(PC-07)

(Paper presented at the Seminar on “Health

Communication” organised by the Xavier
Institute of Communication, Bombay on
November 17, 1994. Not-Published)

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN

The Role of Media and Health Care Professionals
Dr. Amar Jesani

Prof. Upendra Baxi, a well known expert on law and a former vice chancellor of Delhi and
South Gujarat universities, in his comments on the Women’s Studies in the ICSSR Newsletter
seven years back, made some incisive and disturbing comments on the coverage of violence as a
subject matter in the social science discourse in India. He said, “Mainstream social sciences in
India have altogether ignored the fact that India is a very violent society. There do not exist even
pre-theoretical discourses on violence in India. Compared with the practice of violence in India,
there is a total denial of discourse on violence. In other word, we do not have in India even an
androcentric discourse on social and political violence.”1 While the nineteen months of
Emergency sensitised the media to the political violence, the Mathura rape case, women’s
movements against rape, dowry, sati, sex selection and other forms of violence have contributed
immensely in the increased coverage of violence against women. The violence against children,
to begin with the issue of child labour has been finding increasing space in media due to efforts
of many concerned voluntary groups. However, the child abuse, which we suspect is an equally
rampant phenomenon if not more, still remains under wrap for many reasons and the media has
not made adequate effort to focus on it.

Role of Health Care Professionals:

The focus of this paper is on the health care profession and the media in the context of violence
against women and children. For, if according to Prof. Baxi the social scientists have not fared
well in analysing violence and the media have taken up issues thrown up by activist groups, the
health care professionals have fared the worst. This worries me more for the simple reason that
in any violence at some stage the victim or the survivor almost invariably comes in contact with
health care workers. By the very nature of their work, the health care workers are an “involved”
party. The health care workers thus play multiple functions in cases of violence: (1) records the
event in great details, (2) examines and documents the physical and psychological evidence or
signs/symptoms of violence inflicted, (3) carries out laboratory and other investigations to
document supportive evidences, (4) while conducting autopsy, records external as well as
internal evidences of violence and in addition, creates photographic evidences, preserves parts of
the body and other material as evidences, (5) documents and preserves certain evidences from
the scene of the violence, (6) also treats immediate and long term or latent physical and

1
Baxi Upendra, “Towards the Liberation of Women’s Studies”, in ICSSR Newsletter, Vol. XVIII (3), Oct. - Dec.,
1987, pg. 1-13.
psychological effects of the violence on the survivors and (7) helps in the rehabilitation of the
survivors. Thus, the health care professionals have a crucial role in both treating the survivors
and in giving evidence to punish the perpetrators of violence.

Media and Health Care Professionals:

Why have media almost always missed the role of health care professionals in the reporting of
the specific cases of violence? There are multifold reasons which are specific to the media
professionals, to the aura of health care and also to the groups and activists involved in
investigating violence.

First of all, other professions, including the media professionals, behave almost like lay people
while dealing with the issues of health care. They all find health very intimidating subject. While
generally agreeing on the negative effects of the thoroughly commercialised nature of present
day medical practice, all of them feel highly reticent when faced with the individual cases.
Consequently, the health care professionals have largely escaped closer scrutiny of their work.

Secondly, the way media have been operating in our country does not encourage specialisation
by the reporters on health. For that matter, the reporters are given almost no training in the
specialised matters and most of them doing reporting in such fields are self taught. In most of the
media offices the reporters are also frequently rotated giving little time to reporters for self
teaching. That is the reason why reporters often uncritically swallow the interpretation given by,
say for example, doctor on the findings of the autopsy report. That is also why there is hardly
any category of “crime” reporters, and those who cover crime and violence depend almost
exclusively on the police hand outs and have no training in understanding and interpreting
findings of the forensic science.

Lastly, the problem is not only with mainstream medicine and the media but also with the
activists and voluntary groups which have led campaigns on the issues of violence. These groups
have also exclusively concentrated on the main culprit - the agencies of the state - and given
little attention to the contribution made by others in cover up operation or in perpetration of
violence. They too have treated the health and the health care professionals with more respect
than they actually deserve.

This could be shown easily with some examples. In a case of custodial rape in Gujarat, the tribal
victim was gang raped by the police who later went to the government hospital. The doctor who
examined her did not pay attention to her plight. But she was examined and treated by a woman
doctor of the NGO working in that area. The Supreme Court in response to the investigation
conducted by a women’s group in Baroda (Sahiyar) and a public interest litigation appointed a
commission which while identifying the culprits threw light on the colluding role of the doctor
from the government hospital. However, in the subsequent media coverage and the actions
taken, the doctors role was more or less forgotten.

In a gang rape case in Jogeshwari several voluntary groups in their investigation found that
although the woman was taken to the hospital, the doctor failed to take notice of the rape and

2
treated her for injuries although the victim did tell the nurse on duty about the rape. The
evidences were lost. Subsequently, inspite of the investigation report pinpointing the doctor’s
role, the media kept the spotlight only on the rapist who spent a few weeks in the custody. But
that could not help as without medical evidence the case was as good as lost. In both cases cited
above, while it is necessary that culprits are pinned down, one should also look at the manner in
which they could be punished. In our country we often find that news value of an event is given
more importance than the deterrent effect the systematic pursuit of a case to get the offender
punished. As a result, various movements do sensitise the media for increased reporting of the
cases, but there is no collaborative effort in the later stage to get justice for the victim.

One more point about the medical evidence should be noted. I have an opportunity to have a
look at a number of autopsy reports of the custodian deaths and encounter deaths from various
parts of the country. Even a cursory look at these reports would tell you that they are done quite
casually, inadequate in the essential information and often scientifically bad. Similarly, the
autopsy reports of the two nun murdered in Jogeshwari few years back were called casual and
incomplete by a renowned forensic expert. A high ranking forensic expert in the coroner’s court
once told me that such was the quality of autopsy reports in general in most parts of the country.
Further, the doctor hardly ever visits the scene of violence in our country, leaving some essential
scientific forensic tasks to the police officers. The point is, this state of affairs should have been
known to all “crime reporters”, provided there is sufficient involvement in understanding and
analysing cases and of course, necessary familiarity in this field.

Need for Media Spotlight on the Health Care Professionals:

Inspite of the fact that our health care workers are daily playing such intimate role in dealing
with the violence, there is hardly any discussion, awareness within themselves on the violence.
Notably, there is hardly any spotlight on the health care professionals in the reporting of
violence in the media. The spotlight is always reserved for the actions taken by the police. This
is of course in many ways justified, but is not sufficient. True, the perpetrators of violence
escape punishment due to the indifferent or biased actions of and corruption within the police
department. But the health care professionals, even those who are directly employed by the
police department, coroner’s courts (only in Bombay) or in government hospitals, are
professionally autonomous from their employers in the sense that the administrative orders of
the employer for the health care professionals are always subordinated to the professional work
and medical/nursing ethics. It is time that the media stop brushing aside the
inapt/indifferent/biased/corrupt work of the health care professionals under the plea that they
work as per orders from above. An additional spotlight needs to be created on the health care
professionals to monitor the way they preserve and provide evidences, and the treatment and
rehabilitation provided to the survivors of violence.