against women front page news.<\/p>\n
Two months before the Nirbhaya case, an article in The New York Times on Indian news reports of rape observed that \u201cthe emphasis still appears to be on the disgraced victim.\u201d It pointed toward the enduring trope of the \u201cshamed woman,\u201d seen in illustrations of a woman with her head bowed, and continued: \u201cSometimes, this woman also happens to be somewhat scantily clad.\u201d<\/p>\n
$\"A$ <\/a>
A traditional image. Courtesy of Breakthrough India.<\/p><\/div>\n
A study carried out by the University of Oklahoma on the impact of news images, which used the 2003 Iraq war as a case study, found that media visuals are instrumental in directing public opinion. Unlike the actual text of the stories, which relied on \u201carguments and details\u201d and were \u201ccognitive in nature,\u201d the images shown invoked only \u201cpowerful, instantaneous emotion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Newsroom images rely on a vocabulary of visual shorthands: ripped clothing, wide-mouthed screams, shadowy predators.\u00a0 They reinforce a larger double standard around shame and sexual purity, which has deep roots in India\u2019s visual culture. The image of Bharat Mata, or Mother India, allegorizes the nation as a patriotic Hindu goddess. Originally conceived under British rule as a powerful anti-colonial emblem, the symbol linked colonial possession to sexual dishonor, imagining the independent nation as a woman\u2019s unviolated body. In The Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic poem that is reenacted annually all across the subcontinent, the kidnapped queen, Sita, is rescued from a long imprisonment under a lustful demon. Dishonored, she is forced to abandon her kingdom and is exiled to the forest.<\/p>\n
Though the modern-day Bollywood film industry toys with female empowerment, Hindi cinema also has peddled the \u201cshamed woman\u201d trope. In what film scholar Jyotika Virdi has termed \u201crape-revenge\u201d films, the camera lingers on lone, vulnerable women, signaling what Virdi calls \u201cthe rape threat.\u201d Once violated, the disgraced heroines become desperate vigilantes, embarking on quests for comeuppance.<\/p>\n
Media reporting on sexual assault remains steeped in a cinematic language, recycling outdated mores. Newsroom tropes, with their shameful, terror-stricken women and prowling, lustful men, script visual narratives that are wholly divorced from the realities of rape. The journalist Joanna Jolly, a former BBC South Asia correspondent, has said that the illustrations misrepresent assault as \u201cstranger danger,\u201d an \u201calmost Victorian idea of rape\u201d that is taken out of context and only committed by \u201cmadmen, who attack women at night.\u201d Survivors of sexual assault are, in fact, likely to have known their assailants.<\/p>\n
$\"A$
A traditional image. Courtesy of Breakthrough India.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like any political propaganda. It shapes our thinking,\u201d says Ruhie Kumar, a communications consultant who grew up flipping through her mother\u2019s Hindi-language women\u2019s magazines, which used similar kinds of images when illustrating violence against women. \u201cIf we don\u2019t have an intervention, we\u2019re going to have a really off-balance narrative being pushed far and wide.\u201d<\/p>\n
A 2015 report from Australia\u2019s National Research Organization for Women\u2019s Safety found that news reports on violence against women rely on what\u2019s called \u201cepisodic framing.\u201d Unlike \u201cthematic framing,\u201d which uses social factors such as gender inequality to contextualize incidents, episodic or event-based framing \u201ctends to elicit individualistic rather than societal attributions of responsibility.\u201d In India, this tendency often leads to victim-blaming.<\/p>\n
This past winter, in a forlorn patch of a Dehli park behind a strip of restaurants, a woman was allegedly assaulted by a waiter. In its reporting, The Times of India, India\u2019s widest read English-language daily paper, made mention of the woman\u2019s night of \u201crevelry\u201d and \u201cpub-hopping.\u201d To illustrate the article, it ran an image of a female prisoner slinking forward in a jail cell. Bars cast long shadows over her face.<\/p>\n
$\"A$ <\/a>
A traditional image. Courtesy of Breakthrough India.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cFor me to counter it, because I\u2019m so brainwashed, I have to really take a step back,\u201d Kumar says.<\/p>\n
That was precisely the point of the gathering of designers in April: to debate how to develop a better narrative framework for reporting and illustrating assault. But before drafting new images, the group first continued to dissect the news illustrations currently in circulation, which can appear up to several times a week in Indian newspapers.<\/p>\n
