This article is written with the intent of identifying a serious problem afflicting the West and recommending the means by which the West could once again become safe for women.
Catholic priests and Protestant pastors raped at least thousands, and probably millions, of defenseless children over several years. The problem is so widespread that even the John Jay Report—the Catholic-commissioned damage-control exercise—admits that at least 4,392 Catholic priests have been pedophile rapists in the USA alone.
Even the infamous Pope Francis, unable to hide the crime any longer, confesses that two per cent of the Catholic priests are pedophile rapists. In 2009, Pope Benedict, the former Hitler Youth, had confessed that as many as five per cent of Catholic priests are pedophile rapists. Evidently, popes conveniently lie about numbers to suit expediency and the real percentage is likely to be much higher.
Only a fraction of these child rapes have been reported. Very few of the rapist clergymen have been prosecuted. Churches have successfully impeded investigations and denied justice to the victims often with the connivance of a sympathetic judiciary and media. The secularist media occasionally reports on these horrendous rapes but rarely denounces the pope or calls for dismantling the guilty institutions. It counterbalances an occasional report on child rape with a positive propaganda on the pope and Christian institutions. The conservative media would sometimes acknowledge the rapes only to settle an intra-Christian sectarian feud and not out of concern for the child victims. Boz Tchividjian, the grandson of the demagogue, racist, and evangelist Billy Graham, admits that the Evangelical pastors “are worse” offenders than the Catholic priests in raping children.
Media suppresses rape reports
If the widespread rape of defenseless children by Christian clergy is at least minimally reported, the rape of children in Western secular institutions is rarely reported. The leftist media’s suppression of the rape of nearly 1,000 children in the BBC best illustrates this phenomenon.
Jimmy Saville was a television presenter with the BBC. He raped as many as 1,000 children on the premises of the BBC. Many BBC insiders knew about these rapes which lasted several decades. However, the BBC shielded Saville until he died of old age. Mark Thompson, the former CEO of the BBC, thwarted any investigation into and reporting on Saville’s rapes. He lied during the half-hearted questioning to protect rapist Saville and the BBC and to deny justice to the child victims. No secularist has denounced Thompson. Instead, they made him the CEO of the New York Times in 2012.
Mark Thompson is not an exception. He is representative of the prevalent tendency among powerful secularists to usher in a culture of rape and endanger the safety of women and children. Margaret Thatcher made several attempts to get the rapist Saville knighted despite having knowledge of his crimes. Her government was aware of the culture of pedophile rapes in England’s secular and Christian institutions. Instead of going after the rapists, Thatcher intimidated those who attempted to expose them with the help of her home secretary, Leon Brittan, himself a pedophile rapist. The secular establishment was complicit by silence.
At least 16 of Thatcher’s MPs and 30 leaders of the Church of England were pedophile rapists who ran the Pedophile Information Exchange to shield themselves. Honest journalists such as Jill Dando, who courageously attempted to investigate the widespread culture of pedophile rape in the BBC and other secular bastions, were murdered. These gruesome rapes were conveniently reported only after the rapists had died of natural causes.
Contrast between Indian and Western attitude to rape
Contrast this with the Indian response to reports of rape. The spontaneous protests for Jyoti Singh and the sensitive Indian response are well known. The example of Tarun Tejpal, a leading Indian secularist editor of Tehelka, is another. He was arrested for raping a female journalist working for Tehelka. Even though the secular journalists and executives at Tehelka attempted to shield Tejpal, the police acted courageously to arrest the rapist even though he was connected with India’s then ruling Congress party and its leader Sonia Gandhi. More importantly, barring leftists, Indians shunned Tehelka.
In contrast, western secularists eagerly support the BBC despite its criminal guilt in the rape of children. For example, the atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins contributed numerous documentaries to the BBC without letting its culpability in the rape of so many children bother his conscience.
BBC is representative
The BBC episode is representative of secular West’s culture of rape. Rotherham’s Labor MP, Sarah Champion, has revealed that sex gangs probably raped one million British children. She has called it a “national disaster” and has demanded a task force to fight the “horror.” These rapes have gone on for several years and only recently has the media begun reporting.
