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The recent concern over sexual assaults on women has triggered the demand that capital punishment be awarded to rapists. No less than Union ...

The recent concern over sexual assaults on women has triggered the demand that capital punishment be awarded to rapists. No less than Union Home Minister L.K. Advani has expressed his unqualified support for such action.

Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday, he stated that his government was prepared to bring a law along these lines if there was political consensus on the issue.

While the concern of those who advocate such a measure is perfectly justified given the ubiquitous nature of this heinous crime, its efficacy is strongly in doubt. Although it has been rendered into a cliche almost, there is a great deal of common sense inherent in the observation that it is not the stringency of the punishment for this crime that is of the essence, but its surety.

And it is precisely in ensuring that the rapist is actually convicted that the state has failed its women citizens. Even the effort of the state to make punishment for rape more stringent by enacting the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1983 8212; which upped the punishment for the crime to a minimum sentence of seven years, which could go up to life imprisonment 8212; has not yielded the necessary results.

This is also because the great majority of those who commit rape escape any sentence whatsoever thanks to the numerous infirmities inherent in the criminal justice system 8212; from the level of the filing of FIRs to the judicial interpretation of events.

Many women suspect, and understandably so, that this call for capital punishment for rapists is just another way of avoiding a thorough reform of the system to ensure that it delivers real justice to women.

There is another issue that has not been highlighted sufficiently enough and one that has to do with societal trends. The alleged rapist of the Maulana Azad Medical College student in Delhi was found to be in his late teens, or early twenties.

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What causes young men to behave in such a bestial manner? Somewhere, the educational system, the media and society in general has failed to instil the basic value that all human beings, regardless of their gender, have a right to their bodily integrity, a right not to be physically violated, a right to exist without fear. Capital punishment for the rapist will not ensure that this happens. Targeted reform will.