The violence against women is important to justice; women having problems with access to justice is more so. The access to justice is the condition and ability of an individual to seek justice upon infringement of his or her rights. This entails that victims who wish to seek legal redress for the crimes committed against them can do so in timely manner, they are treated in equal, fair and impartial manner, they obtain legal assistance, and they get restitution and compensation for their loss. This also insures that they participate effectively in the legal system through access to courts, tribunals and alternative dispute resolution, and they obtain safety and security to exercise their rights. Access to justice refers to the extent to which an appropriate package of services can be obtained by individuals in a given situation.
The right to justice for the victims is primary. The Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Power has made provisions for access to justice and fair treatment, restitution, compensation, and assistance. It has recommended that the victims of crime and power be “treated with compassion and respect for their dignity.” The Declaration has made number of specific provisions. For example, the victims should be treated with compassion and respect for their dignity, they are entitled to access to the mechanism of justice and to prompt redress for the harm that they have suffered, judicial and administrative mechanisms should be established and strengthened, and victims should be informed of their rights in seeking redress through such mechanisms.
The present criminal justice system has to be transformed into a more human, responsive, fair, accessible, inexpensive and dynamic service system. If necessary, it must be replaced by a proper alternative system.
Rape and sexual assaults are quite often victimless crimes. Many cases go under the sheet of blanket due to societal culture. Any member of the family falling victim to sexual assault is a cause of stress for the members of the family. The relationship between the victim and family members and communities turn into stressful and often end up in disasters. The socio-cultural context to victimization becomes important in this respect. The societies often stigmatize, intimidate, coerce and socially exclude the victims. These kinds of attitudes often silence the victims and devalue their quality of life.
The victims also have right to criminal justice. But the formal processes of the criminal justice system have been the most vulnerable to critique from the perspective of victims. There are evidences that support the fact that the access to justice to victims of rape and sexual assaults are limited in Nepal. Many victims strive to cope with the experience of sexual victimization without the psychological, legal, medical and economic support. The society and the actors of criminal justice system respond in a passive, indifferent, and negative manner to the rights of these victims. The victims are left alone to fight with the post-incident trauma coupled with health and economic problems. They face difficulties with their testimony in the courts also. They do not get any counseling or coaching from the public prosecutors. They also have to recount their “story” several times in the process of court investigation. The police and court officials are not sensitive and supportive. They treat victims as “items of evidences”. They blame the victims. The experiences of the whole criminal proceedings from initial contact to the police to court appearance are testing one for the survivors.
This writer had encountered with several victims of sexual violence in the process of research. Each of the accounts of the victims represented a personal construction of events and their impacts, in other words, a subjective interpretation. Some did not wish to revisit the traumas. Others had thought about their abusive experiences constantly but had taken no action or the case being dropped after initial investigation. Several victims related how being abused carried a stigma, and a strong sense of personal shame and guilt, or feeling of “being dirty”. Others seemed to include a wish to rid them of unresolved past trauma that continued to impact negatively on their lives and the possibility of obtaining justice as well as an acknowledgment of the harm that had been done to them.
Indeed the definitions and meaning of justice are not universal. These are different from people to people; from context to context. In the case of rape and sexual assaults, victims-blaming is very prominent behavior in our societies. The trauma, the humiliation, the indictment, the stigma, and the retaliation that the victims have to bear in their life are simply beyond imagining. In such an environment, the victims are less likely to report a crime. This points toward that the victims have more to lose than gain out of reporting the crime. This leads to the fact that the access to justice is a challenge in itself for many victims; for many disadvantaged ones, the criminal justice system does not exist at all.
The complete solution of the problem of under-reporting of rape and sexual assaults, the low conviction of perpetrators, and the socio-cultural attitudes and behaviors of families, communities and societies lies in the inner core of heart than peripheral. The problem of social indictment, slighting, exclusion, and stigma of sexual and gender-based violence cannot be handled single-handedly, it requires integrated approach. On one side, we need to change the whole socio-cultural environment related to this problem. On the other, the present criminal justice system has to be transformed into a more human, responsive, fair, accessible, inexpensive and dynamic service system. If necessary, it must be replaced by a proper alternative system.
(Writer is Program Coordinator, Master in Security Management, Kathmandu University School of Management and former Additional IGP, Nepal Police.)
gpthapa@gmail.com
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