HOW TO STOP RAPES

Rape, rape, rape. I so dislike uttering the word and yet every single day I have to hear it or read it. Will such a day ever come when no one will utter the word anymore because rapes will have stopped happening?
In the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, a 19 year old Dalit girl Manisha Valmiki had gone to the fields to cut grass for the cows. She was dragged off by four men who raped her, cut off her tongue and shattered her spine. After battling for her life for fifteen days Manisha passed away at a hospital in Delhi on 29 September. Why did those men rape her? Because Manisha was a woman. Because she was a Dalit. And the rapists? The rapists were men, the rapists were upper caste. Does that mean only upper caste men rape? Do men from the lower castes not commit rape? Do women of the upper castes not face sexual violence? All of these things happen. The truth is that women of all castes, all religions, across languages, skin colours, classes, in all villages, cities and countries, irrespective of their ages fall prey to rape. And men of all types are capable of raping and torturing women. Rapes will not stop as long as our patriarchal society continues to function, because patriarchy brainwashes people with the lesson that men are the lords, to whom women are nothing but slaves and sex objects. So what else can men do to slaves and sex objects other than subject them to sexual violence! Even slaughtering them with a smile is an exciting experience on its own, and men hanker for such excitement. They hanker because they are certain that they will not be caught, or if they are caught they will never face punishment.

A couple of years ago when Nirbhaya aka Jyoti Singh, who was raped in a moving bus in Delhi, succumbed to her injuries, thousands of people had taken to the streets. Protests against rape had raged across the country and eventually the adults among the perpetrators were sentenced to death. Isn’t that exemplary punishment enough? But has that stopped rapes from happening? No, they have continued.
Last year in India an average of 87 rape cases were registered per day. In the entire country the number of crimes reported to have been committed against women were around 4,05,861. Surely the number of cases that went unreported was much higher. Especially in this subcontinent whenever we come across an official number it is understood that we have to take the real number to be nearly twice, thrice or even four times. And do that we must, for not many women actually end up registering cases of sexual violence! Which woman can dare report a man’s crime in his own social set-up and still hope to survive unscathed! Women are forced to bury their heads and endure, and doing so has become a habit for them.

Cases of violence against women are not decreasing, rather the number is on the rise. Whatever the number was in 2018, it increased by nearly sevenfold by the very next year. As per data from the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) there were 3, 78, 236 cases of violence against women registered in 2018 and the number of rape cases were 33, 356. That number was 32, 559 in 2017, which means it’s only increasing every year. Will these numbers pile up and graze the sky? Women are becoming educated and self-reliant, rapists are being sentenced to death or life imprisonment, immense effort is being put in to spread awareness against rape, all sorts of government as well as private organisations are working round the clock to prevent rape and yet why have rapes not stopped happening? We must ask this question again and again and we must find the answer as well, not the fake answer but the right one.

Do such crimes of harassment, rape and murder happen only in India? Of course not, as the neighbouring countries are not content to be left behind. In Bangladesh 892 rape cases alone have been registered in the past eight months. We must accordingly figure out the number of cases where the crime wasn’t even reported. Gang rapes, raped and murdered, survivors committing suicide after the incident, and so on and so forth.

Just the other day I heard the news of a Chakma woman from the hills of Bangladesh who was raped by nine Bengali men. Was I surprised by the news? Not at all. When men restrain themselves from committing rape, they do so because they are afraid of the law or of getting caught and beaten up. Had there been a law today whereby men would be able to get away with any crime, then perhaps not a single man would spend a day without raping someone.

I read a newspaper report on a certain Monir Hossain from Chandpur, Faridgunj who had been raping his minor daughter for years. It was ultimately his wife who informed the police about his misdeeds and the daughter too confessed that her father had been sexually abusing her. Monir Hossain may have been arrested but there is no dearth of people like him in our society.

Our one greatest sorrow is that we as women, whether we are part of the minority or the majority, are never safe. That’s because, as ill-fated as we are, we inhabit this society with certain individuals many of who are not really men but mere dicks, deaf and dumb dicks. Until and unless these dicks evolve into actual human beings, rapes will continue to happen.

