India needs a better Supreme Court than the ignorant individuals who declared, "Modesty is a virtue which is inherent to a female owing to her sex; an attribute associated with female human beings as a class."
Modesty is an individual's behaviour that signals that s/he is not indiscriminately receptive to sexual gestures, comments, or touching. Modest dress, modest eye-contact, modest language, modest hand-contact ... all of it allows humans to have neighbourly, friendly, familial, or professional relationships instead of constantly having to negotiate mating. Modesty does not need to be defined as either a virtue ("chastity") or a vice ("frigidity") because assault/offense is a crime against a person regardless of the victim's character. Even a prostitute has modesty when s/he is not in a consensual sexual situation. Modesty is inherent to virtually all human beings, whether female, male, or nonbinary.
Those who value their own modesty may disrespect the modesty of others. A woman may resent one man for smiling at her, but find excuses to touch another man crudely. When a woman falsely accuses a man of outraging her modesty, sometimes her motivation is resentment that he said no to her advances.
If a man is accused of sexual assault, he goes to jail until he can get bail. His health may be permanently damaged (e.g. ulcer from jail food, HIV from rape) by the time he is released. Although there are fast-track courts for crimes against women, the complaining witness can prolong the process by delaying her own appearance in court, just to keep the man on the hook. If the ensuing trial finds that the complaining witness lied, does she go to jail while awaiting trial for perjury? Or, will she get to live her life, secure in the knowledge that trials for perjury are non-fast-track?
I don't know if the 75% of cases that the article calls "false" were actually perjury or simply not provable. Every case should be judged on the evidence and the credibility of witnesses, and unfortunately it is a common tactic to disparage a woman's sexual history to attack her credibility. Acquittal does not mean that the allegation was false.
The law should protect everyone's modesty from outrage. The law is inadequate as long as it denies justice to a class of victims (male) simply because they are outnumbered by another class (female). Without denying that females as a class are more vulnerable to rape, it is the truth that individuals with physical or mental disabilities are vulnerable regardless of sex, and many actions that outrage modesty (gestures, comments, touching) do not require one person to overpower the other.
I am a man. Several times, when I have been riding a bus or a train, women have initiated conversations with me and flirtatiously slapped my thigh without invitation. Imagine a man touching a woman that way; wouldn't you call it outraging of modesty? Should I have called the police? Did each offender deserve a year in prison?
When I was a thirteen-year-old boy, a fifteen-year-old female groped my buttocks in the crowded hallway of my high school. A few weeks later, a fifteen-year-old male pinched my nipple in the same situation. Neither of them needed to overpower me when they could just surprise me. Passing by hundreds of other students in five minutes between classes, was I supposed to watch out for this? I had never met either of them before; only when I looked to see who had sexually assaulted me, I saw whose face was leering at me. My feelings of disgust and embarrassment were the same, regardless of the sex of the lascivious person.
The law and its application should be based on fairness, not idealizing one sex and vilifying the other.
Shiv Shakti
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