INSIGHT: Counselling can help victims reach a calmer frame of mind and speak the truth

Case 1: In the female ward of a dingy Delhi hospital, 10-year-old Alka is cringing with pain. “He tried to hit my head with a big stone,” she tells the psychologist, glassy-eyed. “It was evening. I had gone to the nearby temple for prasad. He told me someone was looking for me, and asked me to follow him. Then he took me to a lonely park,” Alka’s voice reduces to a whisper as she speaks. Her alleged rapist, Tanmay, is a distant relative.

Case 2: A police station in New Delhi. Fourteen-year-old Lony will only speak to a woman psychologist. She tells her that Sanjay, a 20-year-old man and her one-time neighbour, had clamped his hands on her mouth and pushed her into an auto-rickshaw in broad daylight, tied her hands and got her on a bus. He then took her to his friend’s place in another town, where he raped her. Her eyes fill with tears as she describes how he had pinned her on the bed. “I started screaming. Then he left me after 15 minutes or so. He didn’t try anything after that.”

Both the cases are bitter experiences the girls are not likely to forget for the rest of their lives and could get the perpetrators, if found guilty, imprisoned. But, in the absence of witnesses, the only things the police have in hand to ascertain whether the crimes have been committed at all — and then to nail the culprits — are the girls’ testimonies to the police. That is where psychologists step in. And they will tell you that while in Case 1, a truly heinous crime has been committed, Case 2 is just a case of an elopement gone sour.

Crime psychologists are increasingly playing important roles in helping the police tie up cases — and the police are certainly not complaining. “More and more NGOs are coming forward to help us and we welcome them,” says Vimla Mehra, joint commissioner, women’s crime cell, New Delhi. “We do our job of apprehending the culprits. But we also get a lot of help from these experts and NGOs, not only in crime detection, but also in crisis intervention.”

So how do psychologists make their deductions? “The police have facts to base their reports on. But there certain behavioural patterns which we observe in the victim and the accused to determine who’s lying and who’s not,” says Rajat Mitra, director of Swanchetan, an NGO that has helped the Delhi police solve many a case. In a month he assesses 30-odd cases including those relating to rape, molestation, attempted suicide or even homicide.

Alka’s case was one where Mitra helped the prosecution. “What Alka has described is totally probable, as Tanmay was a relative and she could have trusted him to go along. Also, the tone of the victim’s voice changes when he or she speaks of the assault. In Alka’s case, her voice comes down to a whisper,” Mitra explains. It helped the case that the accused had a record, and had been accused of trying to rape another member of Alka’s family.

But Mitra was not comfortable with Lony’s testimony. “How can the alleged rapist clamp her mouth in broad daylight, tie her hands and get her onto a public bus?” he asks. “The girl obviously knows her mind, as she insisted she would only speak to a woman psychologist. It is improbable that she would take in all that quietly and not make the other passengers in the bus aware of her plight.”

The expert argues that a rapist tries over and over again, which was not true in the case of Sanjay, who is said to have left Lony after she screamed for help. “Also, the visible changes in a victim when he or she is reliving her trauma were not displayed by Lony,” Mitra says. Further, the accused, a dentist’s assistant who does tailoring on the side, is said to be very soft-spoken. “He is definitely not the type to expose himself to such daylight antics,” Mitra stresses.

Another part of the psychologist’s job is trying to optimise the memory, perception and recall of the victims. Post-trauma, a victim’s statement often has inconsistencies. Counselling helps the victim reach a calmer state of mind and speak the truth. There was a case three years ago when a girl, after stating to the police that there were three molesters, claimed there were five to a reporter of a national daily, who then wrote that the police had filed an incorrect report. But during counselling, the girl mentioned that she had thought the other two men were accomplices because she had seen her molesters talking to them earlier. The two men were found to be innocent and later let off by the police.

The typical psychologist will not only speak to victims, but family members and even the accused if he or she is in custody, find the link among them, and make an assessment based on all the versions.

While a judge may not base a sentence entirely on the experts’ reports, a lot that is speculative can be confirmed using the psychologist’s perception of a case. The assessment then forms a part of the police report that is presented to the court. Says lawyer Colin Gonzalves, “The psychologists, in a way, perform the job of the police interrogator. Only, they are a lot gentler. They get the truth out of a situation. It sometimes helps to judge a case better.”

There are, however, no landmark judgments yet based on such assessment, as most cases where the experts have played a role are still pending in court. But the day is definitely not far when the crime psychologist will have his place of pride in determining cases.

(The cases mentioned above are true, but names have been changed)