There’s nothing to be proud of being a dick, even though patriarchy provides one lifelong encouragement to be just that.

At the moment of birth a glimpse of the new-born child’s penis sparks elation in the family. That’s when it all starts. From that moment the way a male child is pampered, the amount of money and resources that is spent on him, the dreams and aspirations that are carefully nurtured around him, it all contributes to elevating him to the status of a king in the household. And kings are bound to be arrogant, they are bound to be susceptible to taking things for granted. From the moment they are born boys are taught that they are precious because they are boys and that the numerous girls in the family or in society, none of them are as precious as he. That women were born to serve men, to be objects that men can consume as well as to bear his children. Whatever they are taught, they behave accordingly. Rapes will continue to happen as long as society continues to consider men more valuable than women. Rapists are brainwashed people. They have been brainwashed relentlessly by family, society and the state. In the family laws drawn up by the state it is men who have more rights. The socio-political sphere is a male domain, it’s only men who are celebrated there just as men are the heads of families. We must attempt to demolish this patriarchal framework, only then can true equality be achieved. If we don’t discuss the equal rights of genders, there is no way rapes can be stopped. Lords oppress their slaves, that’s how such a feudal system has always worked. Rape is a form of oppression.

Building an equal society, guaranteeing equal rights for all and demolishing all patriarchal social structures are only ways in which we can combat the rape and oppression of women.

Can rapes in churches be prevented if priests are allowed to break the vow of celibacy?