What explains this silence? How is the secular establishment culpable in such rapes?
Let us begin with the case of Rotherham.
Virtually all the rapists in the 1,400 cases brought to trial there have been Muslims of Pakistani origin. It is reported that the police were hesitant to register cases against Muslim rapists out of fear of being called racists. Secularists characterize even a reasonable criticism of Islam as Islamophobia. They blame even the most heinous crimes committed by Muslims on others—for example, the BBC deviously claimed that an allegedly innocent Mohammed Emwazi became “Jihadi John” because the MI5 verbally interrogated him. Secularists have created pseudo-scientific sociology narratives of ‘institutionalized racism’ and frequently invoke them to deny real crimes and to intimidate law enforcement with the charges of racism. This environment of intimidation prevents law enforcement from taking cognizance of rapes should the culprit belong to certain ethnicities or religions. As a result, rapists flourish.
Roger Scruton points out that all victims in Rotherham were “vulnerable girls” that were “inadequately protected by their families.” This is universally true. Scientific researches of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer have decisively shown that rape is primarily motivated by sexual urges. A rapist targets the most vulnerable victim. A well-knit family system offers crucial protection to a female and deters rapists.
Secularists break up family bonds via feminism
Secularists excoriate traditions that nurture close-knit families. They undermine family relationship by portraying it in hostile and suspicious terms under the garb of feminism.
Kavita Krishnan, a Communist and Naxalite activist who featured in the infamous documentary India’s Daughter exemplifies this undermining behavior. She is “disturbed” that Jyoti Singh “had permission from her parents” to go out that fateful night. “Why should she seek permission?” asks Krishnan and belligerently declares that “an adult woman” should be “unapologetic about having the right to go out.” Note that for secularists it is not trust, love, and reciprocal concern which mark relationships; it is all about obsessively and unapologetically exercising one’s rights.
However, human relationships and behavior are more complex and transcend such ignorant secularist obsessions. The example of the parents of Jyoti Singh demonstrates this. They were poor and uneducated. But they sold every possession they had to educate their daughter. The father loaded cargo at the airport – a back-breaking job in a Third World country, to pay for his daughter’s paramedical education. Those parents aren’t conversant in English but they easily related to their daughter’s passion for English movies. In every sense, they lived for her.
Jyoti Singh, unlike secularists, understood the spirit of that relationship. She knew what her parents stood for: love, care, concern, and selflessness. Her parents were her well-wishers and her relationship with them wasn’t characterized by a misguided obsession with and struggle for rights at the expense of love. She knew that every relationship is reciprocal. Her success was their dream. In her dying moments, she expressed grief that they couldn’t realize their dream. The depth of such relationships eludes the understanding of secularists. However, traditional Indian families understand it well. They know that positive changes happen because of trust and love, not because of obsessive demands for rights. It is this trust and family bondage that enables many poor and uneducated Indian parents to educate their daughters and provide them a bright future. It is this trusting family relationship that secularists attempt to destroy.
They have destroyed it in the West, where divorce rates have risen and family has been significantly weakened. Parents are often unaware of who their children’s friends are or what activities they indulge in. I do not at all suggest that parents should be controlling their children’s lives. On the contrary, a healthy family is characterized by transparency. Parents and children – both sons and daughters, make decisions together. In the secular West, the decline in family involvement has given rise to anonymity, which empowers the rapists and makes women and children vulnerable. In 73 per cent of rapes, the rapist is someone known to the victim. If a woman is vulnerable, and the family is not closely involved in her life, it is the rapist who benefits from the anonymity.
The following chart shows that divorce rate and rape rate are directly correlated. The only exception is Finland, where the high divorce rate doesn’t directly correlate with a high rape rate. However, the rape rate in Finland is likely to be under-reported because the very lenient prison term given the rapists in Finland might be discouraging the women from reporting rape. A 2006 study (Amnesty International: Case Closed – Rape and Human Right in the Nordic Countries, p. 94) reports that the average prison term awarded for rape in Finland is only two years. Only four per cent of offenders are actually sent to prison. Such leniency shown, the rapists would surely discourage women from reporting rape:
Source of data: United Nations Report 2012, The Guardian 2013 Rape Report for the U.K., and NCRB Crime in India 2011.
