hirteen years after the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in Delhi, South Asia is still living with a truth it struggles to face. Outrage rises and fades. Laws grow harsher. Governments promise justice. Executions take place. Yet, rape continues with painful regularity, as if nothing has changed.

India executed four of the men who assaulted Jyoti Singh in 2012. Pakistan upheld the death sentence of Noor Mukadam’s killer, carried out the execution of Zainab’s murderer and handed down harsh sentences in the Motorway Rape Case. Before these, the country had reeled from the gang-rape in Nawabpur and the assault on Mukhtaran Mai in Muzaffargarh. Every time, the public rose in grief and anger; every time, the state fluctuated between acquittals and harsh punishment but the society signalled clearly that such brutality would no longer be tolerated.

But the violence continues. It stretches from Delhi to Lahore, appearing in quiet rural settlements and in the largest cities. It feels like a ghost that refuses to be laid. Its persistence forces us to ask whether we have misunderstood what we are fighting.

Public debate often circles familiar explanations. Some reduce rape to uncontrolled desire. Others blame moral decline or women’s clothing. A third group points to sexual repression. Each of these contains fragments of truth, yet none explains the extraordinary brutality seen in many cases in Pakistan and India.

The sexual frustration explanation collapses when we examine who commits these crimes. A significant number of perpetrators come from lower and upper classes, not typically associated with sexual suppression. Middle‑class individuals, who regulate their behaviour more strictly, are less frequently involved. If repression were the main cause, the pattern would have been different. This suggests that the problem lie elsewhere.

Sexual desire alone cannot explain why victims are tortured, mutilated or murdered; nor why children, fully covered women, religious students and marginalised individuals are targeted under vastly different circumstances.

Psychology offers a more useful starting point. Susan Brownmiller argued that rape was an expression of power. Nicholas Groth expanded this by identifying motives rooted in anger, domination and sadistic aggression. His work reframed rape as a pseudosexual act, one in which sexual behaviour expresses non‑sexual motives such as rage and humiliation.

Modern forensic psychology has refined rather than replaced Groth’s ideas. The Massachusetts Treatment Center’s classification identifies opportunistic, angry, sadistic and vindictive offenders. These categories deepen the insight that rape is driven by power and sexualised aggression. The language has evolved, but the underlying motives remain.

A man seeking release and a man seeking domination may commit the same physical act, but their motives differ profoundly. The latter often explains why so many rapes in South Asia involve extreme violence. The Delhi case remains enlightening. One perpetrator blamed the victim’s clothing, yet the assault went far beyond rape. The violence was apparently a punishment for Jyoti’s non-submissiveness.

Public debate falters here. Statistics comparing rape rates across countries reveal nothing about motive. Many Western cases involve misunderstanding over consent between acquaintances. They rarely involve killing. South Asian cases often do. The contexts are shaped by different motives and social environments and cannot be meaningfully compared.

The answer may lie beyond individual psychology and within society itself. Pakistan and India inherited colonial and deeply hierarchical power structures. Both are shaped by majoritarian politics, widening inequalities, declining institutional trust and the normalisation of coercive power. In such environments, power becomes a cultural value. People learn that strength prevails over justice, authority outweighs morality and vulnerability invites exploitation.

Rape becomes an expression of a broader social psychology. It reflects the same mentality visible whenever stronger groups impose their will on weaker ones. The form changes. The principle remains. States impose decisions without participation. Majorities intimidate minorities. Elites operate above accountability. Wealthy individuals exploit privilege. Everywhere the lesson repeats: power grants Permission.

This perspective resolves a paradox. Many perpetrators come from economically marginalised backgrounds. Conventional theories struggle to explain why individuals lacking social power commit crimes supposedly motivated by power. The contradiction disappears when we consider humiliation. Individuals who experience chronic exclusion or failure may seek opportunities to reverse those feelings by dominating someone even more vulnerable. Rape becomes psychologically meaningful because it temporarily transforms the powerless into the powerful.

Public debate often splits into predictable interpretations. Some insist the crime stems from sexual frustration. Others frame it as a gender conflict. Yet the phenomenon is neither. It is rooted in the unequal distribution of power. Children and women at the lowest rungs of this hierarchy become the most frequent targets. Their vulnerability is produced by the very structure of power that governs social life.

The gang assault becomes not merely a sexual act but a collective performance of power by individuals who otherwise possess very little of it. Violence becomes psychologically rewarding because it symbolically reverses the perpetrator’s own experiences of powerlessness. Low‑income offenders do confirm the power‑and‑anger model; rather, they strengthen it.

Rape is not simply a criminal justice problem. It is a symptom of societies where coercion is normalised, institutions are weak, accountability is selective and power routinely triumphs over law. This explains why harsh punishments alone rarely work. Executions may satisfy public anguish and demands for justice, but they do little to address the cultural and psychological conditions that make such crimes conceivable.

As long as public discussions focus on clothing, morality or sexual repression, we will continue to misunderstand the phenomenon. The more important questions are psychological and sociological. Why is domination so attractive? Why is the humiliation of the weak tolerated? Why do victims face scrutiny when perpetrators should face law? Why do societies reward power despite its lethality?

Until these questions are confronted, rape will remain what it increasingly appears to be across South Asia. It will remain a symptom of a deep cultural disorder in which power carries greater prestige than justice and domination carry greater appeal than humanity. If rape is partly a symptom of a culture of domination, then the solution cannot be confined to harsher punishments. Criminal justice addresses symptoms of disorder, not aetiology.

The larger challenge is cultural. Societies must begin rewarding legitimacy rather than raw power, accountability rather than impunity and empathy rather than domination. Institutions that fail the weak must show that vulnerability is not an invitation to exploitation. Schools, religious institutions, families and political leaders all shape attitudes toward power and consent. Public discourse must shift. Every time attention moves from the perpetrator’s actions to the victim’s conduct, society should redirect it to the abuse.

Ultimately, the struggle against rape is a struggle against a mindset, a worldview. Every society must decide whether it wishes to be governed by the logic of power or by the spirit of justice. Where power is worshipped, the weak inevitably become available for abuses of various kinds. Sometimes their labour is exploited. Sometimes their voices are silenced. Sometimes their bodies become the site upon which domination is performed. Until we challenge that culture, we will continue to mistake symptoms for causes. The tragedy of rape lies not only in what it does to its victims. It lies in what it reveals about the society that produces it.

In this landscape, rape can be understood as the violation of a body without consent in order to assert dominance, to discharge buried anger or to reclaim a sense of power that life has otherwise denied. It is not a sexual act but a moment in which the perpetrator turns another human being into an expression for his own frustrations, humiliations and fantasies of control. The deeper psychological forces at play may be invisible to the perpetrators themselves, yet they can be understood through the psychology of power and anger. As long as this power‑and‑anger connection remains active, it will continue to reproduce itself in new acts of brutality.

The writer is a principal clinical psychologist in the Republic of Ireland. He can be contacted at [email protected]