By Sharanya Gopinathan
Have you seen the uniquely unsettling and very important Rape in India Project? It’s a crowdsourced set of photographs of sites where sexual assault and rape have taken place.
Each photograph is accompanied by some details of the rape that took place there. It’s sombre and honestly depressing, but worth your time. It really contextualises and gives meaning to the hundreds of cold reports and numbers and statistics we see in the newspapers each day, and really shows how specific, violent and awful each individual instance is. Having access to these kinds of visuals really makes it much harder to dismiss each case as another statistic.
It’s still in it’s early stages, and it’ll be important to see how the project shapes up. While a number of the pictures existing in the project already are of open or public spaces, fewer are of homes, apartment complexes and gated communities. I wonder if, as word about the project spreads, more people will send in photographs of their homes, rooms and private spaces, which are sites rife with sexual violence, but that often don’t make it into the national imagination when we think about rape and where it happens.
You can check out the full project on Instagram here.