A nun of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church of Kottayam in Kerala has filed a rape case against none other than the bishop, alleging that numerous times over the past four years the man lured her to his quarters over various flimsy pretexts and raped her. The first incident occurred on May 2014 in a guest house in Kuravilangad. She had reported the incident to the church authorities back then but they chose not to take any action on the matter. Subsequently she was harassed by the bishop on a number of occasions, adding up to about thirteen different counts of rape and sexual assault. Having failed to get any justice from the church the nun was finally forced to seek the help of the police. A bishop is no ordinary individual; he is usually a man of immense influence among Christians and is chosen by priests as their guide and leader. Expectedly the people of the church are unwilling to accept such unsavoury allegations against such a holy person; consequently, their entire ire has been deflected towards the nun. She is being pressurised to drop the case and it has created a furore across the country.
Perhaps the worst rule in the Catholic church is that all priests, nuns and bishops have to take a vow of celibacy. They are not allowed to marry or have sex. Not just Christians, such vows of chastity or brahmacharya are common among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists too. That is not to say everyone unanimously adheres to oaths taken; some observed their vows piously, some stray from their path. The Buddhist monks of Japan used to flout their declarations of celibacy so much that they had to be eventually allowed to get married. I strongly believe that the laws making celibacy necessary for priests ought to be done away with. I am not claiming even once that such a move will ensure that women and children will no longer be sexually violated. But I do believe that it will at least give priests a choice as to whether they wish to remain celibate or not; if they wish to they can and no one will be able to force them otherwise. If celibacy no longer remains obligatory t will only result in an increase in the number of people who wish to join churches to serve God. It is a complete misconception that it is not possible to give oneself up to the service of the Lord while simultaneously performing one’s domestic duties. Rather, it is nearly impossible to put one’s mind to something while trying to repress physical unease or dissatisfaction. Sexual desire is as natural a phenomenon as thirst, it is not contrary to the divine. If God has created this universe then sexuality too is divine creation.
Despite sexual harassment being a systematic and rampant problem in the Indian subcontinent, a counter-movement akin to Me Too of the west has yet to emerge here. Here, if an influential person is accused of rape it does not create any inconvenience for them; instead people slut-shame the accuser or the survivor. In Kerala too the priests have not sided with the nun, they have come out in support of the accused bishop. One priest went as far as to ask the nun to sort the matter out and went on to claim, ‘We will buy a plot of land for a convent and all of you will be safely moved there. Drop the case.’ This was followed by outright threats when the nun refused to back down.
Around the same time that the nun from Kottayam was fighting bishop Franko Mulakkal of Jaladhar, in another convent in Kerala the dead body of a nun was recovered from a well. Blood stains were found in and around the scene and the deceased nun was identified as Susan. A while back another such body had been recovered, that time a nun called Abhaya. Did both these women commit suicide or were they killed?
Men cannot stand the fact that a woman can cause trouble for a man, regardless of the fact whether the man in question is a rapist or a murderer. Quite true to character P.C. George, a MLA of the state, has called the nun a prostitute simply because she has dared to report rape. ‘No one has doubt that the nun is a prostitute.’ Since she has mentioned thirteen counts of rape he has shot back with, ‘Twelve times she enjoyed it and the thirteenth time it’s rape? Why didn’t she complain the first time?’ Powerful and influential people including MLAs have been rattled by the turn of events. They wish to argue that since the nun did not report the incident the first time itself, the accusations of rape are untrue! Some want proof to determine if the bishop did indeed rape her. During the early days of the Me Too movement in Hollywood when actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Lawrence, Ashley Judd were coming out with their stories of sexual harassment involving powerful mogul Harvey Weinstein, did anyone turn around to ask them to furnish proof? Did anyone demand investigation into the matter? Not that I know of. A woman’s claim ‘I was raped’ is enough for her to be believed. No one rapes someone with witnesses in the scene. Be it the east or the west, everywhere it is the same thing that women do not easily report rape simply because in many occasions such an admission only results in further harassment. Whenever someone comes out to directly accuse a man in a position of influence they do so with acute awareness of the dangers involved. They know that society will easily label them as whores and their lives will be upended entirely. And yet they still go ahead with the allegations, all to the service of truth. In the west some women have at least taken such bold steps thanks to Me Too but in the Indian subcontinent harassed and violated women still have to remain silent on most occasions. In this case the nun from Kerala had to have been truly courageous to have not been daunted by the inevitable backlash. Not many of us can claim to be that brave. In this instance she has earned that bravery after thirteen counts of violation against her person. There are countless around us who remain afraid to report rape even after the hundredth time because they are terrified of being shamed by our inherently patriarchal society.
It cannot be said enough how patriarchal and misogynistic our society is. It also explains why the nun found herself alone after alleging rape, with even the church refusing to side with her. She was denied basic facilities like ration and stipend. Since the news broke in the media and became wider public knowledge, pressure had been steadily mounting demanding an investigation into the matter. That is perhaps the only reason why the authorities had to look into the matter, why the bishop was removed from his duties and why he was finally placed under arrest today. If the incident had not been reported in the newspapers it would have surely been hushed up and soon enough another dead nun would have been recovered from yet another well somewhere.
Some go so far as to claim that revoking the vow of celibacy will result in a decrease in the number of cases of sexual violence or rape of women and children involving the clergy. Celibacy is an irrational and absurd ritual and must be put an end to. But it has absolutely no correlation with curbing instances of rape. Rapists do not rape because they do not have a partner or because they are not married – they rape because patriarchy has taught them that they are the stronger sex, that women are inherently weaker and that they have the absolute right to control and torture the latter. Patriarchy has made men into such brutes, has poisoned them with so much cruelty, that they do not even hesitate to sexually violate innocent children.
All across Europe and America today people have gradually begun to voice their allegations against the Catholic church because the clergy have continued to sexually abuse children across centuries. The children had been quiet thus far but today many of them are adults and they want justice. The Pope cannot solve any problems, he merely goes around apologising. And this is not just in the churches. Imams of mosques and teachers of madrassas rape and abuse children with similar impunity, just as Hindu godmen cheat people, amass fabulous wealth and keep raping whoever they want. Some have recently been indicted and jailed too. Even Buddhists monks are known to have committed rape and murder, quite against the grain of popular belief about them being honest and nonviolent.
No godman, no imam, no priest, no bishop, in fact not even the Pope, must be allowed to get away if it’s found they have committed a crime. Everyone must be brought to justice. Across the globe the history of exploitation and persecution of people in the name of religion is an ancient one. If today we continue to remain silent, if we do not build up a resistance against those who wish to see this cycle of abuse continue, then our future is perhaps already doomed.

