How about a little less rape culture, humanity?
This gang rape case in India has my stomach twisted in knots. I can’t believe what this poor woman had to endure before she died, and how people are reacting to her attack. This is freaking 2013 and we are still blaming women for getting attacked.
Do we really have to keep going over this? I don’t give a flying crap if this woman was drunk and naked on the subway. If she didn’t want to have sex—if the words NO came out of her mouth—then she is completely, 100 percent blameless. If you rape someone, YOU are to blame. Period.
Three of the rapists are actually pleading not guilty because the evidence used against them was supposedly manipulated. The youngest attacker, who was apparently not only the instigator and the most brutal of the six rapists, may only get charged with three years in a “correctional house” if he turns out to be under 18 as he claims to be. The lawyer of some of the rapists made the statement that “respected ladies” do not get raped.
So 1 in 3 women are not respectable, folks. Is he actually insinuating that his clients are just respectable men who simply could not control themselves when they saw a woman walk by? And given that a rape occurs in India at least every 20 minutes, there must be a lot of “disrespected ladies,” including mothers and young daughters and students, walking around.
I hope they rot in jail. These beasts deserve the maximum penalty, just as every rapist does—though fewer than 10 percent of rapists will ever spend a day in jail in America alone.
Speaking of America, a court in the states recently ruled that the rape of an unmarried woman wasn’t rape. Had she been married to the man who pretended to be her boyfriend and raped her, he would be in jail. Due to our freaking misogynist, primitive laws, he’s off scot-free after raping her.
Then, in Canada, a 21-year-old man met and seduced a 13-year-old girl on Facebook, and after he raped her in a park, he only received 14 days in jail for “touching” her. Police aren’t even investigating the situation properly, requesting information from Facebook, zilch. The man, who claims he was beaten up by the girl and her friend (though admits to “having sex” with her, apparently), will also receive a measly year of probation and be added to a sex offender registry for just 10 years. Is it just me, or is consent here not even important? You have sex with a 13-year-old child and you’re over 18, you need to be charged with much more than improper touching!
These incidences only highlight the fact that girls aren’t considered important anywhere in the whole planet. Violence against women is rarely prosecuted, and some women even experience more harm—whether in the military, at the hands of “honor killings,” or other retribution—for simply reporting it. And this heinousness has got to stop.
Click here to find out about this year’s Violence Against Women Campaign, One Billion Rising, and find out what you can do about it.