Rape every 15 minutes
Hathras
gang rape:-
India
victim cremated 'without family's consent'
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54351744
The
family of a Dalit (formerly untouchable) woman who died after she was allegedly
gang-raped has accused police officials of cremating her body without their
permission.
The
19-year-old was allegedly raped by four upper-caste men in Hathras district in
northern India.
She was
grievously injured and died in a Delhi hospital on Tuesday after fighting for
her life for two weeks.
Activists
say police must explain why they took the "inhumane decision".
Her
alleged attackers have been arrested and a fast-track court has been set up to
hear the case.
Local
journalist Abhishek Mathur, who witnessed the cremation from a distance, told
the BBC that the police kept her family and media away from the funeral pyre.
Her
body was brought to their village in Uttar Pradesh state around midnight. The
victim's brother said that police officials were putting pressure on the family
to cremate her immediately.
"When
we refused, they took the body in an ambulance and cremated her," he said.
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What is India's caste system?
A
senior district administration official, however, denied the allegation, saying
the family's consent was taken.
Mr
Mathur said the victim's mother wanted to take her body home for rituals before
the last rites, but her request was denied.
"Police
had formed a human-chain to stop the protesting crowds, the family and the
media from getting close to the cremation spot," he added.
The
victim's brother said some police officers were rude to them.
"They
took the body away without our permission, without the permission of my parents
and cremated her. We didn't even get to see her one last time," he said.
He
further added that the police beat up members of the family when they protested
to see the body, adding that even women members of the family were beaten up.
But
then comes a case that stands out for its brutality and shocks the conscience
of the nation.
The
gang rape of the 19-year-old Dalit teen is one such case that has caused
widespread outrage.
But in
this case, it's not just the attackers who have committed a heinous crime. The
authorities too have treated her family with indignity - before and after her
death.
Following
the outrage, the Hathras police have denied reports that they cremated her body
without the family's consent, but many local journalists have contested their
story.
Videos
shared widely on news TV channels and social media show her distraught family
and villagers making several attempts to claim her body as the police ambulance
arrived in the village.
In one
video, her mother is seen weeping with her head on the bonnet of the car. In
another, she's sitting on the road in front of the ambulance, weeping and
beating her chest.
She's
heard repeatedly pleading with officials to hand over the body to her so she
could take it home one last time - and perform some rituals.
The
victim's father is heard telling reporters that cremations are never held
during the night. But the police still carried on with the 2:30am funeral.
The
opposition Congress party has called the hasty cremation "a gross
violation of human rights". On social media, many have called it
"illegal" and "immoral".
Police
officials have not made a statement about the allegations.
Her
death has sparked anger across the country. Dalit activists have shut down the
main market in Hathras and are demanding action against police officers.
They
are also angry with the way police handled the investigation.
The
victim's brother said that no arrests had been made in the first 10 days after
the incident took place. "She was left for dead. She fought for her life
for 14 days," he said.
Several
opposition leaders have condemned the incident, calling it "insulting and
unjust".
Dalits
are some of India's most downtrodden citizens because of an unforgiving Hindu
caste hierarchy that condemns them to the bottom of the ladder. Despite laws
that protect them, discrimination remains a daily reality for the Dalit
population, thought to number around 200 million.
On
Twitter, the victim's death is among the top discussion trends, with many
calling her the forgotten Nirbhaya, a reference to the 2012 gang-rape and murder of a woman in Delhi
that shocked the world.
The
23-year-old physiotherapy student was named Nirbhaya - the fearless one - by
the press as she could not be named under Indian law.
Rape
and sexual violence have been under the spotlight in India since the 2012 Delhi
attack, which led to huge protests and changes to the country's rape laws. But
there has been no sign of crimes against women and girls abating.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54351744
Brutal Rape Case – Nirbhaya Delhi
7 years after bus rape and murder shocked the world, attackers
hanged in New Delhi
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/asia/india-rape-execution-intl-hnk/index.html
New Delhi, India (CNN)Four
men have been executed for the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old
student on a New Delhi bus in 2012, a case that shone a global
spotlight on shocking rates of sexual assault
in India.
Akshay Thakur, Mukesh Singh, Pawan
Gupta and Vinay Sharma were hanged at a
jail in the Indian capital on Friday, March 20, more than six years after being
convicted of raping and killing the woman, known only as "Nirbhaya."
