In India, women and girls continue to be sold as chattels, married off as young as 10, burned alive as a result of dowry-related disputes and young girls exploited and abused as domestic slave labour.
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On January 12 a 29-year-old woman took a bus to travel
home. When she asked the driver to pick her off, he refused and brought
her to a desolate location. There the victim was gang raped by seven
men. The next day, the suspects dropped her off at her village, where
she informed her family and police. All seven rapists were arrested the
same evening and admitted their guilt.Women’s rights in India have remained in the forefront of international concern lately. Last week another woman was gang raped on a bus in India’s state of Punjab. Meanwhile, every year Indian police register thousands of rape cases. Sociologists agree that the Indian society is ill.
This happened less than a month after a brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi. The girl died two weeks later in a Singapore hospital. The Delhi incident spurred a nationwide protest over the treatment of women in India. Meanwhile, official statistics say that in 2012 some 600 rape cases were registered in Delhi alone, while the total number of Indian women suffering sexual abuse stands at 24,000. Expert for the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, Boris Volkhonsky: “These figures are shocking. Indian women are abused not only by strangers but by their husbands, too. Not all women, however, dare to report abuse to the police- and this is a question of Indian cultural traditions. What is especially sad about all this is that some politicians, public and religious figures blame the victims.”
According to official reports, a woman in India is raped every 20
minutes. But most cases had remained unknown to the public until
recently. One should mention that rapists were not even barred from
seeking posts in parliament. Expert for the Institute of Oriental
Studies, Tatiana Shaumyan: “Actually, there is nothing new about the
situation with women’s rights abuse in India. But those incidents had
been always hushed up. This is very sad. On the one hand, India has had a
number of outstanding women politicians and public figures, on the
other hand- Indian women continue to suffer this humiliation.”
Notably, the suspects have not been trying to conceal
their crime. The authorities do not seem to be offering a really
acceptable solution to the problem despite a national outcry about the
Delhi brutal incident. Experts agree that the Indian society is living
through a deep cultural crisis when old religious norms are dying off to
be replaced by distorted modern pro-Western values.
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