Indian bus rape: Delhi sees rush for guns

[Type Username Here]

Hundreds of women in Delhi have applied for gun licences following the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman by six men in a bus in the city last month.

The news underlines the widespread sense of insecurity in the city, deep before the incident and deeper now, and the lack of faith in law enforcement agencies.

The ashes of the victim of the attack – who died on Friday after 13 days in hospitals in India and Singapore, and was cremated in Delhi in a secret ceremony under heavy security on Sunday – were scattered on the surface of the Ganges river, sacred to Hindus, in northern India on Tuesday.

The case has provoked an unprecedented debate about endemic sexual harassment and violence in India. Tens of thousands have protested across the country, calling for harsher laws, better policing and a change in culture.

Politicians, initially caught off-guard, have now promised new legislation to bring in fast-track courts and harsher punishments for sexual assault. The six men accused of the attack are to be formally charged with murder later this week and potentially face execution.

Indian media are currently reporting incidents of sexual violence that would rarely gain attention previously. In the last 24 hours these have included a teenager fleeing repeated abuse by her brother, who was allegedly assaulted on a bus by a conductor, a 15-year-old held for 15 days by three men in a village in Uttar Pradesh and repeatedly assaulted, an 11-year-old allegedly raped by three teenagers in the north-eastern city of Guwahati and two cases of rape in the city of Amritsar.

One case reported on Tuesday involved a woman, also in a village in Uttar Pradesh, who suffered 90% burns after being doused in kerosene, allegedly by a man who had been stalking her for months.

There were signs that a further taboo was about to be broken when one of India's best-known English-language television presenters asked viewers who had experienced abuse from a family member to contact her.

The rush for firearms will cause concern, however. Police in Delhi have received 274 requests for licences and 1,200 inquiries from women since 18 December, two days after the woman and a male friend were attacked in a bus cruising on busy roads between 9pm and 10pm.

"Lots of women have been contacting us asking for information about how to obtain licences. Any woman has a threat against her. It's not surprising. There are fearless predators out there," said Abhijeet Singh of the campaign group Guns For India.

Delhi police received around 500 applications for the whole of 2011, up from 320 the previous year.

Hundreds of women had come in person to the police licensing department in the city, the Times of India reported.

"We had to patiently tell them that one needs to have a clear danger to one's life to be given a licence. However some … said that with even public transport no longer safe in the city they just cannot take chances," an unnamed official told the newspaper.

There are estimated to be 40m guns in India, the second highest number in the world after the US. Licences are hard to obtain and most are illegal weapons, many manufactured in backstreet workshops. Official ownership levels remain low – three guns for every 100 people – but in recent years the number of women holding arms has risen. Most are wealthy and worried about theft or assault.

There are fears the attack will lead to further restrictions on women in India, who already suffer significant constraints.

Elders in Matapa, in the poverty-stricken Indian state of Bihar, banned the use of mobile phones for teenage girls and warned them against wearing "sexy" clothes. They claim the move will check rape cases and restore "social order". Other villages nearby are planning similar bans, locals said.



One member of parliament in Rajasthan, the north-western state, also called for a ban on skirts for schoolgirls to keep them away from "men's lustful gazes". Banwari Lal Singhal said private schools allowing students to wear skirts explained increased sexual harassment locally.


Matapa is in southern Bihar's Aurangabad district – the region from which one of the Delhi gang-rape accused, Akshay Thakur, comes. The order was issued after a formal meeting with villagers, council officials and school teachers on Sunday. "Almost every villager pressed us to ban the mobile phones use by the schoolgirls saying they are proving quite dangerous for the society and corrupting traditional values," the local village council head, Sushma Singh, told the Guardian on Tuesday.



Protesters were angered by the news. "Our sister will have died in vain if all that is happening after is our fear is greater and ladies are more unfree," said Deepti Anand, a 21-year-old student in Delhi who has attended demonstrations most days in recent weeks.

Indian bus rape: Delhi sees rush for guns | World news | guardian.co.uk

 

[The Real]

The problem is in the article itself. You've got rural villages with poor education that are run by councils of elders, which is to say, old and unchallenged traditions, which are heavily patriarchal. It's good that the protesters against that way of thinking are gaining visibility, though.

 

[the cac mamba]

the primitive victim blaming in some of these societies is pretty disgusting

 

[The Real]

the primitive victim blaming in some of these societies is pretty disgusting

It is disgusting, but primitive might not be the word- much of the "developed" world continues to do this, including the USA. Don't forget all those rape comments, etc, spoken by mainstream politicians in the last year alone. There's still a lot of work to do on that front.

 

[the cac mamba]

It is disgusting, but primitive might not be the word- much of the "developed" world continues to do this, including the USA. Don't forget all those rape comments, etc, spoken by mainstream politicians in the last year alone.

yea u got a point

 

[88m3]

It is disgusting, but primitive might not be the word- much of the "developed" world continues to do this, including the USA. Don't forget all those rape comments, etc, spoken by mainstream politicians in the last year alone. There's still a lot of work to do on that front.

True but in law, and science they aren't correct so its a moot point.