The next picture projected on the screen that morning captured, unnervingly, the vantage point of the assailant. From eye level, a grasping hand reached forward. A woman shrunk back, her palm shielding her face. All the viewer could see was a pair of widened eyes and a crown of dark curls.<\/p>\n
$\"A$ <\/a>
A traditional illustration. Courtesy of Breakthrough India.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cHow can we avoid sensationalizing?\u201d the emcee asked. The audience grew quiet, save for a little girl dressed in bubblegum pink, who babbled baby-talk in the back row. \u201cCan we give out a powerful image using more subtle imagery?\u201d<\/p>\n
A woman in white raised her hand. She had seen the illustration in multiple news reports. \u201cThe perpetrator is just a symbol of what it means to be a perpetrator,\u201d she complained. It was a cartoon\u2014a lurid abbreviation of real horror. \u201cWe need to create a narrative that gives out the message, enough is enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe if we show the survivor dragging the perpetrator to the police station,\u201d suggested a designer. \u201cHead up, not chin down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another hand shot up. \u201cFrom my experience, trying to do anything with gender in a newsroom is very difficult,\u201d the hand-raiser ventured. \u201cThe only solution is to shove it down their throats!\u201d the others shouted, sparking a round of applause.<\/p>\n
Illustrations used by Indian media outlets are typically developed by visualizers working alongside staff reporters and editors covering stories of domestic and sexual violence. They can also be sourced from various stock photo databases and online platforms. Though repetitive\u2014and ridden with troubling cliches\u2014dramatized sketches of events also help protect the anonymity of victims.<\/p>\n
Later in the afternoon, Himel Sarkar, digital coordinator for Breakthrough India, held up his Samsung smartphone: A national paper had just reported a gang rape in Mumbai. Under the headline was an illustration\u2014a long-haired girl, groveling in obvious fear\u2014that had appeared earlier in the slideshow. \u201cCase in point,\u201d Sarkar said.<\/p>\n
After a chicken biriyani lunch, designers split up into small groups, tasked with preparing preliminary sketches. A woman in a gray sari\u2014Neha Dixit\u2014 complained of the \u201cdarkness\u201d and \u201cend-of-the-world hopelessness\u201d to which the media defaulted when representing rape. There was an appetite for tearstained cheeks and ruined lives, but none for solidarity and longer-term support.<\/p>\n
$\"One$ <\/a>
One of the alternative images. Courtesy of Breakthrough India.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cI was thinking to flip it,\u201d Dixit said quietly, \u201cto show the victim as a survivor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd remove the perpetrator?\u201d asked Rana Bhanu, a bearded illustrator, leaning across the table. \u201cIs that something we\u2019re willing to do?\u201d<\/p>\n
Taking out a small notepad, Valiullah Hashmi, a Delhi-based artist in his mid-twenties, sketched out Lady Justice balancing a set of scales\u2014the survivor on one side, the assailant on the other. Others protested against symbolism, seeing it as a form of erasure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more abstract we make it\u2026 the silencing [around rape] will get stronger,\u201d argued photojournalist Ruhani Kaur.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever we write about rape, it\u2019s written in a passive voice: \u2018A woman was raped,\u2019\u201d explained journalist Shobha SV. \u201cThe [rapist] never really comes into focus.\u201d<\/p>\n
A little while later, the groups presented their ideas. One sketch showed an outstretched hand\u2014now a woman\u2019s\u2014clawing at the face of an astonished assailant, drawing little globs of blood. In another, a boy stood smiling. His shadow revealed devil\u2019s horns. \u201cIt shows that someone you know can also be the one to create havoc in your life,\u201d explained the artist. \u201cHe\u2019s the one who should be shamed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Men still leered, not shadowy monsters, but real guys in jeans, and this time the viewer faced them. A young woman stood alone at night, men staring at her from behind. But she looked normal, unafraid; it was the oglers whose behavior looked wrong.<\/p>\n
– Courtesy: Columbia Journalism Review<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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