Rape – The national crime of India and other countries

Congratulation guys!!! You have done it by sheer hard work. Rape has become the national crime of India (well I would say almost all countries). Almost every 30 minutes one women is raped in India (for those statisticians, one every 2 minutes in United States).Majority of the cases go unreported. There nothing to be proud of. We should be ashamed of ourselves. This is not a problem of one country. This is universal problem irrespective of the geography, religion language or education.

Quoting Justice Arjit Pasayat – “While a murderer destroys the physical frame of the victim, a rapist degrades and defiles the soul of a helpless female.”

Not even a single day passes without any such incident in media. The ever news hungry media sensationalize these issue for publicity and makes the rapists a national hero. Seldom have they thought of the trauma and tragedy the victim and her family has to undergo. The only thing they are bothered about is their ratings and viewership. Why should we blame media? We should start protest against this uncontrolled yellow journalism. We all how the Indian media handled the recent case of teenage girls murder in Delhi. They molested even her character and soul.

Yesterday there was news about how the blue chip company employee was molested by 10 people. What a team effort!!! We can’t produce enough Olympics medals in team games (or any event) but here we will be among the best!!! Is this the same country where the women is considered as Shakthi and worshipped? Why this conflict? Has the human race degenerated so badly that they have no sense and become animals? How could I compare these demons to poor animals? It will be biggest cruelty from my part.

When you read this you might not know the seriousness of the situation.

Law should be amended so that death punishment could be given to these criminals. They are not fit to considered humans. They should be stoned to death or hanged or whatever may be punishment but they should be eliminated. My sisters and mothers don’t think that all are like these demons. There are humans also in the male gender. I feel so helpless when I hear these tragic stories which the creator of life of earth, the most wonderful creation of God has to undergo everyday.

Women must find the courage to report the rape. They must find support from their families and friends to deal with the stress, anger, and fear they experience. Most of all, women must never feel guilty or blame themselves. For there is no need to accept shame or blame for a crime committed by another.

Facts

Rape is the fastest growing crime in the country, according to data for 2006 released by the home ministry’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recently. A rape is being reported every 30 minutes, an alarming increase of nearly 700% since 1971 when the NCRB started recording them.

These figures are revealed even as reports of sexual crimes, including those against foreign tourists, come in from different parts of the country.

Every hour, 18 women become victims of crime directed specifically at them — rape, kidnapping and abduction, dowry-related crimes, molestation, sexual harassment, eve-teasing, etc. Rape has grown from seven cases a day in 1971 to 53 in 2006. In comparison, all other crimes have grown by 300% since 1953 when the NCRB started keeping records.

What is alarming is that the offenders were known to their victims in 75.1% of rape cases (14,536 out of 19,348). Parents/close family members were involved in 3% of cases (431 out of 14,536), neighbours in 36.8% of cases (5,351 out of 14,536) and relatives in 7.6% of cases (1,106 out of 14,536).

According to the NCRB data, among 35 cities with a population of over 1 million, Delhi topped the list of crimes against women, with 4,134 cases (nearly one-fifth of the total number of crimes against women). One-third of all rapes and a fifth of molestation cases took place in the city. Hyderabad was the second most dangerous city for women, with 1,755 cases.

Among the states, Andhra Pradesh recorded the highest number of crimes against women — 21,484 cases, or 13% of the total number of cases in 2006. Uttar Pradesh was a close second, with 9.9% of such crimes. Madhya Pradesh reported the highest number of rape cases, at 2,900, and also molestation cases.

Records reveal that 7,618 women were killed for dowry in 2006, an increase of 12.2% over 2005. Uttar Pradesh, with 1,798 cases, had the highest number of such deaths, followed by Bihar with 1,188 cases.

And these are just the cases that have been reported; the number of unreported cases may be much higher.

Links
http://www.endesastres.org/files/ENGLISH_Rape_Prevention__CONCID_.pdf

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The dark story of war – mass rape

I was proud of India army with its discipline and moral behaviors. But recently there were allegations against them in Congo. (The United Nations has accused the Indian Army troops of sexual exploitation, including child abuse, while on peacekeeping duty in Congo. http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/14/stories/2008081459661200.htm) Then I heard about the some more dark side of the war which I have heard many times but didn’t notice much. The dark story was always in dark waiting for the world to accept the brutality of war and its consequences.

The world is at war everyday. The number games of dead, wounded or seriously injured is familiar to us. In this epic story of hide and seek, victory and defeat, life and death there are many hidden plots and tactics which never surfaces. The most successful and brutal of these is mass rape, the mass humiliation of human race. No body notices these state (not only state all the parties in a war) sponsored terror. If we look at the history of all the aggression we can find many such untold grime stories of death and shame.

The biggest mass attack on the women’s dignity which I knew was that of Pakistan’s army in 1971. When they raped around 2,00,000 Bangladeshi (East Pakistan at that time) women. But then it still repeated in Congo, Sudan, Bosnia and all those known and unknown places in much larger scale.

Gita Sahgal, of Amnesty International – “Rape is often used in ethnic conflicts as a way for attackers to perpetuate their social control and redraw ethnic boundaries””Women are seen as the reproducers and carers of the community,” she said. “Therefore if one group wants to control another they often do it by impregnating women of the other community because they see it as a way of destroying the opposing community.”

