Hannah Ellis-Petersen: Despair as India rape crisis grows
The key social issues behind the crisis remain unaddressed and the culture of impunity for sexual crimes remains firmly embedded. In the courts there are 133,000 pending rape cases. In May, a panel of judges dismissed allegations of sexual harassment against the chief justice of India, made by a former court employee, as being of “no substance”, in a ruling that triggered anger and protests. ... According to statistics, a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. India is the most dangerous place to be a woman
Her family called her
Twinkle. In the dry desert brush of Rajasthan where her body was found, blood
spattering her tiny legs and brown school uniform and a belt fastened around
her neck, she lay among scattered toffee wrappers. Her family could
barely utter the words to describe what happened to the six-year-old. “If you
saw her body, you will never sleep again,” said her grandfather Mahvir Meena.
Over the past week, a
wave of anger
and repulsion has enveloped India in response to the gang rape and
murder of a 27-year-old vet in Hyderabad as she made her way home from work
last Wednesday. The four men who allegedly carried out the attack deliberately
deflated her scooter tyres, then waited. After offering her help, they
allegedly dragged her to isolated scrubland by the side of the road, raped her,
asphyxiated her and then dumped her body in a motorway underpass, before
dousing it with kerosene and setting it alight. The four suspects were
controversially shot
dead by police on Friday.
Yet while the horrific
crime has prompted hundreds to take to the streets, and calls for lynching and
hanging in parliament, it was far from an isolated incident. According to
statistics, a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. India is the most
dangerous place to be a woman, according to a survey by the Thomson Reuters
Foundation last year, and the stark reality of this was brought to the fore
this week. As well as the Hyderabad case, there was the abduction, gang rape
and murder of a young lawyer in Jharkhand;
the rape and murder of a 55-year-old cloth seller in Delhi’s Gulabi Bagh
neighbourhood; and a teenager in the state of Bihar was gang raped and killed,
before her body was set on fire on Tuesday. And last Saturday, in
the small rural Rajasthan village of Kherli, Twinkle became one of the youngest
recent victims of India’s sexual violence pandemic.
It was seven years
ago, after the brutal
gang rape of Jyoti
Singh, a student on a bus in Delhi in 2012, that India’s systemic problem
with sexual violence was first pushed into the spotlight. Thousands took to the
streets to demand action in the name of Singh, – who was christened Nirbhaya,
meaning fearless, by the media. New legislation doubled prison terms for
rapists to 20 years. But seven years on,
the consensus among activists and women is that the problem is getting worse.
The key social issues behind the crisis remain unaddressed and the culture of
impunity for sexual crimes remains firmly embedded.
In the courts there
are 133,000 pending rape cases. In May, a panel of judges dismissed allegations
of sexual harassment against
the chief justice
of India, made by a former court employee, as being of “no substance”, in a
ruling that triggered anger and protests. He denied the claims. “Unless this becomes a
problem of nationalism and national pride, I don’t see anything changing,” said
Deepa Narayan, a social activist and the author of Chup: Breaking the Silence
About India’s Women.
“Society here devalues women systematically and makes them subhuman, and rape
is the worst symptom of that. It does feel like the levels of depravity and
cruelty in these crimes are increasing.”
State governments have
not even touched the Nirbhaya fund, for which the government put aside 10bn
rupees for initiatives to help women’s safety. As of today, 91% of the fund
remains unspent. Delhi, which bears the unwelcome title of “rape capital of the
world”, has spent 5% of its allocation.... read more:
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