I cannot help shuddering. It goes beyond keeping children away from all this. What worries me equally is that a lot of gamers are older men, men in their 20s and 30s and even older. Men who have more access to women in offices or on the streets than say, teens.

So where does the offender figure in our understanding of rape? Do we understand the brutality enough to actually be able to pardon it?

But what if a man does change? Does he have the right to lead a normal life?

The unimaginable agony in Polanski’s personal life is really no excuse for his act in 1977. There have been plenty of holocaust survivors and most of them have lived respectable and decent lives. Krakow’s Ghetto and Auschwitz are nightmares whose scars cannot be replaced by the accolades he has been showered with. But then, they are no excuse for his sexual misconduct either. And then again, a man, whose wife was murdered, must understand that violence against women is a crime.

Rape, it is important to internalize is a gendered crime where the perpetrator is responsible for great trauma caused to a woman. She is not the carrier of honour and the vessel of purity but a human being – a person whose needs and space must be respected, a woman who has no obligation to fulfill any “conjugal rights” demanded of her.

On our way back, I ask Zubeida to leave the medicines at my place. She could take one every morning when she comes. She weeps staring into her palms. She says that she doesn’t know which shame is better. Living everyday knowing her husband has raped her ever since they have been married or putting him away in a lock up and letting everyone know where he is and why.

Feminism and objectivism are both not monolithic. This is true, especially so for feminism. Women, ecologists and pacifists all over the world define it in different ways. However, to accommodate Rand would be an abrogation of the basic premises upon with feminism stands.

Picture this. A young girl, actually a young woman age 19, who has a mental age of 6-9 years, lives in an orphanage. A ruthless employee decides to have his fun with her. She is left pregnant and doesn’t even know it, because she is mentally challenged. Her fate and her baby’s fate are to be decided by others because she cannot think as an adult for herself, and also she has no biological relatives or guardians to take care of her.

More than 4,000 rapes have been reported in the eastern Congo region this year. It remains one of the world’s worst rape zones.

In February 2006, a Sudanese man married amidst great media attention. Having been caught trying to have sex with a neighbour’s goat, it was deemed by a council of elders that the accused would have to pay the owner a dowry of 15000 Sudanese dinars and, of course, marry the goat. When asked to comment on the issue, the owner Mr. Alifi, who had caught the accused red handed, said that the elders had not felt the need to involve the police. The dowry would suffice for the loss of the goat. The marriage of goat and man (who according to the owner were still very much together) was of course necessary because the goat had been ‘used as a wife’.

It is highly frustrating (not shocking) that our focus is on all the wrong aspects and the wrong people. Why doesn’t the cruelty of rape jerk us? Instead of viewing the case of celebrity rapes as an opportunity to send a warning to the society by meting out the severest of punishments, we further propagate the idea that rape is fun and is not that bad an affair if caught when money’s there to bail one out!