Justice Verma Committee – Suggestions

Prevention of sexual assault:

1) Gender equality and male dominance: Include chapters on true gender equality in the classroom for the basic compulsory education phase.
Why: Girls are being explicitly informed from their childhood by society (parents, relatives etc.) that males are the dominant gender. Promote gender equality and negate male superiority through education in all sections of the populace.

2) Spare the victim: Promote total acceptance of a rape victim across all sections in society through education and propaganda.
Why: Remove the stigma attached to a rape victim. This would lower the self punishment, guilt and shame which the victims undergo after an assault.

3) Punishment: Death to be declared as the maximum punishment for assaults.
Why: Strong laws usually act as a deterrent unless a person is low on self concern.

4) Public Background Checks: Online searchable record of convicted offenders which is publicly available.
Why: Background check of convicts should be made accessible to everyone so people would be able to make decisions to rent out a place or hire convicts and more. This would also socially ostracize convicts.

5) Encourage citizen intervention: A person reporting an assault should be exempt from case investigations, unless he/she is a suspect in the said case.
Why: It would encourage citizens to look out for each other.

Tweaking the process after sexual assault:

1) Special Training for police force: Organize special courses for the police force once every 6 months to sensitize them towards sexual assault events.
Why: They should be able to look at complainants as victims, not adventurers. Mindset of police officers should accept sexual assaults as wrong and a violation of human rights, not the fault of the victim.

2) Female officers to register firs: Only female police officers should be assigned the role of registering firs on ‘all’ sexual assaults involving female victims.
Why: Female officers would be able to relate to the victim better than their male counterparts. Also, this would lower the sense of inhibition to register a fir in such cases.

3) Transparent investigation: Let the different phases of police investigation be mapped and status of investigation be made available publicly online without revealing the identity of the victim, which can be referred to using the fir number.
Why: This would add a layer of accountability to police investigations.