BBC News – How India treats its women

Soutik Biswas, Delhi Correspondent

People have called her Braveheart, Fearless and India’s Daughter, among other things, and sent up a billion prayers for a speedy recovery.

When the unidentified woman died in a Singapore hospital early on Saturday, the victim of a savage rape on a moving bus in the capital, Delhi, it was time again, many said, to ask: why does India treat its women so badly?

Female foetuses are aborted and baby girls killed after birth, leading to an appallingly skewed sex ratio. Many of those who survive face discrimination, prejudice, violence and neglect all their lives, as single or married women.

TrustLaw, a news service run by Thomson Reuters, has ranked India as the worst G20 country in which to be a woman.

This in the country where the leader of the ruling party, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, at least three chief ministers, and a number of sports and business icons are women. It is also a country where a generation of newly empowered young women are going out to work in larger numbers than ever before.

But crimes against women are rising too.

With more than 24,000 reported cases in 2011, rape registered a 9.2% rise over the previous year. More than half (54.7%) of the victims were aged between 18 and 30. Most disturbingly, according to police records, the offenders were known to their victims in more than 94% of the cases. Neighbours accounted for a third of the offenders, while parents and other relatives were also involved. Delhi accounted for over 17% of the total number of rape cases in the country.

And it is not rape alone. Police records from 2011 show kidnappings and abductions of women were up 19.4%, women being killed in disputes over dowry payments by 2.7%, torture by 5.4%, molestation by 5.8% and trafficking by an alarming 122% over the previous year.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has estimated that more than 100m women are “missing” worldwide – women who would have been around had they received similar healthcare, medicine and nutrition as men.

New research by economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray estimates that in India, more than 2m women are missing in a given year.

The economists found that roughly 12% of the missing women disappear at birth, 25% die in childhood, 18% at the reproductive ages, and 45% at older ages.

They found that women died more from “injuries” in a given year than while giving birth – injuries, they say, “appear to be indicator of violence against women”.

Deaths from fire-related incidents, they say, is a major cause – each year more than 100,000 women are killed by fires in India. The researchers say many cases could be linked to demands over a dowry leading to women being set on fire.

Research also found a large number of women died of heart diseases.

These findings point to life-long neglect of women in India. It also proves that a strong preference for sons over daughters – leading to sex selective abortions – is just part of the story.

Clearly, many Indian women face threats to life at every stage – violence, inadequate healthcare, inequality, neglect, bad diet, lack of attention to personal health and well-being.

Analysts say deep-rooted changes in social attitudes are needed to make India’s women more accepted and secure.

There is deeply entrenched patriarchy and widespread misogyny in vast swathes of the country, especially in the north.

And the state has been found wanting in its protection of women.

Angry citizens believe that politicians, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, are being disingenuous when they promise to toughen laws and speed up the prosecution of rapists and perpetrators of crime against women.

How else, they ask, can political parties in the last five years have fielded candidates for state elections that included 27 candidates who declared they had been charged with rape?

How, they say, can politicians be believed when there are six elected state legislators who have charges of rape against them?

But the renewed protests in Delhi after the woman’s death hold out some hope. Has her death come as an inflexion point in India’s history, which will force the government to enact tougher laws and people to begin seriously thinking about the neglect of women?

It’s early days yet, but one hopes these are the first stirrings of change.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-20863860

The Hindu Editorial – Time to be ashamed

Wednesday 19 December 2012.  Perhaps the real tragedy we must contemplate, as we consider the story of the young woman who now lies in a Delhi hospital bed battling for her life after being brutally beaten and gang-raped Sunday night, is this: in six months or less, she will have been forgotten.

There will, by then, have been the next victim, and the one after — and absolutely nothing will have changed. Ever since Sunday’s savage crime, India’s political leadership has been loudly engaged in what it appears to believe is advocacy of women’s rights — in the main, dramatic but meaningless calls for summary trials, castration and mandatory death penalties.

The same leaders will, if past record proves a guide, do absolutely nothing to actually address the problem. For all the noise that each gang-rape has provoked, Parliament has made no worthwhile progress towards desperately-needed legal reforms. Even nuts-and-bolts measures, like enhanced funding for forensic investigations, upgrading training of police to deal with sexual crimes, and making expert post-trauma support available to victims, are conspicuous by their absence.

How does one account for the strange contrast between our outrage about rape — and our remarkable unwillingness, as a society, to actually do anything about it? For one, we are far more widely complicit in crimes against women than we care to acknowledge.

