Doctors Finger Indian Rape Survivors to Judge Sexual History

Whether a woman has had sex thousands of times or never before in her life has absolutely no bearing on the likelihood of her being raped. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop off-base attacks on a woman's sexual history as a means of undermining a rape allegation, provoking laws in the United States and other countries to help shield sexual assault survivors. In India, however, Human Rights Watch reports that the victim-blaming goes beyond digging up private info about a woman's sex life to a traumatic examination in which a doctor inserts multiple fingers into a survivor's vagina to judge how "loose" she is. Loose vaginas mean loose women, right?

Besides the original point that a woman's sexual history has no bearing on either her likelihood to be a victim of rape or her credibility as an accuser, a medical examination like this one cannot make accurate determinations about how sexually active a woman is. Doctors in these cases base medical judgments on the prevalence of myths about the hymen and how a woman "should" react physically her first time having sex, despite the fact that each woman's hymen and vagina is different, can be impacted by regular physical/athletic activity, and reacts to penetration based on how relaxed the woman is, not how often she has had sex previously. The Swedes even recently went through the trouble of renaming the hymen, which some believe all women might not even have at birth, to counter misconceptions about what exactly this tissue is.

Nonetheless, doctors in India will testify in court that if they can insert two fingers into the woman's vagina easily and without pain, she is "habituated to sex." If a woman is single, she is judged for having premarital sex, and if she consented before, hey, she probably consented this time around to and is just making the rape up. That's one of the first things you learn in Victim-Blaming 101.

In addition to being a medically unsound and misogynistic judgment on women's sexuality, the examination itself can be deeply traumatic to a rape survivor, and as such a massive deterrent to a woman reporting the crime and having her rapist prosecuted. Gee, what a surprise: Having a man penetrate your vagina with his fingers after you've been raped could trigger a post-traumatic stress reaction?

Human Rights Watch reports that doctors often conduct the examination without any thought to the survivor's physical, mental, or emotional state, and fail to obtain informed consent before going ahead with the violating procedure. And a rape survivor has to actually hope to feel excruciating pain during the examination assault to support her allegation. Basically, it's a lose-lose situation for the woman.

Although Indian law and the Supreme Court have now decided that neither evidence against a woman's "general immoral character" nor this specific "hypothetical and opinionative" test comprise sound evidence in a rape case, the government has failed to adequately enforce these aspects of the legal system, so this degrading, traumatic examination and attacks on women's sexually morality continue to be used today to put the victim on trial.

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