The Rapes at Kathua and Unnao

From the Europe and America the news has come that Christian priests have raped young boys inside Catholic churches. I haven’t investigated how prevalent it is in other Muslim countries, but I have often read in the newspapers of Bangladesh about Imams raping children in mosques, of a teacher at a Madrasa raping a four-, five- or six-year-old girl student inside the Madrasa. Now I’ve been told that some people brought an eight-year-old girl into a temple in Jammu and Kashmir and gangraped her. One of the rapists is Sanji Ram, who had the responsibility for looking after the temple. Sanji Ram’s relatives as well as two police officers, their friends, kept the eight-year-old girl imprisoned inside the temple and raped her. The girl used to take horses out to graze in Jammu. When one of her horses was lost, she went looking for it in the jungle, which is when the gang of rapists captured her and imprisoned her in the temple. After raping her for several days in succession, the valiant heroes smashed the girl’s head in with a rock and murdered her.

Had the girl been a Hindu and not a Muslim, perhaps those men would have captured, imprisoned, raped, and finally killed her in exactly the same way. Both the poor and the rich know that killing the poor usually reduces the chances of trouble. I don’t believe that those men would have allowed the girl to walk on unscathed in the jungle had she been a Hindu. A rape takes place in India every 14 minutes. Hindu men rape Hindu women every day. They don’t spare anyone, from old women to one-year-old children. Muslim men rape in the same way. They don’t spare any women of any age. Rapes are continuing. Murders, too. Those who rape are usually not interested in the name, address and religion of those they are raping. They’re only concerned with the body. The more tender it is, the more delicious. Or they only consider the ‘valiance’. There is no lack of people in the world who think barbarity is bravery.

Raping the women of the enemy is nothing new. Since, like the elephants and horses and land and houses of the enemy, their women too are considered property, the visors take away the elephants and horses, occupy the land and houses, burning and pillaging them, and rape the women. This is how it was been since ancient times. Subjugating the adversary by raping his mother, his sister, his wife, his daughter, is an age-old practice. After killing jews in Arab lands, the prophet Mohammad had distributed the Jewish women amongst his militant companions for their pleasure. Pakistani soldiers raped two hundred thousand women in the Liberation War of Bangladesh. Although the troops were Muslims, and so were the majority of the women they raped, resistance had been a bigger factor than religion. The Pakistanis looted and pillaged the homes of Bengalis and set them on fire, and raped Bengali women. They raped the women because the war provided an opportunity. Whenever there’s an opportunity men rape women all the time, irrespective of caste and creed, it doesn’t even need a war.

To tell the truth, there is no ongoing war between Hindus and Muslims in India. It is true that some people are trying to provoke a conflict, but the conflict has not reached the proportion where Hindus will rape Muslim women in droves, or vice versa. Hindu men have raped a hundred times more Hindu women than they have raped Muslim women. It’s the same story with Muslim men. It is not as though either of them has vowed to rape women of the other religion alone. They do it when they get the opportunity. Muslim men rape more of Muslim women because they’re the ones who are near at hand. It’s the same with Hindu men.

Was it merely the attraction of raping a Muslim that made seven people rape an eight-year-old girl for seven days, that even made a man travel all the way from Meerut to Jammu? Or was it the opportunity to rape a female child? The rapist from Meerut would have travelled to Jammu even if the eight-year-old had been a Hindu. Child rape is on the rise today. Whether they’re Hindus or Muslims, Buddhists or Christians, no one gives up the chance to rape a child these days. Perhaps rape of children has always existed, and it is just the increase in the number of news reports about it that makes it seem it is on the rise.

