The Rape Fantasies of Indian Men
"In Nepal too she kept falling in and out of depression. Last year, we finally decided to get her regular treatment."
"A friend suggested a doctor in Nainital and since then she was on medication. I had purchased all her medicines when she told me she wanted to live with our sister for a while."
Brother of Nepalese rape and murder victim, Haryana State, India
"Notions of revenge and honor have always been intertwined. This can cause women to end up as collateral, even when they themselves have committed no wrong. This was the case last year when unelected heads of a village council in the state of Uttar Pradesh ruled that a 24-year-old woman should be gang-raped to punish her brother, who had eloped with someone’s wife. In addition to the green light for the rape, the village council also ordered the woman to marry one of her attackers."
"Just why is rape such a powerful way of seeking revenge? The reason, again, lies in notions of honor and shame. If you are raped, the pressures of honor compel you and your family not to speak about the crime. Unlike murder, which does not carry this stigma, rape and its perceived shamefulness make it hard for women and their families to seek justice. Many might not see the point. According to one common saying, “A girl’s honor is like glass, once it is broken it cannot be fixed."
Amana Fontanella-Khan, feature writer, Mumbai, India
Anindito Mukherjee/Reuters
An autopsy found that she was missing several of her internal organs. Objects, including stones, blades and a stick had been inserted into her body. No mention made whether that mutilation took place while she was still living, or when she was already dead. Why do these dreadful atrocities, these gruesomely horrible sexual attacks happen in India to vulnerable women?
What is it in the collective cultural code of the country that persuades men that women's lives are casually expendable?
Indian laws forbid naming and identifying victims of rape, living or dead. Indian laws were fairly recently re-written to address the pathology of sexual violence in Indian society. Where news surfaces of atrocities committed against women in urban settings, but the far more prevalent and vicious attacks against girls and women in rural India are so commonplace they are hardly worth a mention, and police fail to respond.
Newspapers do carry those stories when, as happens all too frequently, foreign visitors happen to be the victims. As happened with a Japense student sightseer in northern India who trusted a man who persuaded her he would be happy to guide her around and show her his country. What he did was take the woman by motorcycle to a farming village outside Jaipor in Rajasthan state to rape her and leave her on a highway.
Two months earlier a 22-year-old Japanese researcher had been held captive and repeatedly gang raped over a three-week period in a village close by a Buddhist pilgrimage centre in Bihar state. Several suspects have been arrested by police. A "tourist guide"offering to help the woman was involved in this case, as well. The woman managed to escape and fled to the eastern city of Kolkata.
Visit India? Why would any woman want to?
Leave India? Why wouldn't any woman be eager to?
Labels: Atrocities, Gender Equality, India, Sexual Predation, Social Failures
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, February 10, 2015
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