XPost: rec.sport.football.college, talk.politics.medicine, misc.survivalism   
   From: biden-communism@denverpost.com   
      
   NEW DELHI — For months, the police say, a group of men took   
   turns raping an 11-year-old girl.   
      
   In the gated community in Chennai, India, where the girl lived   
   with her parents, the men gave her soft drinks laced with drugs,   
   the police said. They filmed themselves raping her, brandishing   
   knives and threatening to release the videos if the girl told   
   her family, the police said.   
      
   The men were not intruders in the gated community, but employees   
   who greeted residents, operated the elevator or brought water   
   coolers to apartments.   
      
   When news broke on Monday that the authorities in Chennai, a   
   coastal city in the southeast, had arrested 17 men accused of   
   raping or molesting the girl over a period of seven months,   
   chaos erupted at the complex in an older part of the city.   
   Residents dismissed the building’s remaining staff members.   
   Women volunteered to guard the complex’s entrances, and some   
   called for the suspects to be hanged.   
      
   Indian television channels ran lengthy news segments with banner   
   headlines that read, simply, “Chennai Horror.”   
      
   “This story has shaken me to the core,” Rohini Singh, an Indian   
   journalist, wrote on Twitter. “An entire community got together   
   to rape a child. I cannot even fathom the depravity and horror   
   of this act.”   
      
   This has been a year punctuated by brutal crimes against young   
   girls in India. In January, an 8-year-old was kidnapped, locked   
   in a Hindu temple, gang raped and beaten to death. In May, a   
   teenager in central India was set on fire after her parents told   
   a village council that men in the area had raped their daughter.   
   In June, a 7-year-old was raped in the state of Madhya Pradesh,   
   also in central India. Afterward, the two men slit her throat   
   and left her to die.   
      
   A poll released in June by the Thomson Reuters Foundation named   
   India the most dangerous country in the world for women, ahead   
   of war-torn countries like Afghanistan and Syria. In India, a   
   rape occurs at least every 20 minutes, according to data from   
   the National Crime Records Bureau.   
      
   Indian officials have struggled to figure out what to do. The   
   government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved a   
   measure in April to raise jail sentences for rapists and   
   introduce the death penalty for those convicted of raping   
   children under the age of 12.   
      
   But it is unclear whether the law will have much of an effect.   
   India’s judicial system is notoriously backlogged, with millions   
   of cases stuck in overburdened courts. Many of the crimes   
   against young girls that gripped India this year have dropped   
   out of the news cycle.   
      
   Some Indians have criticized the near-constant coverage of   
   sexual violence, questioning whether the country’s statistics   
   were any worse than other parts of the world.   
      
   After the release of the Thomson Reuters report, Shailendra Raj   
   Mehta, an Indian economist, argued in an editorial that India’s   
   rape numbers were lower than those of several advanced   
   countries, and argued that critics were guilty of the “foisting   
   of a prefabricated narrative entirely contrary to the facts.”   
      
   The true prevalence of sexual violence is hard to discern in   
   many places around the world, because so many crimes go   
   unreported.   
      
   In India, reporting crimes can be dangerous. National laws do   
   not always take effect in rural villages, where councils of men   
   mete out their own punishments. As more Indians buy smartphones,   
   the rapid spread of rumors through messaging platforms like   
   WhatsApp has spawned vigilante justice.   
      
   In recent months, mobs have killed dozens of people falsely   
   accused of kidnapping young children, prompting the Supreme   
   Court to urge the government on Tuesday to pass an anti-lynching   
   law aimed at curbing the spread of messages and videos that   
   could incite mob violence.   
      
   The rape of the 11-year-old girl in Chennai has raised many   
   uncomfortable questions. E. Rajeswari, a police inspector in the   
   area, said it was still unclear what had occurred at the   
   apartment building, which is surrounded by slums in the Chennai   
   neighborhood of Ayanavaram. It is a stately complex with   
   hundreds of apartments, a pool and a jungle gym.   
      
   Starting in January, the men — ages 23 to 66, who worked as   
   contractors in the building — took the girl to empty apartments   
   in the complex, where they gave her sedatives, tied a belt   
   around her neck, forced her to watch obscene videos and raped   
   her, according to court statements. For months, Ms. Rajeswari   
      
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