Had Hindu men never raped Hindu women, I would have assumed the Hindu males of Kathua raped the eight-year-old girl because she was a Muslim. Had Muslim men not raped anyone other than Hindu women, maybe it would have become clear that the conflict between Hindus and Muslims is increasing or that the war between them is becoming more intense. But society still has Muslims like Imdadul Rashidi, who do not want to start a riot by attacking his son’s Hindu murderers as an act of revenge. There are still Hindus like Yashpal Saxena who prefer to forgive the Muslim murderers of his son rather than avenge his death. The Indian subcontinent needs Hindus like Yashpal Saxena and Muslims like Imdadul Rashidi.

Over in Uttar Pradesh, an 18-year-old woman has accused an MLA named Kuldip Singh Singer and his brother of raping her. The alleged rapists are Rajputs, and the young woman, a Dalit. Some people are saying that upper-caste men have a tendency to rape lower-caste women. Because hatred is one of the factors causing rape, it is entirely possible that the upper caste rapes the lower caste out of hatred. But it isn’t as though upper caste men are not raping upper caste women. And lower caste men are raping lower caste women. So it is not caste but hatred for women, the notion that women are of a lower class, that they are maids and slaves, that they are brainless creatures, that is responsible. As many of us know, rape is not sexual intercourse, whatever else it might be. Rape is muscle power, male power, penis power. The bottomline: the act of putting a crown on, or flying the flag of victory from, the bald head of the male organ is also known as rape.

It has not yet been proven whether MLA Kuldip Sengar has raped the women from Unnao. But there will be nothing to be surprised at if it is proven. He did not rape the woman because he is a BJP MLA. A male MLA of the Congress or the SP or the CPM or Trinamool or any other political party could have raped her too. Because he is a man. It is the powerful who commit the most rapes. Because the powerful have arrangements to cover their tracks. And it is not a custom to punish the powerful. They are the ones who can commit crimes and get away untouched far more often than others.

The Kathua rape is being called communal, and it is being said that the rape in Unnao took place only because it was a BJP MLA. I believe that the rapists in both cases did what they did because they are men. They raped the women because they had the opportunity to do it. A patriarchal society has taught men that women are nothing but sex objects. Therefore there is no crime in gratifying themselves with women’s bodies in any way they please. A patriarchal society has taught men that women are helpless and powerless – no matter what their religion or age, what their caste or their lineage, whether they’re rich of poor, they belong to the lower classes. And men have the right to humiliate them, to torture them, to crush them. Which is why men rape them. One rape every 14 minutes.

Until this patriarchy is not abolished, until men do not dismiss equal rights for women, until men stop thinking of themselves as lords and of women as sex-slaves, all men – Hindu or Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or Jew, poor or rich, upper caste or lower caste, legislator or minister, Imam or priest – will keep raping women.

Rapes will continue unhindered in temples, mosques, churches and pagodas because the custodians of these ‘holy’ places are all God-fearing men. God-fearing men do not consider rape a sin as they are well-aware that everything – notwithstanding Ishwar or Allah or Bhagaban or their respective religions – is undeniably misogynous.

Getting away with rape and murder

In Delhi, around December 2012, there happened a brutal incident. Six men gang raped a girl on a bus; but that wasn’t really all. They didn’t stop at inflicting violence with merely male organs, they had to reach into her insides and rip open her intestines. When her gut was spilling out of her, they still hadn’t stopped raping her. After they were done, they threw her limp body out unceremoniously from the speeding bus onto the street. She battled for her life as long as she could but it finally slipped out her wrecked body in a hospital far away from home.

In the Indian subcontinent, mostly the relentless canvassing and campaigning by male leaders have achieved women’s liberation. Men have fought to abolish sati, for women to step out of the home and hearth and get educated, have professionsand having suffrage against a largely patriarchal society.

Having said that, the number of men with such intentions and understanding come to a mere handful. While it is true that some men have indeed helped in somewhat scaling the immense wall of impediments in the way of women’s freedom, it also remains true that most men pushed womenkind back a few centuries, and unfortunately, the number of such men has always been far higher.

