Comment by Riaz Haq on April 17, 2018 at 7:47am

BBC News - Why #India's #rape crisis shows no signs of abating. #Modi #BJP #Kashmir #Unnao

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43782471#

The police in India are looking for the rapists of a girl who has no face, name, home or number.

She was possibly between nine and 11 years old, and her mutilated corpse was found in a bush recently near a playground in western Gujarat state's bustling Surat city, known the world over for its diamond polishing industry. Her battered body bore 86 injury marks. The autopsy surgeon believes that the injuries "seem to have been caused over a period ranging from one week to a day prior to the recovery of the body".

The police believe she was held captive, tortured and ravaged. More than 10 days after they found her body, they are clueless about her identity: they have trawled the list of some 8,000 missing children in the state and come up with nothing. "There was no sign of struggle at the spot where the body was found," the local police chief says.

Putting up a struggle seems to be futile when rape is increasingly used as an instrument to assert power and intimidate the powerless in India. This is not surprising, many believe, in a hierarchical, patriarchal and increasingly polarised society, where hate is being used to divide people and harvest votes.

An awful sex ratio imbalance - largely because of illegal sex-selection abortions - means it is a country full of men. The country sees 112 boys born for every 100 girls, which is against the natural sex ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. A preference for boys has meant that more than 63 million women are statistically "missing". Many believe such skewed ratios can contribute to increased crimes against women.

The northern state of Haryana, which records the highest number of gang rapes in India, has the worst sex ratio in the country. In January alone, a 50-year-old man was held for mutilating a 10-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy allegedly raped a three-and-a-half-year-old girl, a 20-year-old married women was raped by two men, a 24-year-old man was held for kidnapping and abducting a student and a minor's girl's brutalised body was found in the fields. And these were only the reported cases.

In Indian-administered Kashmir, a poisonous cocktail of biology and bigotry led to the macabre rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim nomadic girl in January. She was kidnapped, kept captive in a Hindu temple, raped repeatedly and dumped in a forest. It was a warning to the minority Muslim nomads in the area to stop grazing their animals on Hindu owned land, in a restive part of the region, which is simmering with religious tensions.

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Rape can also be ingrained and justified in cultures. When Goths attacked Rome in 410 AD St Augustine called wartime rape an "ancient and customary evil". An ancient Indian treatise, according to American Indologist Wendy Doniger, "legitimised rape as a form of marriage and gave some degree of legal sanction, retroactively, to women who had been raped".

So has nothing much changed after the 2012 Delhi gang rape sparked global outrage and violent public protests?

It is difficult to say. The good news is that there is higher and better reporting of rape. The bad news is that a shambolic criminal justice system remains vulnerable to political pressures and allows many of the accused to go scot free - only one in four cases of rape in India end in conviction.

Also many Indians - men and women - refuse to believe that sexual violence is a serious problem eating away at India's vitals. And most political parties, including Mr Modi's BJP, don't appear to recognise and treat it as the crippling societal crisis it is.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 1, 2018 at 7:46pm

'Desperate housewives': Why so many young #women are dying by #suicide in #India. India accounts for almost 40 per cent of #female suicides worldwide — and young, married women are most at risk. #Modi #BJP https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-02/young-women-india-dying-suic... via @ABCNews 

Women in India are also 2.1 times more likely to die by suicide than the global average, accounting for 71 per cent of deaths in women aged under 40, according to a study published in medical journal The Lancet.

Suicide was the leading cause of death in women aged 15 to 29, with death rates higher among women than men in that age group, it said.

The study also found "arranged and early marriage, young motherhood, low social status and domestic violence" were factors contributing to the nation's high suicide rates.

"In Western countries a marriage is protective to women but in India it seems that marriage is not protective," said Dr Manjula O'Connor, a Melbourne-based psychiatrist who works closely with Australia's Indian community.

"It relates to the patriarchal factors and the level of oppression and lack of autonomy that women feel within a marital situation."

University of Adelaide associate professor Peter Mayer, who is an expert on suicide in India, has coined it the "desperate housewives" effect.

Though the female suicide rate has actually fallen since 1990, nearly two in five global female suicides are recorded in India, making it a "public health crisis" in the country, Dr Mayer said.

As in most countries, overall suicide death rates in India are higher among men than women, at 21.2 and 14.7 per 100,000 people respectively, but globally Indian men account for about 25 per cent of male suicides, the Lancet study said.

Dr O'Connor said she believed suicide was also a problem among young women in Australia's Indian community.

However, statistics are difficult to pin down, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics does not release information on suicide deaths based on ethnicity or culture.

