XPost: ba.politics, dc.media, soc.penpals   
   XPost: alt.burningman   
   From: basic@animals.org   
      
   One of the girls wore crimson, the other emerald. They had long   
   black hair. They were barefoot. They were cousins and of a low   
   caste. As shown in gruesome photographs, they were barely more   
   than children.   
      
   One was 14 and the other was 15, police said. Without a toilet   
   in their home, they had gone outside to relieve themselves the   
   night before and had now been found dead, hanging from a mango   
   tree framed by a rising sun.   
      
   A crowd of villagers swelled underneath the bodies Wednesday   
   morning. Reports said they wouldn’t allow anyone to cut down the   
   girls until arrests were made, so for hours, they waited in near   
   silence. Then came news that four men had been arrested for the   
   crime. Two of the accused were villagers who lived in Katra in   
   Uttar Pradesh state. The other two, the Associated Press   
   reported, were police officers.   
      
   Autopsy reports confirmed the children had been raped and   
   strangled. News of the attack splashed across nearly every major   
   publication in India. Even in a country where a rape occurs   
   every 22 minutes, according to Indian government statistics   
   reported by the AP, the gang-rape and killing was shocking.   
      
   Shocking because of its sheer brutality. Shocking because two   
   suspects are police officers. And shocking because even after   
   2012's fatal gang-rape — in which a woman’s insides were mangled   
   with a metal rod — and tightening of national anti-rape laws,   
   men in India have committed the crime again.   
      
   Gang-rapes are evidence of entrenched social problems, analysts   
   said: the resiliency of caste-based sexual violence, police   
   indifference and a tolerance of sexual harassment.   
      
   “There is no magic formula to deal with the problem of rape,”   
   Indira Jaisingh, national additional solicitor general, told the   
   BBC in 2013. ”There’s a bias that operates in the mind of   
   decision makers — stereotyping women, blaming the victim, trying   
   to find out if she invited the rape.”   
      
   In the past four decades, the number of reported rape cases in   
   India surged nearly 900 percent to 24,923 in 2012, according to   
   the statistics from National Crime Records Bureau. Since many   
   rapes go unreported, the problem may be worse. There’s familial   
   pressure to keep quiet about the crime, and it’s difficult to   
   know whether the increase means more rapes have occurred or   
   shows a growing willingness among victims to come forward. Some   
   activists estimated only 10 percent of rapes are actually   
   reported — others feared as few as 1 percent are.   
      
   But there’s little denying rape’s pervasiveness: According to   
   one 2011 poll cited by the Times of India, nearly 25 percent of   
   Indian men admitted committing an act of sexual violence, and   
   roughly 20 percent of those polled conceded they had forced   
   wives or partners to have sex.   
      
   The Indian capital of New Delhi has long been maligned as the   
   rape epicenter of India. It was both the scene of 2012's widely-   
   publicized rape, but also of this year’s alleged gang rape of a   
   51-year-old Danish tourist.   
      
   “I lived for 24 years in New Delhi, a city where sexual   
   harassment is as regular as mealtime,” one New York Times   
   opinion writer wrote. “Every day, somewhere in the city, it   
   crosses the line into rape.”   
      
   But rape is also endemic in Uttar Pradesh, where the two teenage   
   girls were found this week. About five people are raped there   
   per day, according to national crime statistics reported by the   
   BBC. ”At the moment,” state Congress leader Rita Bahuguna Joshi   
   said, “Uttar Pradesh is one of the worst places to be a woman.”   
      
   The state is both staggeringly populous — 200 million   
   inhabitants — and staggeringly poor. More than 60 million people   
   there live on less than $1.25 per day, according to state   
   records. Such poverty, experts said, is vital to understanding   
   the frequency of rape in India. Upper-caste men targeting lower-   
   caste women — usually Dalit or “untouchables” — account for a   
   large proportion of rapes.   
      
   “I analysed the rape figures for 2007 and I found that 90   
   percent of victims were Dalits and 85 percent of Dalit rape   
   victims were underage girls,” SR Darapuri, vice-president of the   
   state’s People’s Union for Civil Liberties, told the BBC.   
      
   One 15-year-old Dalit in Uttar Pradesh, for example, was gang-   
   raped by three men and held captive for 15 days by men of an   
   upper-caste. “These cases are so brutal that we wouldn’t have   
   believed that they could happen,” one rights activist told the   
   BBC. “We thought such things could happen only in novels and   
   films.”   
      
   Meanwhile, police disregard sexual assault. One oft-cited   
   investigation, published in 2012 in the magazine Tehelka, found   
   widespread police indifference, if not outright hostility,   
   toward victims of sexual assault. Some cops blamed rapes on   
   revealing clothing or said alleged victims were prostitutes.   
      
   “There are [rape] cases, but 70 percent involve consensual sex,”   
   one officer said. “Only if someone sees, or the money is denied,   
   it gets turned into rape.” Another added: “She is dressed in a   
   manner that people get attracted to her. In fact, she wants them   
   to do something to her.”   
      
   Indifference has, in some ways, reached the highest levels of   
   the state’s political apparatus. Last month, the head of the   
   state’s government party told an election rally that he was   
   against a law that calls for the execution of gang-rapists.   
      
   “Boys will be boys,” Mulayam Singh Yadav said. “They make   
   mistakes.”   
      
   http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-   
   mix/wp/2014/05/30/indias-culture-of-gang-rape-and-the-failure-to-   
   stop-it/?tid=pm_national_pop   
      
       
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)