I have been looking at India closely for the past few years because I have been residing here; I am residing here because my democratic right of being a resident in any other part of this subcontinent has been undercut by ostensible democracies. And this nation, the oldest democracy in the subcontinent, which is far ahead of its neighbours in terms of education, resources and equivalence, wakes me up each day with its news dailies describing horrific crimes against women. Rapes of minors, murder, physical assault, strangulation, shootings, hacking, burning, stoning — strange, myriad ways of doing away with women are revealed every single day.

I am even more amazed by the fact that they meet with little or no protest. A slight increase in the prices of petroleum or onions is enough, usually, to get a few thousands on the street marching, but a hundred women raped, mutilated, brutalised doesn’t bring out a single man or woman. Rape stories have become so very commonplace that the media only reports especially brutal gangrapes these days with adequate coverage.

The Delhi gangrape changed that scene, ever so slightly. For the first time in years, people were angry, they were awakened to a few truths in this subcontinent. Thousands of men, too, joined the protests and demanded more measures for the safety and security of women. Many demanded death for the rapists.

What they perhaps do not realise is that the death penalty is possibly the easiest punishment to mete out to a criminal by a court. The logistics of a hanging is far simpler than to initiate a grassroot change in an inherently misogynistic society that must learn not to objectify women. The Herculean task of educating a society to look at individuals equally and respectfully, and not merely as sex objects, is a responsibility that this government must take.

Of course, making kids recite, like clever little cockatoos, lines about freedom and non-discrimination and how ‘men and women are equal, how women must not be disrespected,’ doesn’t exactly solve the problem as it doesn’t reach back to the core of their values. When the children go back home to find men to be the ruling heads and women to be side-characters in this cinematic reel, this observation itself changes their entire perception about themselves.

They grow up reading the same newspaper reports screaming, ‘One can do anything with a woman’s body and get away with it. One can rape an infant and be forgotten. No one thinks of this as something worthy of protest. To rape a wife is not punishable in a patriarchal society. To give or receive dowry is a common cultural practice condoned by both men and women.’

Yes, it’s that bad for women in this society which treats them as a second sex, as a lesser, lower life form, so that there’s really no other option for them than to bribe men and become their slaves for life. To pay men to accept them into their lives.

The media has its own role to play, the society its own. The society spots women by such so-called ‘innocuous’ ritualistic markers as the sindoor or the shankha-pola/mangalsutra, as something that is already licensed and sold. No such markers for married men, of course, for when were they meant to ‘belong’ to a woman?

The media rediscovers female bodies each day as sex objects, focussing maniacally on disembodies anatomical parts to titillate audiences. Whoever she is, a writer, scientist, thinker, philosopher, it ceases to matter. She is a mindless, spineless piece of flesh, and the folds of body are meant to be devoured by millions. They are not meant for conversations of intellectual stimulation, they are meant to be enjoyed.

Perhaps no other species can treat its females the way humans can. There is no documented instance of gang rape, there is no instance of murder after intercourse. If anything, the male of every species do their utmost to court the women into acquiescence through a mating ritual. To treat their own species so abysmally may finally lead to the extinction of the species altogether, because it seems to be somewhere stuck in the evolutionary ladder, and instead of bettering itself, is rooting for its own destruction by exterminating the female of its own genus.

Teenage girls gangraped and hanged by men

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Two teenage girls were abducted, gangraped and hanged by men in India.

Villagers found the girls’ bodies hanging from a tree on Wednesday morning, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state.
The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.
Hundreds of angry villagers spent the rest of Wednesday in silent protest over alleged police inaction in the case.
Indian TV channels showed video of the villagers sitting under the girls’ bodies as they swung in the wind, preventing authorities from taking them down from the tree until the suspects were arrested.
Police arrested the three men later in the day and were searching for four more suspects.

Autopsies confirmed the girls had been gang-raped and strangled before being hanged, police said.
The villagers accused the chief of the local police station of ignoring a complaint by the girls’ father on Tuesday night that the girls were missing.
The station chief has since been suspended.
The family belongs to the Dalit community, also called “untouchables” and considered the lowest rung in India’s age-old caste system.
India tightened its anti-rape laws last year, making gang rape punishable by the death penalty.
Records show a rape is committed every 22 minutes in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people.
Activists say that number is low because of an entrenched culture of tolerance for sexual violence, which leads many cases to go unreported.