In other words, as a society becomes increasingly secularized, divorce rates increase, relationships become less trusting, and the family is weakened. This leads to anonymity, which empowers and emboldens sexual predators and renders women and children vulnerable to rape. In contrast, traditional Indian culture results in stable families and trusting relationships, and reduces anonymity. As a consequence, as objective analysis of data informs us, women and children face lesser risk of being raped.
Richard Dawkins as an exemplum of racism against Indians
If westerners could contrast the high incidence of rape in their society with the low incidence of rape in India, they could analyze the root causes of the problem. However, the secular tendency to appeal to racism inherent in a sizeable section of the West prevents this introspection. An approving tweet by Richard Dawkins of an op-ed by Zubin Madon filled with racist stereotypes illustrates this point.
Indian men are portrayed, on the basis of anecdotal evidence, as having a hearty laugh at the plight of a woman being raped. The author then invokes an imaginary ride on a boat across the river. Indian men on the boat are shown as ogling at exposed female legs “like a starving Somalian infant pining at a bottle of milk.” British men are presented as a refreshing contrast. Almost yogi-like, they “never look up from their smart phones during the whole ride.”
The secular media would’ve never published such an op-ed packed with anecdotal evidence and racist stereotypes had the subjects being caricatured been blacks instead of Indians. As a result of sustained campaigns by the blacks against racism, racists among the whites are more careful about what they say and write about blacks in public. However, they can stereotype Indians in the most racist manner without consequences. If a brown sepoy could create such stereotypes, racists among the secularists are only too glad to propagate it.
Such stereotypes prevent westerners from objectively evaluating their own societies. The documentary, United Kingdom’s Daughters, made in response to India’s Daughter, demonstrates that westerners are often crudely insensitive to the plight of a rape victim. In that documentary, white British men proudly appear on camera to inform us that women enjoy being raped. One man gleefully says, “Show her your penis. If she cries, she is just playing hard to get.” Racists among westerners needn’t confront this sickening reality in western societies if they could instead invent and propagate racist stereotypes of Indian men as perverts.
Unfortunately, many westerners, who are not racists but are sensitive human beings, also end up internalizing these racist stereotypes spread by the secularists. By sheer repetition, such stereotypes create the perception that unlike the depraved Indian men, western men are knights in shining armor. As a result, very few westerners realize that the incidence of rape in the West is orders of magnitude higher than what it is in India. They do not realize that the destruction of family resulting from the spread of secular culture is at the root of this pervasive problem.
Secular West’s culture of rape
Secular West’s culture of rape is four-fold in nature. First, it is prevalent in the institutions secularists cherish. Secularists are guilty of thwarting any meaningful investigation into these rapes and of suppressing honest reporting. Second, secularists have created false narratives and pseudoscientific explanations to rationalize rape and to blame it on all but the rapists. This often impedes law enforcement and allows the rapists to flourish. Third, the secularist obsession with misguided feminism and the undermining of the family as an institution has deprived women and children of the most valuable defense against rape. Statistics show that the weakening of family directly correlates with the increase in rape. Fourth, secularists appeal to the racism inherent in a sizeable section of the West by creating false and racist stereotypes of Indian men. These stereotypes present white men as desirable and Indian men as depraved rapists. As a result, many westerners live in a make-believe world where they imagine that their societies are rape-free whereas India is infested with rapists. This deluded belief allows rapists to flourish while endangering the safety of women and children.
As I explain here, while the tendency to rape may be rooted in biology, memetics often influence whether or not such tendencies manifest. A society that curbs the spread of the virulent secular meme protects the vulnerable from the rapists. Reasonable westerners should boycott institutions such as the BBC that are guilty of fostering a culture of rape.
Kalavai Venkat is a Silicon Valley-based writer, an atheist, a practicing orthodox Hindu, and author of the book “What Every Hindu should know about Christianity.”