Family violence and murder in Australian Hindu and Sikh communities

There are growing concerns about a recent, significant increase in domestic violence in Hindu and Sikh communities, a crisis which has become public in a spate of horrific deaths.
Many of those affected were young women who travelled from India to Australia to enter arranged marriages, arriving with "dreams of freedom" only to find their new husband is "coercive or controlling", Dr O'Connor said.

"They fight back against the demand for dowry or control over their wages, and when they fight back it leads to family violence," she said, which can compound with stressors such as social isolation and mental health issues.

The practice of dowry — common in India and among Indian communities overseas — involves a bride's family giving money or goods to her husband once they are married.

A Senate inquiry into dowry abuse in Australia is due to hand down its report on Thursday December 6.

Discussion of suicide and related mental illness still carries a heavy stigma in India, with researchers saying it presents a barrier to addressing some of the root causes.

"In India the idea that you might have some kind of mental health problem is not only a problem for you, it will affect your sister's ability to get married," Dr Mayer said.

"There are all sorts of constraints to one's ability to admit depression."

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 21, 2019 at 8:36pm

#India’s #inequality crisis hurts #girls and #women the most. Women still receive 34% less wages than their male counterparts for the same work. And as you go further down the social ladder, things get worse. #gendergap https://qz.com/india/1529154/ via @qzindia

The burden of poverty weighs down heavier on girls and women in India than it does on the opposite sex.

An Oxfam report on inequality published yesterday (Jan. 21) revealed that in the workplace, women still receive 34% less wages than their male counterparts for the same work.

And as you go further down the social ladder, things get worse.

“When governments reduce their expenditures on essential public services such as education and healthcare, women and girls are the first ones to lose out on these services,” according to the report.

Girl children from the lower strata of society are lucky to see a classroom at all. In India, girls belonging to families in the top 20% get nine years of education on average, while girls from families in the bottom 20% get none at all. Even those who make it to school are often pulled out when money is tight, the report said. In addition, more than 23 million girls drop out of school annually because of a lack of toilets in school and proper menstrual hygiene management facilities.

Then, because social norms subject women to domesticity, they often have to stay home and look after the young and the elderly.

Women in India spend around five hours a day on unpaid care work while men devote a mere half an hour on average. “This disproportionate burden of unpaid care work by women means they lose out on opportunities to participate in paid labour or are forced to undertake paid labour leading to their time poverty and loss in well-being,” the report said.

This imbalanced system leaves women vulnerable. A survey of 1,000 households across the central-Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Uttar Pradesh last year revealed that people thought it was acceptable to criticise and beat women if they slipped up while carrying out unpaid care work. In turn, violence continuously sets women back economically. It’s a vicious cycle.

Further up the social ladder, the inequality still persists. Even in India’s elite club of three-comma fortunes, women make a blink-and-miss appearance. “There are only nine women billionaires in the list, constituting just 7.5% of the Indian billionaires,” the report said.

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Comment by Riaz Haq on September 9, 2020 at 9:36am

#India in shock over 86-year-old grandmother's #rape. Govt data shows police recorded 33,977 cases of rape in India in 2018 - that works out to a rape every 15 minutes. Activists say most cases are not reported. Actual numbers are much higher.#crime #Modi https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54085183

"I have met a month-old girl and women in their 60s who've been raped," Ms Bhayana, who works for People Against Rapes in India (Pari), an NGO working with survivors, says.

Tens of thousands of rapes are reported in India every year, but some stand out for being deeply disturbing.
In one particularly shocking case, police in the capital, Delhi, have arrested a man in his 30s for the rape and assault of an 86-year-old grandmother.
"The woman was waiting outside her home on Monday evening for the milkman when she was approached by her attacker," Swati Maliwal, head of the Delhi Commission for Women, told the BBC.
"He told her that her regular milk delivery man wasn't coming and offered to take her to the place where she could get milk."
The octogenarian trustingly accompanied him, said Ms Maliwal, adding that he took her to a nearby farm where he raped her.
"She kept crying and begging him to leave her. She told him that she was like his grandmother. But he ignored her pleas and assaulted her mercilessly when she tried to resist and protect herself," Ms Maliwal said.
Local villagers who were passing by heard her cries and rescued her. They handed over the attacker to the police.
Ms Maliwal, who visited the survivor at her home on Tuesday, described her meeting as "heart-breaking".
"Her hands are totally wrinkled. You get a shock when you hear what she went through. There are bruises on her face and all over her body and she told me that she had vaginal bleeding. She is suffering from extreme trauma."

Ms Maliwal has demanded the death penalty for the attacker, whom she described as "not human".
"I'm writing to the chief justice of Delhi High Court and the lieutenant-governor of the city to fast-track the case and hang him in six months," she said.
Rapes and sexual violence have been in the spotlight in India since December 2012 when a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was gang-raped on a moving bus in Delhi.
She died a few days later from injuries sustained during the assault. Four of the accused were hanged in March.
But despite the increased scrutiny of sexual crimes, their numbers continue to rise.