I don’t get surprised anymore. Men are the most cruelest, nastiest, filthiest immoral creatures on earth. Men hate women. They can do anything against women. They can murder all women. They can make all women extinct.

A woman was gang raped on the orders of a village council. Her crime? She fell in love with a man outside her community.

A woman was gang raped because she was in love with a man outside her community.

A WOMAN was gang-raped by 13 men on the orders of a village council in eastern India as punishment for apparently having an affair.

The council ordered the horrific penalty to be carried out in a village in West Bengal state on Tuesday night after the 20-year-old woman was discovered with a man from another community, a senior officer said.

“The girl was gang-raped for having an affair with a youth of another community and failing to pay the fine which was imposed by the village council,” district police superintendent C. Sudhakar told AFP.

“The head of the village council held an urgent meeting in the village square on Tuesday when the girl and her lover were called,” Sudhakar said.

“The girl and her lover were tied to two separate trees and fined 25,000 rupees each as a fine for having an affair,” he said.

“As the parents of the girl, who were also present at the meeting, expressed their inability to pay the fine, the head of the village council ordered that she should be raped by the villagers as punishment,” he said.

The man apparently involved with the girl was freed after he agreed to pay the fine within a week, he said.

The woman was recovering from the attack in a hospital.

Last month, India marked the first anniversary of the death of the 23-year-old student who was gang-raped in New Delhi on a moving bus, in an attack that sent shock waves across the nation.

Despite tougher laws and efforts to change attitudes to women in India’s deeply patriarchal society, the number of reported sex crimes continues to rise.

We are raped, it is our fault.

It is actually our fault that we live with our oppressors, abusers, rapists, murderers.

Anti-rape underwear

A company has made anti-rape underwear for women.
What about making don’t-rape underwear for men and make the wearing of that underwear compulsory?
It won’t work, right?

The responsibility to not be raped is not on the woman. The responsibility to not rape is on the man.

If people still do not understand it, the companies will continue making all kinds of anti-rape spooky thingies.
But we all know that these thingies won’t stop rape.

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If nothing works, then women would be advised to literally lock their vagina. Believe it or not, it happened. A man kept his wife’s vagina under lock and key for years!

Do you guys prefer to go out wearing armour everyday for not being murdered? Or you want to get a safe place where nobody would murder anyone!

A girl was raped and then buried alive.

A girl was raped and buried alive in Pakistan.

Siddique Mughal, a resident of a village in Toba Tek Singh district, located 225 km from Lahore, told police that his 13-year-old daughter was abducted by two unidentified men while she was going to a seminary for Quran lessons. The men took the girl to a deserted place and raped her. They believed she had died during the assault and buried her by the roadside, Mughal said.

However, the girl regained consciousness and dug her way out of the mud covering her. She raised an alarm and caught the attention of a passerby , who took her to a nearby rural health centre.

As police were not cooperating with the girl’s family, the Lahore HC chief justice’s complaint cell took notice of the incident on Saturday and directed the district and sessions judge of Toba Tek Singh to probe the matter.

The sessions judge subsequently directed police to arrest the rapists, complete their investigation.

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I feel like I am buried alive and I am suffocating inside my grave, I am screaming and calling people out but nobody is listening to me! I feel like I am dying but no one is trying to save me.

Rape in Pakistan

Kunwar Khuldune wrote about rapes that occurred in Pakistan.

A five-year-old girl was brutally raped in Lahore on Thursday and was found dumped outside Ganga Ram Hospital around 8 pm on Friday. The very next day a 12-year-old girl in Faisalabad and another first year student in Toba Tek Singh were gang raped. This was followed by another gang rape of a 15-year-old girl yesterday in Tharparkar. Last year 7,516 cases of violence against women were reported in Pakistan with 822 of them being rape cases. And anyone who’s familiar with the perverted concept of ‘honour’ in our country knows that 822 is a sorry fraction of the actual number.