The four men were convicted in
2013, but three of them appealed their death sentence to India's top
court, the Supreme Court. All appeals were denied, including mercy pleas to
India's President Ram Nath Kovind.
The case prompted outrage around the
world and in India, where protesters demanded justice for Nirbhaya, a pseudonym
given to the student that means "fearless." Under Indian law, victims
of certain crimes cannot be named.
Campaigners called for tougher laws on
sexual assault in a country where, based on official figures from 2018, the
rape of a woman is reported every 16 minutes.
While reports of rape are all too
common, the execution of prisoners for any type of crime in India is rare.
In 2018, trial courts imposed 162 death
sentences --
the highest number in nearly two decades -- according to data collated by National
Law University in Delhi.
However, there were no recorded
executions that year, according to Amnesty International. Only
a handful of people have been executed over the past 20 years, including three
terrorists, and Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was executed in 2004 over the rape
and murder of a school girl. Recently, the Supreme Court has commuted a number
of death penalties to life imprisonment.
A
horrific attack
At about 8:30 p.m. on December 16,
2012, Nirbhaya and her boyfriend took a
chartered bus home after watching the film "Life of Pi" at a Delhi
movie theater. It's common in India for chartered buses to pick up additional
passengers during odd hours.
While the bus was moving, a group of
men stole the pair's belongings, then took the victim to the back of the bus
where they raped and assaulted Nirbhaya with iron rods, according to court
documents. They also stripped and beat her boyfriend, who they held down during
the attack.
Afterward, the men
threw the naked victims from the front door of the moving bus and tried to run
them over. They then cleaned the bus with the victims' clothes, before burning
them and dividing the "loot" among themselves, including two mobile
phones, a wrist watch, and a pair of shoes.
Nirbhaya died two weeks after the attack in a
Singapore hospital, where doctors had been treating her for serious injuries to
her body and brain. Before she died, she made statements to the authorities
about the attack.
The
men involved
Soon after the attack, police located
six suspects, who knew each other before the incident.
The oldest was 34-year-old school bus
driver Ram Singh, who "routinely" drove the vehicle where the attack
took place, according to court documents.
He was accused of the victim's rape and
murder but was never convicted as he allegedly killed himself in prison shortly
after the trial began. His family claimed that he was murdered, according to media reports.
The youngest, who was only 17 at the
time of the attack and who cannot be named for legal reasons, was sentenced to
three years in a juvenile correctional facility, and was released in 2015.
The other four, aged between 28 and 19
at the time of the attack, were convicted and sentenced to death less than a
year later.
They include bus cleaner Akshay Thakur,
part-time gym instructor Vinay Sharma, fruit seller Pawan Gupta, and Ram
Singh's younger brother Mukesh Singh.
In a 2015 BBC interview, the younger Singh
said "a decent girl won't roam around at nine o'clock at night. A girl is
far more responsible for rape than a boy."
A wider issue of
rape
In 2018, more than 33,000 cases of alleged rape were reported --
roughly 91 cases each day, according to India's National Crime Records Bureau.
The number of reported rapes has risen since 2012, potentially
because of greater awareness and the perception that something will be done.
Legal reforms and more severe penalties for rape were introduced
following Nirbhaya's death.
The
women and girls of Delhi are fighting back. 02:03
Those included fast track courts to
move rape cases through the justice system swiftly, an amended definition of
rape to include anal and oral penetration, and the publication of new
government guidelines intended to do away with the two-finger test which
purportedly assessed whether a woman had sexual intercourse recently.
The authorities also updated the law to
allow the death sentence for repeat rape offenders. Prior to that, the maximum
punishment for
rape was life imprisonment. In 2018, the law was amended so that the death
penalty can be handed down in cases where the victim is a girl under the age of
12.
Experts say that the outrage following
Nirbhaya's death has helped to lift the shame around discussing
rape. However, many of the problems associated with India's rape crisis
continue.
And high-profile rape cases have
continued to hit headlines. Last year, four men confessed to the gang rape and
murder of a 27-year-old woman, whom they set on fire. The four were shot dead by police in custody after
allegedly snatching weapons from police and firing at them while visiting the
scene to reconstruct the crime.
CNN's Esha Mitra contributed reporting from New Delhi.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/asia/india-rape-execution-intl-hnk/index.html
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