India Rape Epidemic

[sincity]

'India's Rape Epidemic' among Time's top ten stories of 2013
All India | Indo-Asian News Service | Updated: December 05, 2013 12:48 IST





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Washington: Time magazine has listed what it calls "India's Rape Epidemic" as the ninth top world news story of 2013.

The popular US news magazine has mentioned the nationwide uproar over a number of rape incidents, especially following the brutal Delhi gang-rape in December 2012, and has noted that mass protests after the student was raped in a moving bus "demanded greater protection for women and swift justice."

Timehas reported on the trial of the men arrested in the case and on the death penalty handed to four of them in September. "Subsequent incidents, including the rape of another 23-year-old girl in Mumbai, also drew widespread attention nationally and abroad, and the uproar has shone a necessary spotlight on India's notoriously patriarchal society," it says.

"It has also placed renewed scrutiny on the state of women's rights in the developing world where more than 2 million girls give birth before the age of 14," the magazine adds.

Time has listed "Syria's Civil War - and the War That Didn't Happen" as its top news story of the year. (Read: original story here)

"Iran's New Chapter" and "The End of Egypt's Revolution?" are at number 2 and number 3 on the list.

The magazine lists "Bangladesh's Factory Disaster" which it calls "the worst industrial disaster in recent memory, killing over 1,100 workers" as its seventh top news story. On April 24, the Rana Plaza building had collapse on the outskirts of Bangladesh's capital Dhaka.

 

[sincity]

India Bihar rapes 'caused by lack of toilets'
By Amarnath Tewary Patna, Bihar

More than half-a-billion Indians lack access to basic sanitation
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Most of the cases of rape of women and girls in India's Bihar state occur when they go out to defecate in the open, police and social activists say.

Some 85% of the rural households in the state, one of India's poorest, have no access to a toilet, a study says.

The police reported more than 870 cases of rape in Bihar last year.

More than half-a-billion Indians lack access to basic sanitation. Many do not have access to flush toilets or other latrines.

The issue of sexual violence against women and girls in India has been under intense scrutiny since the gang rape and murder of a student on a Delhi bus in December led to widespread protests.

In March, India passed a new bill containing harsher punishments, including the death penalty, for rapists.

'Worrisome trend'
There have been a number of recent cases where women and girls have been raped in Bihar after they stepped out of their homes to defecate:

• On 5 May, an 11-year-old girl was raped in Mai village in Jehanabad district when she was going to the field at night

• On 28 April, a young girl was abducted and raped when she had gone out to defecate in an open field in Kalapur village in Naubatpur, 35km (21 miles) from the state capital, Patna

• On 24 April, another girl was raped in similar circumstances on a farm in Chaunniya village in Sheikhpura district. She told the police that two villagers had followed and raped her. One of them has been arrested.

Senior police official Arvind Pandey told the BBC that such cases happen every month in Bihar.

"They take place when women step out to defecate early in the morning and late evening. It is a very worrisome trend."

Mr Pandey said that about 400 women would have "escaped" rape last year if they had toilets in their homes.

A recent study by global health organisation Population Service International (PSI) and Monitor Delloitte, done in collaboration with Water for People, said that Bihar had India's poorest sanitation indicators with 85% rural households having no access to toilets.

The report added that 49% of the households that did not have a toilet wanted one for "safety and security".

Some 45% wanted a toilet for "convenience", while 4% wanted one for "privacy".

"Surprisingly, only 1% indicated health as a motivator for having a toilet," the report said.

The Bihar government says it plans to provide toilets to more than 10 million households in the state by 2022 under a federal scheme.

A law making toilets mandatory has been introduced in several states as part of the "sanitation for all" drive by the Indian government.

Special funds are made available for people to construct toilets to promote hygiene and eradicate the practice of faeces collection - or scavenging - which is mainly carried out by low-caste people.

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

An article published in the very same Time magazine which listed what it calls "India's Rape Epidemic" as the ninth top world news story of 2013:-​

Why Rape Seems Worse in India Than Everywhere Else (but Actually Isn’t)

Women shout slogans outside the District court in Saket as they call for the death penalty of the four men convicted of rape and murder on September 13, 2013 in New Delhi, India

Yes, the gang rapes have been shocking — but India's reputation as rape capital is undeserved
​

Since the gang rape of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi last year, India has become the world’s rape capital. An American website recently satirized the problem by joking about an upcoming rape festival in the country. You can call it a reflection of the way the world thinks of India or you can call it bad taste (depending on which part of the world you are in) — but you know the image of India as rape hell has stuck when most readers of the article failed to realize that it was satire. Rape is a serious problem all over the world. So why does it seem so much worse in India?

