On Wednesday, Manesh Gill, a 39-year-old Indian-origin GP was convicted of rape and sentenced to 4 years in Jail, by the High Court of Edinburgh. He was also added to the list of Sexual offenders.
As per reports Manesh Gill, met the victim, a nursing student on Tinder. He posed as Mike on tinder and set up a date with the victim at a hotel in Stirling in 2018. Though the accused pleaded that the sex was consensual, the victim stated that during the assault her body had 'shut down' due to shock and was not in a state to stop the accused.
A lot of rape victims have previously reported their bodies going into involuntary paralysis during the assault. Though many a times courts favour the victims in such incidents, it has been noticed that victims get more traumatised while recalling the incident.
This case also calls into question the meaning of consent. A few years back the Bollywood actor Shiney Ahuja was accused of allegedly raping his 20-year-old maid. Later he was let scot free when the so-called 'victim' withdrew all charges against him.
Suppose the victim goes into 'shutdown' and is unable to react or stop the offender, is it taken as consensual sex? In case the convicts are falsely accused but proven guilty in courts, is there a way to get back their old lives? These are questions that are left unanswered.
This is not the first incident wherein an Indian-origin doctor is sentenced to jail for sexual assault in the UK.
A few weeks back, a 72-year-old GP, Krishna Singh was sentenced to 12 years in jail, by the High Court of Glasgow for having inappropriately touched over 40 female patients in the last 35 years of his practice. In another incident, a 65-year-old GP in Birmingham was falsely accused of sexual assault by a patient only to lose his GMC registration and job with the NHS.
In Krishna Singh's case, he had insisted that the patients were wrong and the examinations he performed on them were taught to him during his medical training in India. Such statements by the convict can jeopardize the practices of other doctors who underwent their medical education in India and draw a stigma on the Indian doctors.