 

[zerozero]

The problem is in the article itself. You've got rural villages with poor education that are run by councils of elders, which is to say, old and unchallenged traditions, which are heavily patriarchal. It's good that the protesters against that way of thinking are gaining visibility, though.

it's interesting in a way the easy way social conservatives can hitch their agenda to the anti rape thing. They don't see the distinction between the whole modern "it's a consent problem" thing and their agenda of "it's about sex" thing. Sometimes this folds over like a mobius strip in that feminists and social conservatives end up having concurrent agendas on things like being against particular media, songs, porn etc

 

[The Real]

Delhi gang-rape: look westward in disgust | Emer O'Toole | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

There's something uncomfortably neocolonial about the way the Delhi gang-rape and subsequent death of the woman now known as Damini is being handled in the UK and US media. While India's civil and political spheres are alight with protest and demands for changes to the country's culture of sexual violence, commentators here are using the event to simultaneously demonise Indian society, lionise our own, and minimise the enormity of western rape culture.

A particularly blatant example of this is Libby Purves's piece for the Times. She says the Delhi bus rape should "shatter our Bollywood fantasies". For Purves, westerners enjoy a romanticised view of India, all heady spirituality and Marigold Hotels; and especially romantic in their views, for reasons Purves neglects to address, are the British. Thus, upright Europeans have sentimentally ignored the "murderous, hyena-like male contempt" that Purves says is an Indian cultural norm. Neatly excised from her account however is the relationship between poverty, lack of education and repressive attitudes towards women, and, by extension, the role of Europe in creating and sustaining poverty in its former colonies. Attitudes towards women in the east were once used by colonialists to, first, prop up the logic of cultural superiority that justified unequal power relations (the "white man's burden") and second, silence feminists working back in the west by telling them that, comparatively, they had nothing to complain about.

When it finishes calling Indian men hyenas, Purves's article states that westerners "have the luxury of fretting about frillier feminist issues such as magazine images, rude remarks and men not doing housework". Does anyone else see an unattractive historical pattern here?

Her article is not, by any means, the only one to report on this issue as if rape is something that only happens "over there" – something we civilised folk in the west have somehow put behind us. Elsewhere, the message is subtler, but a misplaced sense of cultural superiority shines through. For example, this BBC article states, as if shocking, the statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours. That equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately four times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; in the US only 24% of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction. This is the strange kind of reportage you tend to get on the issue.

Owen Jones's excellent piece in the Independent is a breath of fresh air, asking people to acknowledge that rape, as well as gang rapes, happen in the west too. Similarly, Laura Bates's recent article on victim blaming should act as sufficient retort to anyone who thinks police chief KP Raghuvanshi's advice that women should carry chilli powder to prevent rape is symptomatic of a specifically Indian brand of misogyny.

The coverage of Damini's death strikes a particularly ironic note following recent media controversy over a rape, in Steubenville, Ohio, of a 16-year-old girl – allegedly by members of the high-school football team. The case is that the young woman was dragged, drunk and unresponsive, from party to party, where she was sexually abused. The brutal death of Damini has spurred Indian civil society to its feet, causing protest and unrest, bringing women and men into the streets, vocal in their demands for change. Sonia Gandhi has met the woman's parents. The army and the states of Punjab and Haryana have cancelled new year's celebrations. What happened in the US? In Steubenville, football-crazy townsfolk blamed the victim and it took a blogger – Alexandria Goddard, who is now being sued – and a follow-up article from the New York Times four months after the incident to get nationwide attention for the story.

Purves's article claims that we in the west are "looking eastward in disgust". I believe that disgusted parties would do well to turn their judgmental gazes on their own societies. Let's look east in solidarity and support for India's urgently necessary women's rights movement; let's keep talking about the social discrimination Indian women face, which affluent westerners do not. However, it is both prejudiced and completely fantastical to talk as though sexual violence is some kind of Indian preserve. We might have comparatively better women's rights in the UK, but this is due, in large part, to the social services that our wealth allows. Colonial history helped to create and global capital continues to sustain low standards of living in India. We would do well to be cognisant of our historically inscribed privilege before complaining that this horrific event has destroyed our pretty colonial fantasies.

 

[Type Username Here]

Delhi gang-rape: look westward in disgust | Emer O'Toole | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

There's something uncomfortably neocolonial about the way the Delhi gang-rape and subsequent death of the woman now known as Damini is being handled in the UK and US media. While India's civil and political spheres are alight with protest and demands for changes to the country's culture of sexual violence, commentators here are using the event to simultaneously demonise Indian society, lionise our own, and minimise the enormity of western rape culture.

A particularly blatant example of this is Libby Purves's piece for the Times. She says the Delhi bus rape should "shatter our Bollywood fantasies". For Purves, westerners enjoy a romanticised view of India, all heady spirituality and Marigold Hotels; and especially romantic in their views, for reasons Purves neglects to address, are the British. Thus, upright Europeans have sentimentally ignored the "murderous, hyena-like male contempt" that Purves says is an Indian cultural norm. Neatly excised from her account however is the relationship between poverty, lack of education and repressive attitudes towards women, and, by extension, the role of Europe in creating and sustaining poverty in its former colonies. Attitudes towards women in the east were once used by colonialists to, first, prop up the logic of cultural superiority that justified unequal power relations (the "white man's burden") and second, silence feminists working back in the west by telling them that, comparatively, they had nothing to complain about.

