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. [...]
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. [...]
“The cry for the death penalty is nothing but a red herring,” she said. “It’s the easy option because it avoids any institutional accountability and doesn’t cost a thing, it’s just lawmakers reassuring themselves that all it will take to solve this problem is to eliminate one or two of these devils. We are still not having the conversation which needs to happen, so nothing changes.”
No comments:
Post a Comment