Ok – that was a terrible title.
Having gotten that out of the way – something has been confusing me in the past few days. In discussing about the horrific custodial murder of Mr. Jayaraj and Mr. Bennix, some people talk about ‘systemic’ violence. And then go on to say a few other things that seemed dissonant. So here’s an attempt to unpack that dissonance:
First, our system is based on retributive justice – punish those who are guilty. So, that’s the first frame defining the systemic:
Now, come to the issue of ‘Who is guilty’
Whenever I think of understanding law and issues related to law, I look to the book ‘Alchemy of Race and Rights’ by Patricia Williams. I read the book in one breath, and I re-read it many times. I discovered, there’s a PDF, so if you are interested in critically looking at law, as in looking at law as if it is about social, political, and economic issues, I would highly recommend picking a comfortable corner, for I ended up taking my time with the book. It has texture and has layers.
She speaks of three aspects of law (Paraphrased of course. Her writing is like poetry sliding off the page):
- It has simple to define categories that are fixed.
- Legal ‘truths’ are seen as a-contextual and universal
- Existence of ‘objective’ voices who give voice to those legal truths. It is of course mentioned that they are ‘real’ people, and their understanding and experience of these truths are seen as valid and legitimate.
A note here: I am not a lawyer or have any kind of legal training. If legalese with latin is more your cup of tea, then this may not suit your palette.
Let us take, 1 – the definition of simple categories that are fixed. Suppose you are laying down the law in your garden and say, all leaves that are not green need to be pruned. Now, you know from previous experience that pruning dead leaves that are not green is a good idea. Now, a group of people join you. They find some mottled leaves, some browning, some red ferns. Now, you know which you would like to keep, but the ‘not green’ rule lets them chop off red ferns too. In addition, they feel partial to a pale green, and feel anything darker is ‘not green’, and so they go ahead and snip-snip.
Categories are political.
Categories define, but more importantly, they exclude. So, when someone says, ‘anyone out after curfew’ is breaking the law, it is up to the police to decide whether someone wanting to finish a last sale has broken the law, or can be let go. It is a wide net to capture ‘who is guilty’ and the police becomes the arbiter of that definition. Immediately, caste, class, and gender come into the mix.
Consider the definition of ‘a good woman’ as a legal truth. What a ‘good woman’ does, how she behaves, how she should be protected, is all interpreted in the frame of ‘a good woman’, and that definition lives in the heads of judges, police, and others, who are like all of us are prejudiced, except they have the power to decide who gets to be free. Caste, class, and gender.
Someone on Twitter said how their friends have been having parties post curfew time, and their feed on Instagram is filled with such images, and yet they do so because of privilege. And so, in the case of Mr. Jayaraj and Mr. Bennix too, caste and class are enmeshed.
When it is systemic, what I see as an exception is mostly because of my own location.
A friend of mine once told me, she does not agree with the death penalty, BUT, when it comes to people who rape, she finds herself rooting for it. It was an honest admission, not one that many would make. I think it makes for a lot of introspection to understand that say, I am ok with this person being a recipient of systemic abuse, and not that person – whereas, as it is systemic, it is a problem whether anyone, including a rapist, gets a death penalty.
Is there an alternative?
Yes. There’s a frame of ‘restorative justice’. You see it in schools. When children are bullies, there are mechanisms where instead of punishment, both the child doing the bullying and the kid being bullied are brought together, so that the child being bullied can take back control, and the other one realises the problem in their behaviour. The idea is that both are children, and that they can be taught to change, and do better.
I think my dissonance stemmed from the fact that I or my friend cannot speak of ‘systemic’ issues with a police state without wanting justice for the rapist too.
Middle aged 