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“She should just be silent”: the real roots of India’s rape culture
Three years after a horrific gang rape in Delhi brought global attention to India's sexual assault epidemic, a new documentary has quoted one of the rapists saying something so inflammatory that it has provoked a whole new wave of outrage.
"A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy," Mukesh Singh, one of the six rapists convicted in the 2012 attack, says in the documentary, because "a decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night."
"Housework and housekeeping is for girls," he claimed, "not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent of girls are good."
If women are not "good," he said, men have a right to "teach them a lesson" by raping them. And if that happens, the woman being raped has a responsibility to silently accept the assault. "When being raped, she shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape."
"A GIRL IS FAR MORE RESPONSIBLE FOR RAPE THAN A BOY"
What has made the comments so outrageous is not just the callousness and victim-blaming expressed by this one rapist, but the degree to which his comments reflect attitudes that are disturbingly common in India, and that are central to its climate of hostility toward women and, often, impunity for male violence against them.
Singh made the comments in the new documentary India's Daughter, which screened Wednesday night on the BBC. In the 2012 attack, Singh and five other men lured a young woman onto a bus and then gang-raped her, violating her so brutally that she later died from her injuries.
The 2012 Delhi gang rape was a high-profile instance of the brutal sexual attacks that strike fear into Indian women — more recently, a woman in Rohtak was violently gang-raped and beaten to death by eight men. In a 2011 study, nearly one in four Indian men surveyed admitted to committing rape — by far the highest of any country included in the sample.
Driving this problem is a widespread view among many tradition-minded Indians that women must adhere to certain conservative social norms, and that rapes are the fault of "bad" women who violate those norms.
At the same time, culturally modernizing forces are leading more Indian women to behave in ways that traditionalist society deems transgressive — dating, delaying marriage, pursuing careers — thus making them "deserving" of rape. Not only are victims blamed and rapists forgiven, but aspects of India's legal system and police also support this view of rape, which for traditionalists is all about enforcing their demand that women adhere to their "proper" role in the traditional family structure, which just happens to mean subjugation.
In the documentary, Singh, who was sentenced to death for his role in the crime, shows no remorse. He explains that the victim's death was her own fault: that if she had simply silently acquiesced to the rape, the men would have "dropped her off after doing her."
India's government has now banned the documentary, arguing that it could provoke "public disorder," which suggests that officials may fear a resurgence of the massive protests that occurred in 2012 and 2013 in response to the attack. Their apprehension is understandable: sexual assault is a serious problem in India, and outrage over both that problem and the failure to address it is still high.
FULL ARTICLE >> “She should just be silent”: the real roots of India’s rape culture - Vox
Three years after a horrific gang rape in Delhi brought global attention to India's sexual assault epidemic, a new documentary has quoted one of the rapists saying something so inflammatory that it has provoked a whole new wave of outrage.
"A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy," Mukesh Singh, one of the six rapists convicted in the 2012 attack, says in the documentary, because "a decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night."
"Housework and housekeeping is for girls," he claimed, "not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent of girls are good."
If women are not "good," he said, men have a right to "teach them a lesson" by raping them. And if that happens, the woman being raped has a responsibility to silently accept the assault. "When being raped, she shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape."
"A GIRL IS FAR MORE RESPONSIBLE FOR RAPE THAN A BOY"
What has made the comments so outrageous is not just the callousness and victim-blaming expressed by this one rapist, but the degree to which his comments reflect attitudes that are disturbingly common in India, and that are central to its climate of hostility toward women and, often, impunity for male violence against them.
Singh made the comments in the new documentary India's Daughter, which screened Wednesday night on the BBC. In the 2012 attack, Singh and five other men lured a young woman onto a bus and then gang-raped her, violating her so brutally that she later died from her injuries.
The 2012 Delhi gang rape was a high-profile instance of the brutal sexual attacks that strike fear into Indian women — more recently, a woman in Rohtak was violently gang-raped and beaten to death by eight men. In a 2011 study, nearly one in four Indian men surveyed admitted to committing rape — by far the highest of any country included in the sample.
Driving this problem is a widespread view among many tradition-minded Indians that women must adhere to certain conservative social norms, and that rapes are the fault of "bad" women who violate those norms.
At the same time, culturally modernizing forces are leading more Indian women to behave in ways that traditionalist society deems transgressive — dating, delaying marriage, pursuing careers — thus making them "deserving" of rape. Not only are victims blamed and rapists forgiven, but aspects of India's legal system and police also support this view of rape, which for traditionalists is all about enforcing their demand that women adhere to their "proper" role in the traditional family structure, which just happens to mean subjugation.
In the documentary, Singh, who was sentenced to death for his role in the crime, shows no remorse. He explains that the victim's death was her own fault: that if she had simply silently acquiesced to the rape, the men would have "dropped her off after doing her."
India's government has now banned the documentary, arguing that it could provoke "public disorder," which suggests that officials may fear a resurgence of the massive protests that occurred in 2012 and 2013 in response to the attack. Their apprehension is understandable: sexual assault is a serious problem in India, and outrage over both that problem and the failure to address it is still high.
FULL ARTICLE >> “She should just be silent”: the real roots of India’s rape culture - Vox