When it finishes calling Indian men hyenas, Purves's article states that westerners "have the luxury of fretting about frillier feminist issues such as magazine images, rude remarks and men not doing housework". Does anyone else see an unattractive historical pattern here?

Her article is not, by any means, the only one to report on this issue as if rape is something that only happens "over there" – something we civilised folk in the west have somehow put behind us. Elsewhere, the message is subtler, but a misplaced sense of cultural superiority shines through. For example, this BBC article states, as if shocking, the statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours. That equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately four times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; in the US only 24% of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction. This is the strange kind of reportage you tend to get on the issue.

Owen Jones's excellent piece in the Independent is a breath of fresh air, asking people to acknowledge that rape, as well as gang rapes, happen in the west too. Similarly, Laura Bates's recent article on victim blaming should act as sufficient retort to anyone who thinks police chief KP Raghuvanshi's advice that women should carry chilli powder to prevent rape is symptomatic of a specifically Indian brand of misogyny.

The coverage of Damini's death strikes a particularly ironic note following recent media controversy over a rape, in Steubenville, Ohio, of a 16-year-old girl – allegedly by members of the high-school football team. The case is that the young woman was dragged, drunk and unresponsive, from party to party, where she was sexually abused. The brutal death of Damini has spurred Indian civil society to its feet, causing protest and unrest, bringing women and men into the streets, vocal in their demands for change. Sonia Gandhi has met the woman's parents. The army and the states of Punjab and Haryana have cancelled new year's celebrations. What happened in the US? In Steubenville, football-crazy townsfolk blamed the victim and it took a blogger – Alexandria Goddard, who is now being sued – and a follow-up article from the New York Times four months after the incident to get nationwide attention for the story.

Purves's article claims that we in the west are "looking eastward in disgust". I believe that disgusted parties would do well to turn their judgmental gazes on their own societies. Let's look east in solidarity and support for India's urgently necessary women's rights movement; let's keep talking about the social discrimination Indian women face, which affluent westerners do not. However, it is both prejudiced and completely fantastical to talk as though sexual violence is some kind of Indian preserve. We might have comparatively better women's rights in the UK, but this is due, in large part, to the social services that our wealth allows. Colonial history helped to create and global capital continues to sustain low standards of living in India. We would do well to be cognisant of our historically inscribed privilege before complaining that this horrific event has destroyed our pretty colonial fantasies.

Excuse me if I'm missing the point, but the rape comments from elected officials in this country was very big news and was debated here for weeks. No one is ignoring the situation in the west.

Also, the term rape to me is very ambiguous in nature, and statistics don't reflect that. There are also false allegations of rape and unreported rape. I'm not going to sit here and say that there are more rapes in India than the West. I'd be willing to bet the opposite is true.

 

[Type Username Here]

It is disgusting, but primitive might not be the word- much of the "developed" world continues to do this, including the USA. Don't forget all those rape comments, etc, spoken by mainstream politicians in the last year alone. There's still a lot of work to do on that front.

It's primitive.

I don't care if its US Congressman John Cracker the Third saying it or Tribal Elder Piyush.

These types of comments in the year 2013 are fukking primitive.

 

[The Real]

Excuse me if I'm missing the point, but the rape comments from elected officials in this country was very big news and was debated here for weeks. No one is ignoring the situation in the west.

I agree, and thank goodness there was an uproar about that. I do think there is a bit of Eurocentrism that creeps into these discussions, though. For example, as the article mentions, we have the current situation of the Ohio gang rape, in which a 16-year-old girl was raped by about 13 guys for several hours, most of them football players on a local team. The town in which this happened has expressed overwhelming support for the players and blamed the victim for being drunk, promiscuous, etc. Thankfully, she did not die, but personally, I have not seen nearly the amount of coverage (or outrage) over this as I have the India case. I'm willing to bet that if we did a survey of the top 5 most-read newspapers in this country for the last week or so, we'd find more time and print space dedicated to the India case.

I also think the article points out certain falsehoods that are present in the specific articles it quotes, like the idea that Western women are only worrying about "frillier," more minor issues, since rape has more or less been overcome here as opposed to in these non-Western countries, etc.

Also, the term rape to me is very ambiguous in nature, and statistics don't reflect that. There are also false allegations of rape and unreported rape. I'm not going to sit here and say that there are more rapes in India than the West. I'd be willing to bet the opposite is true.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with the unreported rapes, as that's mentioned in the article. You're right, there are false allegations of rape, too. India is massive, so I'm sure there are more rapes in India than any particular Western country, but it is interesting that the rate of rape (and we can assume that the US, for example, doesn't have a very different system or rate of generating rape stats) isn't significantly different in either place, which I think is what the article is getting at.