The hideous gang-rape in Delhi is part of the continuum of violence millions of Indian women face every single day; a continuum that stretches from sexual harassment in public spaces and the workplace to physical abuse that plays itself out in the privacy of our homes far more often than on the street. Nor is it true, secondly, that Delhi is India’s “rape capital.”

There are plenty of other places in India with a higher incidence of reported rape, in population adjusted terms — and Delhi’s record on convicting perpetrators is far higher than the national average. Third, this is not a problem of policing alone.

As Professor Ratna Kapur argues in an op-ed article in this newspaper today, there is something profoundly wrong in the values young men are taught in our society — values which bind the parental preference for a male child to the gang of feral youth who carried out Sunday’s outrage or the hundreds of thousands of husbands who were battering their wives that same night.

Finally, India’s society rails against rape, in the main, not out of concern for victims but because of the despicable notion that a woman’s body is the repository of family honour. It is this honour our society seeks to protect, not individual women. It is time for us as a people to feel the searing shame our society has until now only imposed on its female victims.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/time-to-be-ashamed/article4214334.ece

The Hindu – Prospects of justice for rape victims in free fall

Despite sustained campaigns and legal changes, convictions have declined steadily

Praveen Swami

New Delhi, 11 March 2012. From the near-illegible notes scrawled by investigators at the Prasad Nagar police station, we know this: ever since 2005, the young woman who walked in through their doors last month had been stalked by her brother-in-law, given flowers and chocolate and beatings.

There was the time, a bottle of rat-poison in his hand, he threatened to kill himself if she did not declare her love; there was the time he showed up with an affidavit on Rs. 50 stamp paper, promising to marry her.

Then, there were the times he raped her.

The files do not record what led the woman to summon up the extraordinary courage it takes to file a criminal complaint for rape, but this we can be certain of: she is less likely than ever before to receive justice from India’s criminal justice system.

Shameful figures

In 1973, when the National Crime Records Bureau first published nationwide statistics on rape, 44.28% of perpetrators — almost half — were being convicted by trial courts. In spite of years of hard-fought struggles by women’s rights groups, and landmark Supreme Court judgments, the conviction rate has fallen to 26.5% — just about a quarter. The decade-on-decade conviction rate has been in free fall: to 36.83% in 1983, 30.30% in 1993 and 26.12% in 2003.

How dangerous is your city?

Maharashtra reported a 13.9% conviction rate in 2010, while Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal both recorded 13.7%. Karnataka stood at 15.4%. Jammu and Kashmir had the lowest conviction rate nationwide: a disgraceful 2.6%.

India’s rape crisis in 2010

Lawyer Rebecca John, who has worked on the frontlines of sexual assault prosecutions, holds declining investigation responsible. “I can tell you from personal experience,” she said, “that nine out of ten cases fall apart because of shoddy investigation.” “There often isn’t a single fingerprint to link the perpetrator to the crime scene, let alone anything else.”

In 2009, Delhi began issuing SAFE — short for sexual assault forensic evidence — kits to all major hospitals, in the hope of improving evidence collection. “The new systems,” says Pushpa Singh, head of obstetrics and gynaecology at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, which has been using SAFE kits for the last year and a half, “make evidence-gathering far more accurate and useful.”

The fact is, though, that SAFE hasn’t boosted conviction rates — often, an official familiar with the procedures said, because “protocol isn’t followed.” “The police accompanying the victims aren’t sensitised on how to deal with them; clothes and personal articles aren’t stored properly; the temperature at which vaginal swabs are kept is sometimes inaccurate. The evidence is often useless.”

Legal measures haven’t helped much either. In case after case, the Supreme Court has set landmark standards for rape trials — holding, among other things, that the testimony of a victim did not need independent corroboration, and insisting that women officers alone deal with victims. In trial courts, though, perpetrators are still walking free.

In not one of five 2012 cases surveyed by The Hindu had forensic tools been used to link the alleged perpetrator to the crime scene; in one, involving a 14-year-old Bihar resident kidnapped by a friend, there was no paperwork to suggest that the alleged perpetrators had even been tested for a DNA match.

“Frankly,” says Pinky Anand, an eminent New Delhi-based lawyer who has worked on several key women’s rights cases, “I think we need to focus less on the law, and more on the institutions which make the law work. That’s where the real problem is.”

(With inputs from Devesh Pandey and Bindu Shajan Perappadan)

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2982321.ece?homepage=true