In an open letter on Saturday, 4 July, members of a citizen’s group called ‘No Rape India’, wrote to the Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to make rape and sexual harm gender-neutral offences, by including men and trangenders within the ambit.
The letter, signed by citizen activist Ravina Raj Kohli and former Uttar Pradesh DGP Vikram Singh, said that other cases “be treated with no less rigour and conviction than those who perpetrate such harm on women.” Referring to the Shantakulam incident in Tamil Nadu, where two men were victims of alleged police brutality, the activists said that sexual assault was undermined and not classified as rape, simply because they were identified as “men” by their anatomy.
“Sadly, it took the death of these two men for the law to address what happened to them with the seriousness necessary, by invoking charges of murder. If not for the tragedy of their deaths, the law’s best response to the brutality that they endured and the unacceptable injustice they suffered would have been to slap the accused policemen with less serious charges of inflicting grievous hurt or the more vague and controversial charge of “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” under Section 377 of the IPC.”Open Letter By No Rape India Activists