Chief Justice Bobde: Are you a rapist?
India’s top judge tells accused rapist to marry victim to avoid jail, Sharad Arvind Bobde faces calls to resign over remarks to government technician about schoolgirl by Agence France-Presse in Mumbai, March 4, 2021, The Guardian
The chief justice Sharad Arvind Bobde said: ‘If you want to marry (her) we can help you. If not, you lose your job and go to jail.’ Photograph: Getty Images Agence France-Presse in Mumbai
India’s top judge is facing calls to resign after telling an accused rapist to marry his schoolgirl victim to avoid jail.
More than 5,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the chief justice Sharad Arvind Bobde quit after he told the government technician at a hearing: “If you want to marry [her] we can help you. If not, you lose your job and go to jail.”
Bobde’s comments sparked a furore and prompted women’s rights activists to circulate an open letter that gained more than 5,200 signatures calling for his resignation.
According to the letter, the defendant is accused of stalking, tying up, gagging and repeatedly raping the girl and threatening to douse her in petrol, set her alight and have her brother killed.
“By suggesting that this rapist marry the victim-survivor, you, the chief justice of India, sought to condemn the victim-survivor to a lifetime of rape at the hands of the tormentor who drove her to attempt suicide,” the letter said.
India’s abysmal record on sexual violence has been a focus of international attention since the 2012 gang-rape and murder of a student on a Delhi bus. Victims are regularly subjected to sexist treatment at the hands of police and courts It’s a global problem, including in Caveman Canada, including being encouraged to marry their attackers in so-called compromise solutions.
The letter drew attention to another hearing on Monday during which Bobde reportedly questioned whether sex between a married couple could ever be considered rape. “The husband may be a brutal man, but can you call the act of sexual intercourse between a lawfully wedded man and wife as rape?” he said.
The letter by the rights campaigners said: “This comment not only legitimises any kind of sexual, physical and mental violence by the husband, but it normalises the torture that Indian women have been facing within marriages for years without any legal recourse.”
Marital rape is not a crime in India. Bobde has not responded to the criticism.
His predecessor Ranjan Gogoi was the highest-profile figure in India to face a #MeToo complaint after he was accused by a former staffer of sexual assault. He was cleared in 2019 after an in-house inquiry, prompting protests in the country.
A tiny sampling of the rape-enabling judicial shit show:
@TheDominiqueM: When I navigated a criminal prosecution as a complainant, I was treated as the wrongdoer. “Most people who are selling the system as an answer have never had to navigate the system.”
@TheDominiqueM: Harvey Weinstein did not become Harvey Weinstein on his own. These are systems. The man who sexually harmed me harmed others. This doesn’t remove his accountability. This looks at the larger picture. Grace quotient. This is a journey.
@TheDominiqueM: Historically, those pushing the system are not the one’s subordinated by it. R. Kelly did terrible harm to countless women. But what system permitted all this harm right in front of us? “We watched it. We have a part of it. The system has a part of it.”
@alexis_hoag: “Our legal system isn’t set up to hold [Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly] accountable because they hold so much power.” Rather, “it was designed to maintain a social ordering”—to punish non-powerful people. Look at what we do with police officers who commit harm.
2021 comment to Ernst by an Alberta resident:
Jessica,
… I was searching the internet to see what had become of the Matthew Brown case..the miscarriage of justice that had acquitted this man of a number of crimes when the judge in the case ruled he was so intoxicated as to be held not criminally responsible for his actions. My search led to a story on this case on your website. It was there that I read of your absolute oppression by Big Oil through the contamination of your water and our government’s inability/unwillingness to give a damn.
It takes an incredible amount of energy…and of course money to try to get any justice in this world anymore. Your story is both heartbreaking and encouraging at the same time. I applaud your efforts and sympathize with the absolute tragedy that has been committed against you. Of course I don’t need to tell you…there are hundreds, likely tens of thousands of others whose water has been rendered unusable due to fracking. And yet it continues.
The current government is so entirely pro-oil & gas…at all costs..including blatant disregard for the basic rights we should be able to take for granted as our birthright here in Alberta, is beyond pathetic. The system is broken..likely irreversibly.
It gets harder for me to find any redeeming qualities in the human race anymore; selfish, self-interest, greed, power, dishonesty…this is the value system of the day. To find anyone who is willing to push back against an army of people with all these things in force in their everyday dealings..is somewhat amazing.
I wish you all the best as you move forward. Thank you for your kind and considerate comments, and brutal honesty.
2020: “When judges don’t know the meaning of rape, there is little hope of justice” never mind that some (one is too many) are racist misogynistic bigoted troglodytes in society’s “Upside Down of Patriarchy.” What if judges are appointed because they are known by their peers to be rapists?
2020 USA:
2019 Canada: How prevalent is racism (and misogyny) among Canadian lawyers & judges?
2019 Chile: “It’s the judges!” enabling rape and murder of women. No kidding. In Canada too.
2019: Misogynistic Justice. Rapist after rapist set free by Canadian judges.
2017 Canada: ‘This Hour Has 22 Minutes” Sketch: “Judges: a danger to Canadian women” 1:15 Min.
… The Chief Justice’s speech only exacerbated the crisis of confidence afflicting the courts she symbolically speaks for. By now, it is well known that only three in every 1,000 sexual assaults result in a conviction. No one can rationally call this an acceptable level of service to sexual assault survivors. It is instead a profound failing. Chief Justice McLachlin could have addressed this serious problem in constructive ways, but she missed the boat. …
Chief Justice McLachlin’s foray into this important social issue was problematic in another respect as well. She suggested the national debate is too polarized and hostile to be helpful. This sounds like code for “anger is inappropriate here.”
But wait a minute. Nobody on the offender side of the ledger is angry about a 99.7 per cent success rate in escaping liability for sexual violence.
So the Chief Justice’s coded disparagement of anger is really directed only at sexual assault survivors. This shades uncomfortably close to victim-blaming. Ugly as this truth may be, sexual assault survivors and their loved ones have every good reason to be angry at the current system’s profoundly unacceptable service delivery rates. The last thing survivors need, and the last thing that could build greater confidence in justice processes among survivors, is for the Chief Justice to wag her finger at them. …
2017 01 11 Canada: Public won’t see results of review of Alberta judges’ sex-assault case conduct
2016 Canada: Most complaints about Canadian judges dealt with behind closed doors Gotta do the dirty in secret to protect rapists and keep them raping strong and out of prison.
2016 09 14 Canada: The Robin Camp case: Who judges judges? – Macleans.ca
2007: AER/ERCB/EUB, Alberta’s Energy Regulator officials, staff and companies raping the public, their acts of rape have only intensified and multiplied:
