RAPE IN INDIA

 It is impossible not to echo, in our blog, the news of the terrible and cruel rape in India that has touched our hearts for one month. Besides our opinion, we want to share with you, because of its interesting perspective, an op-ed article from the New York Times.

The Unspeakable Truth About Rape in India

Published: January 1, 2013

I LIVED for 24 years in New Delhi, a city where sexual harassment is as regular as mealtime. Every day, somewhere in the city, it crosses the line into rape.

As a teenager, I learned to protect myself. I never stood alone if I could help it, and I walked quickly, crossing my arms over my chest, refusing to make eye contact or smile. I cleaved through crowds shoulder-first, and avoided leaving the house after dark except in a private car. At an age when young women elsewhere were experimenting with daring new looks, I wore clothes that were two sizes too large. I still cannot dress attractively without feeling that I am endangering myself.

Things didn’t change when I became an adult. Pepper spray wasn’t available, and my friends, all of them middle- or upper-middle-class like me, carried safety pins or other makeshift weapons to and from their universities and jobs. One carried a knife, and insisted I do the same. I refused; some days I was so full of anger I would have used it — or, worse, had it used on me.

The steady thrum of whistles, catcalls, hisses, sexual innuendos and open threats continued. Packs of men dawdled on the street, and singing Hindi film songs, rich with double entendres, was how they communicated. To make their demands clear, they would thrust their pelvises at female passers-by.

If only it was just public spaces that were unsafe. In my office at a prominent newsmagazine, at the doctor’s office, even at a house party — I couldn’t escape the intimidation.

On Dec. 16, as the world now knows, a 23-year-old woman and a male friend were returning home after watching the movie “Life of Pi” at a mall in southwest Delhi. After they boarded what seemed to be a passenger bus, the six men inside gang-raped and tortured the woman so brutally that her intestines were destroyed. The bus service had been a ruse. The attackers also severely beat up the woman’s friend and threw them from the vehicle, leaving her to die.

The young woman didn’t oblige. She had started that evening watching a film about a survivor, and must have been determined to survive herself. Then she produced another miracle. In Delhi, a city habituated to the debasement of women, tens of thousands of people took to the streets and faced down police officers, tear gas and water cannons to express their outrage. It was the most vocal protest against sexual assault and rape in India to date, and it set off nationwide demonstrations.

To protect her privacy the victim’s name was not released publicly. But while she remains nameless, she did not remain faceless. To see her face, women had only to look in the mirror. The full measure of their vulnerability was finally understood.

When I was 26, I moved to Mumbai. A commercial and financial megalopolis, it has its own special set of problems, but has, culturally, been more cosmopolitan and liberal than Delhi. Giddy with my new freedom, I started to report from the red-light district and traveled across rough suburbs late at night — on my own and using public transit. It seemed that something good had come out of living in Delhi: I was so grateful for the comparatively safe environment of Mumbai that I took full advantage of it.

The young woman, however, will never have such an opportunity. On Saturday morning, 13 days after she was brutalized, this student of physical therapy, who had, no doubt, dreamt of improving lives, lost her own. She died of multiple organ failure.

India has laws against rape; seats reserved for women in buses, female officers; special police help lines. But these measures have been ineffective in the face of a patriarchal and misogynistic culture. It is a culture that believes that the worst aspect of rape is the defilement of the victim, who will no longer be able to find a man to marry her — and that the solution is to marry the rapist.

These beliefs aren’t restricted to living rooms, but are expressed openly. In the months before the gang rape, some prominent politicians had attributed rising rape statistics to women’s increasing use of cellphones and going out at night. “Just because India achieved freedom at midnight does not mean that women can venture out after dark,” said Botsa Satyanarayana, the Congress Party leader in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Change is possible, but the police must document reports of rape and sexual assault, and investigations and court cases have to be fast-tracked and not left to linger for years. Of the more than 600 rape cases reported in Delhi in 2012, only one led to a conviction. If victims believe they will receive justice, they will be more willing to speak up. If potential rapists fear the consequences of their actions, they will not pluck women off the streets with impunity.

The volume of protests in public and in the media has made clear that the attack was a turning point. The unspeakable truth is that the young woman attacked on Dec. 16 was more fortunate than many rape victims. She was among the very few to receive anything close to justice. She was hospitalized, her statement was recorded and within days all six of the suspected rapists were caught and, now, charged with murder. Such efficiency is unheard-of in India.

In retrospect it wasn’t the brutality of the attack on the young woman that made her tragedy unusual; it was that an attack had, at last, elicited a response.

            By SONIA FALEIRO

From the Feminine Inspiration we believe that being a woman in India, like in some other countries, is the chronicle of a foretold death. The selective abortions have been calculated as millions for the last three decades, and the number of female infanticide has been very high as well, to the point that, according to the last census, between the 1210 million of people in India there are only 940 females per thousand males. If the Indian woman survives to this first life step, the next test will be to survive to the patriarchal society based on the religious frenzy; a society that has made of The ‘Mother India’ a castrated mother continually raped by her sons.

This news has horrified us. However, this horror should be produced by the idea of how many deaths of this kind have happened, and we fear will continue to happen, in a country where its widows still die in an ashram. (We recommend you the film “Water” by the Indian female director Depra Metha)

Besides the brutality of this event, which will remain in our memory, it is also remarkable the effect this crime has had in India, because for the first time it has produce a global awareness. Thousands of protesters, females and males, have gone to the streets asking for a legislative change and for justice to be made.

We consider this social movement of vital importance, yet we want to add something: Laws are made by men and they are who apply them. As much as laws can change, if mentality doesn’t, those laws will never be applied. This mentality change belongs to men and women, and we are being the witnesses of the beginning of that transformation. We think this change is fundamental in women because we must not forget that women are the ones that hide these events that happen within their own families, undoubtedly because of the fear they have. (We also recommend you the film “The Source” by Radu Mihaileanu and “What Do We Go Now?” by Nadine Labaki as well)

More than ever, the confabulation between women is of vital importance. In this sense, a few days ago in Pakistan, a nine-year- old girl was brutally raped and killed as well, and although the rappers had threatened the mother, she decided not to keep silence. The social change that is happening in India is also expanding to its neighbor countries, and may suppose not only a legislative change –which we think it’s fine- but an awareness change as well.

This social protest is not because a wealthy or important family has been injured. On the contrary, her father, who has a modest job in the aviation sector in Delhi, had sold his ancestral land in his UP village to ensure an education for all his children. It is a reason for hope for a future change that a father in India would sell a land to provide his daughter an education

The fact that this event happens in “The Mother India” has made us reflect over the maternal sense, which the patriarchal society has relegated to mere reproduction. This society has given motherhood an economic and social value base on a linage concept; therefore, women have become a disposable good. From Feminine Inspiration, we think and feel that the motherhood concept it’s something more than reproduction and it includes concepts as solidarity, consensus, confabulation, healing, shelter, devotion, etc., and it makes her become a mirror of the Creation. When women are considered from this amplified concept of motherhood, a woman’s life will not be considered a chronicle of a foretold death but a chronicle of a hopeful life.