1. More rapes are being reported now: Along with the modernization of society, more Indian women are being educated and are going out to work. They are breaking out of the subservient mold that society had given to them and are more independent. While this means they are more likely to be sexually abused, it also means they are more likely — compared with women of a previous generation — to report rapes and confront sexual predators. In the three months after the Delhi gang rape, the number of rapes reported in the city more than doubled to 359, from the 143 reported in January-March of 2012. This doesn’t necessarily mean more rapes are happening now, just that more women are emboldened to come out and report.

2. India actually has a high conviction rate for rape: According to the Guardian, just 7% of reported rapes in the U.K. resulted in convictions during 2011-12. In Sweden, the conviction rate is as low as 10%. France had a conviction rate of 25% in 2006. Poor India, a developing nation with countless challenges, managed an impressive24.2% conviction rate in 2012. That’s thanks to the efforts of a lot of good people — police, lawyers, victims and their families — working heroically with limited resources.

3. The media report everything: According to Dave Prager, the American author of Delirious Delhi, crimes that “wouldn’t garner even a sentence in an American paper because so many bigger crimes would elbow it out of the way” are obsessively reported in Indian news publications. Post the Delhi gang rape, Indian media have faithfully recorded each and every rape case, highlighted them for the world and continue to do so.

4. Most Indians, men and women, hate the reputation that rapists have given their country: No country in the world can claim to have witnessed protests against rape on the scale of India’s, where people turned out in the tens of thousands to voice their shock and sadness. It was people power that forced the government to change existing rape laws and drew the world’s attention to the problem. What happens in other countries? This may not be a typical example, but the rape of a teen girl by high school football players in the Steubenville, Ohio had many in the town sympathizing with the rapists and not the victim.

Source:- Rape In India: Why It Seems Worse | TIME.com

 

[asad71]

Open Defecation in India Leads to Rape and Disease. Now, Women Are Demanding Toilets.
Posted:07/30/2015 9:26 am EDTUpdated:07/30/2015 1:59 pm EDT

31 percentsince 1990, about 300 million women and girls in India still have no other choice. Try to squat in a sari, while holding a cup of water to cleanse yourself and keeping an eye out for rapists.

"They had gone out to use the field as a toilet; they had been gang raped and lynched."


The risks are real: In 2014, two girls were found hanging from a tree in Katra Sahadatganj. They had gone out to use the field as a toilet; they had been gang raped and lynched. There was a brief outcry and were articles linking their murders to the lack of toilets.

Then came a backlash from writers such as the academic Shilpa Phadke and the head of policy at WaterAid India, Nitya Jacob. The murders were due to caste issues, they argued. Indian women and girls are raped everywhere, all the time.

Shilpa Phadke wrote in Al Jazeera that toilets at home could damage women's ability to use public space. They like going to the fields together and chatting, she wrote. No woman I have ever met has said she liked squatting in darkness knowing that men are watching her.

"Toilets must be demand-driven, and the demand can come from women like Priyanka."


I once met a woman who married, moved to her in-laws' house and was woken at 4 a.m. that first night to go to the field with her mother-in-law. She stuck it out for three days, then left. She wasn't willing to accept life without a latrine. In rural India, it was a scandalous thing to do. Her case got media attention, and the NGO Sulabh built her a toilet.

After the two girls were lynched, Sulabhinstalled 100 toiletsin the village. But Sulabh can't build toilets for the whole country. And even if it did, there is no guarantee people would use them. A RICE institute study found that40 percentof respondents who had a toilet or latrine had at least one family member who continued to defecate in the open.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Swachh Bharat ("Clean India") campaign was launched in 2014, but it has problems.Critics suggestthat it's installing toilets without consulting their users. That's a recipe for an unused toilet. That's because human software - psychology -- is more important than hardware, sometimes, when it comes to persuading people to change a habit.

"Brides will refuse to marry into families that don't have a toilet. It's a movement nicknamed 'No loo, No I do.'"


Toilets must be demand-driven, and the demand can come from women like Priyanka. Her actions have become increasingly common: Brides will refuse to marry into families that don't have a toilet. It's a movement nicknamed "No loo, No I do." Gujarat passed astate lawthat forbids candidates in local elections from running for office if they don't have a toilet at home. Some of these measures are criticized for being punitive. But we must use whatever works. This is an emergency of public health and safety but also of human dignity.

Access to toilets can't hurt, unlike the chronic, acute shame, embarrassment and fear that Indian women and girls must deal with at least once a day, every day.

© Zocalo Public Square

 

[RisingShiningSuperpower]

Rape is a Western concept, born out of confused minds. There is no such thing as rape in the Vedas.