[Videos of the girl and her alleged attacker as violent crowds shamed and beat her created outrage in India.]
By Sameer Yasir
The distraught teenager told family members that their neighbor had pushed her to the floor, stuffed a cloth in her mouth and raped her. The relatives, with a number of villagers, found the man she had accused and beat him.
Then, declaring that the
16-year-old girl had brought shame to the family, the group tied the girl to
the suspect with a rope and paraded them through fields and markets in a
village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Some spectators kicked,
punched and spat on her.
Videos of the shaming this past
Sunday circulated widely on social media, triggering a nationwide
outcry over one of the most distressing aspects of India’s rampant problem with
sexual violence: victim blaming.
“Hope the criminals even if they
happen to be her own family members, are brought to justice and pay dearly for
scarring the life of this 16 year old,” wrote Raveena Tandon, an Indian actress, on Twitter.
Tilak Ram Bhilela, a farmer from
the village, told The New York Times he had been horrified when he saw people
laughing and shooting videos on their cellphones as the pair were led through
the market. Crowds lined the streets and some men stepped forward to spit on
the girl’s face, he said.
“When I saw them doing that to her,
I had tears in my eyes,” recalled Mr. Bhilela, who said he had been watching
with the paraded girl’s family members as she turned to them for help. “But no
one could speak a word, the mob was so angry they would have killed us.”
After coming under public pressure,
the authorities in the village said this week they had arrested six people for
publicly shaming the girl. India law protecting minors prohibits identifying
the village by name.
Among those held are her brother,
an uncle and a cousin. The police said that the neighbor she had accused had
also been arrested as part of an investigation into the rape. The girl, her
family and the neighbor could not be reached for comment.
Reports of horrific sexual assaults
on women have become familiar in India, where by some calculations the average
number of rapes committed daily works out to one roughly every 15 to 20
minutes.
But a publicized spate of brazen
assaults in recent years has mobilized women’s groups and other activists to
raise the alarm on deeply entrenched misogyny that may be fueling the attacks.
That includes the problem of victim
shaming, which is most acute in rural areas, women’s rights activists say,
where a rape survivor is often regarded as a shamed woman, unfit for marriage.
Many rape victims pay the price for speaking out, with their family members disowning
them or pressuring them to stay quiet.
Perpetrators of sexual violence can
act with impunity, activists say, because only a handful of rape cases lead to
prosecutions, out of tens of thousands of cases reported a year. In 2019, the
last time the Indian government provided statistics, an average of 87 rapes
were reported daily,though the true scope is far worse because most go
unreported.
In villages the problem is
exacerbated because complaints are handled by councils of men, who mete out
their own punishments, said Ranjana Kumari, a women’s rights activist in New
Delhi.
“Victim shaming in this country has
become so common,” said Ms. Kumari, who is also director of the Center for
Social Research, a nonprofit group in New Delhi that supports women’s rights.
“If you commit a crime against women, perpetrators think they can get away with
it.”
In 2018, a teenager in central
India was set
afire after her parents told a village council that men in the area
had raped her. That year, reports that an 11-year-old girl in Chennai had been
gang-raped drew an outcry, but in the city, people soon started to blame
the child’s mother.
Even at the highest levels of the
country’s courts, recent decisions have drawn scrutiny and anger over what
rights groups describe as regressive, patriarchal attitudes toward women. The
head of India’s Supreme Court recently drew
calls for his resignation after he had asked a man accused of raping a
minor whether he would marry the victim as a way to settle the case.
Amid this week’s uproar, the
National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, a government body, directed
the police in the state of Madhya Pradesh to submit a report within 24 hours on
the parade incident in the village, where about 1,200 people live. And on
Wednesday, the local police said officers were investigating more people
suspected of involvement in parading, beating and punching the girl.
In the videos that emerged the
crowds lining the streets also shouted “India, my motherland, is great.” The
slogan has come to define the Hindu
nationalist fervor that some say is sowing divisions in the country,
including between men and women.
Ms. Kumari, the activist, said the
state of Madhya Pradesh had witnessed some of the most horrific incidents of
sexual violence against women in recent years.
“Over 95 percent of people watching
the events of Sunday were men,” she said, referring to the parade crowd in the
village. “This is a reflection of our society. This is how we see crime against
women.”