According to the National Crime Records Bureau, police recorded 33,977 cases of rape in India in 2018 - that works out to a rape every 15 minutes. But campaigners say the actual numbers are much higher as many cases are not even reported.
And not all make news - only the most brutal or shocking get reported in the press.
In the last few days, while India has been struggling to cope with the coronavirus pandemic, there have been reports of an ambulance driver who allegedly raped a Covid-19 patient while ferrying her to hospital.
Last month, a 13-year-old girl was found raped and murdered in a sugarcane field and her father alleged that her eyes were gouged out and her tongue had been cut.
And in July, a six-year-old girl was abducted and raped and her attacker inflicted severe injuries to her eyes apparently so she couldn't identify him.
As women's activist Yogita Bhayana points out, no age group is safe.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 26, 2021 at 9:44pm

The #Indian girl killed for wearing #jeans . Her mother, Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi that the teenager had been severely beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after an argument over her clothes. #Hindutva #misogyny - BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57968350

Women and girls in small town and rural India live under severe restrictions with village heads or family patriarchs often dictating what they wear, where they go or who they talk to, and any perceived misstep is considered a provocation and must be punished.

No wonder then that the alleged assault of Neha for her choice of clothing is just one among a number of brutal attacks reported on girls and young women by their family members that have recently shocked India.

Last month, a gut-wrenching video that emerged from Alirajpur district in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh showed a 20-year-old tribal woman being beaten by her father and three male cousins.

Following outrage, police lodged a complaint against the men and said she was being "punished" for running away from her "abusive" marital home.

A week before the incident, reports said two girls were mercilessly beaten up by their family members for talking on the phone with a male cousin in the neighbouring district of Dhar.

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Reports of girls and young women being brutally assaulted by family members have recently made headlines in India. The incidents have also put the spotlight on how unsafe girls and women are within their own homes.

Last week, 17-year-old Neha Paswan was allegedly beaten to death by members of her extended family in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh because they didn't like her wearing jeans.

Her mother, Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi that the teenager had been severely beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after an argument over her clothes at their home in Savreji Kharg village in Deoria district, one of the least developed regions in the state.

"She had kept a day-long religious fast. In the evening, she put on a pair of jeans and a top and performed her rituals. When her grandparents objected to her attire, Neha retorted that jeans were made to be worn and that she would wear it," her mother said.

The argument escalated, resulting in the violence, she claims.

Shakuntala Devi said as her daughter lay unconscious, her in-laws called an autorickshaw and said they were taking her to hospital.

"They wouldn't let me accompany them so I alerted my relatives who went to the district hospital looking for her but couldn't find her."

The next morning, Shakuntala Devi said, they heard that the body of a girl was hanging from the bridge over the Gandak river that flows through the region. When they went to investigate, they discovered it was Neha's.

Police have lodged a case of murder and destruction of evidence against 10 people, including Neha's grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and the auto driver. The accused have yet to make any public statement.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 12, 2022 at 8:17am

#India #Rape: Alleged rapist and his mother set teenage girl on fire after learning she was pregnant. India has long grappled with an epidemic of #violence against #women and #girls in the deeply patriarchal country. #Hindutva #BJP #Modi #Misogynist https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/india/india-girl-rape-pregnancy-atte...


A 15-year-old girl is being treated at a hospital in northern India after she was allegedly set on fire by a man accused of raping and impregnating her in the latest case of violence against women to shock the country.

Kamlesh Kumar Dixit, a senior police official in Uttar Pradesh state, told CNN the man, 18, and his mother were arrested on Monday on suspicion of attempted murder after they allegedly poured kerosene on the girl and set her ablaze on October 6.

Police also accuse the man – who is a cousin of the alleged victim – of raping her about three months ago after which she became pregnant, Dixit said.

Upon learning of the girl’s pregnancy, her family and the family of the alleged rapist had discussed whether the two should get married, Dixit added.

Citing police, the Press Trust of India – the country’s largest news agency – reported the girl was lured to the alleged rapist’s home on the pretext of getting married to him when she was allegedly set alight. However, Dixit declined to comment when asked about this detail.

India has long grappled with an epidemic of violence against women and girls in the deeply patriarchal country. And campaigners say the alleged involvement of a woman in this latest case demonstrates the scale of internalized misogyny in society.

“I’ve become so numb to stories like this. There is a lack of empathy in our country,” said Yogita Bhayana, an anti-rape activist from New Delhi. “For years, we have been trying to change things. This case demonstrates a failure of our system. The girl should have been helped.”

The girl’s condition and the status of her pregnancy are unknown. CNN ha

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