The same tactic was used in a “very strategic attack” by state-backed Pakistani troops during the fight for Bangladesh‘s independence in 1971, Ms Sahgal said.

“They were saying ‘we will make you breed Punjabi children’,” she said, with the aim of weakening the integrity of the opposing ethnic group.

History

The Hebrew Scriptures describes the rape of the women of conquered tribes as a routine act. Foreign woman were often kidnapped as spoils of war, and forced to marry their captors/rapists. This was probably typical behavior in the Middle East during that era. In ancient times, rape was considered to be a crime against the victim’s father or spouse — whoever owned her. “The ancient Greeks and Romans would rape and enslave women after they had conquered a city.”

In Nanjing, China, during 1937 & 1938, Japanese soldiers were responsible for massive levels of rape among the local Chinese population. There were “over 20,000 rape victims…when the soldiers themselves were not raping the Chinese women, they took great pleasure in forcing fathers to rape their daughters and sons to rape their mothers.“

Millions of women victims raped by Russian soldiers during the last months of World War II. Anthony Beevor’s book “Berlin — The Downfall 1945” documents rape by Russian soldiers. “Beevor’s conclusions are that in response to the vast scale of casualties inflicted on them by the Germans the Soviets responded in kind, and that included rape on a vast scale. It started as soon as the Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia in 1944, and in many towns and villages every female aged from 10 to 80 was raped.“

Random rape by soldiers during wartime has been a common phenomenon, particularly when there has been a lack of army discipline. “From [recent] conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina to Peru to Rwanda, girls and women have been singled out for rape, imprisonment, torture and execution. Rape, identified by psychologists as the most intrusive of traumatic events, has been documented in many armed conflicts including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cyprus, Haiti, Liberia, Somalia and Uganda.“

Author Maria B. Olujic – “Rape was a weapon of terror as the German Hun marched through Belgium in World War I; gang rape was part of the orchestrated riots of Kristallnacht which marked the beginning of Nazi campaigns against the Jews. It was a weapon of revenge as the Russian Army marched to Berlin in World War II, it was used when the Japanese raped Chinese women in the city of Nanking, when the Pakistani Army battled Bangladesh, and when the American G.I.s made rape in Vietnam a ‘standard operating procedure aimed at terrorizing the population into submission’.”

I can’t write much more about these. This is a real horror much bigger than the holocaust or anything heard of till now. This is the worst punishment. And this is happening almost everyday. We the “cultured” human society are not doing anything to prevent this? Animals are far better than us.

Hey warlords, please spare our sisters and mothers. Fight with dignity like real men.

LINKS:

1. The Greatest Mass Rape in History: http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:oRzuO9ARMccJ:library.flawlesslogic.com/massrape.htm&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=in&client=firefox-a
2. U.N.: Brutality against women in Congo ‘beyond rape’: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/07/30/congo.rape.reut/index.html
3. Japan‘s Mass Rape and Sexual Enslavement of Women and Girls: http://www.cmht.com/cases_cwcomfort2.php
4. “Not Women Anymore…” The Congo’s rape survivors face pain, shame and AIDS http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2005/congo.asp
5. The silent story of Bosnia: http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/rape/rape.html
6. Democratic Republic of Congo: Mass rape – time for remedies: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR62/018/2004/en/dom-AFR620182004en.html
7. Human Rights Watch/Africa : SHATTERED LIVES:Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath http://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/Rwanda.htm
8. “News from Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc.,” at: http://witness.peacenet.or.kr/e_comfort/newsletter/wccw.htm
9. Heather A. Blackburn and Stacey M. Thomas, “Rape Warfare,” 1998-FEB-25, at: http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/Research/
10. “Sexual violence as a weapon of war,” UNICEF, at: http://www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/sexviol.htm
11. Maria B. Olujic, “Women, Rape, and War: The Continued Trauma of Refugees and Displaced Persons in Croatia,” Anthropology of East Europe Review, Volume 13, No. 1 Spring, 1995; Special Issue: Refugee Women of the Balkans
12. “Nanjing Massacre: A Retrospective,” at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ccba/
13. John Baird, “Rape of Nanking: Remembering the horrors of World War II,” at: http://www.wpi.edu/News/TechNews/article.php?id=210
14. Peter Almond, “Feature: Book on WW II rapes upsets Russia,” at: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6043-11.cfm
15. Anthony Beevor, “Berlin — The Downfall 1945,” Viking, 2002.
16. Dahlia Gilboa, “Mass Rape: War on Women,” at: http://www.scrippscol.edu/~home/
17. Valerie Oosterveld, “When women are the spoils of war,” UNESCO, at: http://www.unesco.org/courier/1998_08/uk/ethique/txt1.htm
18. “International Law Relating to Rape in Armed Conflict,” http://www.alliancesforafrica.org/
19. “Rape in Times of Conflict and War: A resolution from the General Board of Global Ministries approved by the 1996 General Conference of The United Methodist Church,” at: http://gbgm-umc.org/mission/resolutions/rapewar.html
20. From: Stefan Blaschke, “History of Rape: A Bibliography,” at: http://www.geocities.com/history_guide/horb/horb-t08.html

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