Every individual who propagates the deplorable myth that women are inherently dependent on or weaker than men is a rape accomplice. Every person who scorns at a girl for not catering to their definition of decency is a rape accomplice. Anyone who is a flag-bearer of double standards of modesty for men and women is a rape accomplice. Everyone who teaches women to be ashamed of their bodies is a rape accomplice. And if your respect for a woman is dependent on how well covered her body is, then you sir/ma’am, are a rape accomplice as well.

An accomplice is ‘a person who helps another commit a crime’. And while most of us won’t directly provide a rapist the aid that he needs to commit his monstrous crime, by propagating the aforementioned ideals we definitely help him unleash the loathsome ‘beast’ inside him.

Answer this: who would have more of a tendency towards rape, a man who’s told that a woman not dressed up in synchrony with (insert any cultural/social/religious/individual standard of modesty) is dishonourable, or a man who’s told that how a woman chooses to dress up should be no one else’s concern, regardless of whether she’s wearing a burqa or a bikini?

Now answer this: who would have more inclination towards physically abusing a ‘party girl’ who’s drunk and has ‘many male friends’, a man who’s taught that women must follow a different set of morals as compared to men, or a man who’s taught gender equality in every single aspect of life?

And finally answer this: who has more of a chance to become a rapist, a man who lives in a society where a woman’s respect has got nothing to do with her body or a man who lives in a society where a woman not following a certain ‘dress code’ is dubbed an open lollipop inviting flies and insects?

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A woman not covering her head isn’t ‘asking for it’; one wearing a bikini isn’t ‘asking for it’ and yes, one who might not be wearing anything at all is still not ‘asking for it’. Those that justify rape under any circumstance omenshouldn’t merely be dubbed rape apologists but should instead be called rape accomplices and should share a fraction of guilt for every rape where the victim was ostensibly ‘asking for it’.

The myth that the hijab, burqa, or following a particular definition of modesty protects women is busted by the fact that in a recent BBC report it was revealed that 99.3 per cent of Egyptian women had experienced harassment, while the rate of sexual offenses in Saudi Arabia is 58.6 per 100,000 and Qatar and UAE have rates of 1.7 reported cases of rape per 100,000 population. Also, when 5-year-olds and 7-year-olds are being raped, it’s obviously not a case of what’s atop the woman’s head, more a case of what’s inside the man’s head. And those who want to flaunt the fact that forcing a woman to wear the hijab reduces the chances of her being raped, should know that those chances would be further reduced if you lock her up in a cupboard and throw away the key.

Rape cannot be prevented by forcing women to cover up, it can only be prevented by women empowerment, promotion of gender equality and the eradication of antediluvian myths that teach us how women are men’s property who must keep a watch on them and control them. When it is stated or implied that women are men’s property and that the latter have an upper-hand over the former, you’re cultivating a ground for rapists to grow. And everyone who plays even the most minor of roles in the cultivation should be called a rape accomplice.

Not only are we all rape accomplices because we promote the aforementioned ideals, but our law is quite possibly the grandest of all rape accomplices, since it doesn’t consider DNA as primary evidence in rape cases in the year 2013 AD. Furthermore, by asking for four witnesses – who can only be dubbed the closest of collaborators, since they preferred watching a woman being abused than preventing the act – it’s almost as if we’ve created a social and judicial setup to facilitate rapists.

Merely screaming bloody murder over a heinous act won’t suffice in its eradication, and propagating the West’s rape statistics won’t particularly help the cause in our neck of the woods, where rape is criminally misreported and prevails despite us purging our society from ‘Western evils’. To actually reduce rape, every single one of us must ask ourselves if we’ve ever, intentionally or inadvertently, promoted misogynistic ideals or tried to justify rape under any circumstances. If the answer to those questions is in the affirmative, we’ve all played a part in the physical and mental trauma of every raped woman in our society.

I agree with Khuldune. What about you guys?