The December 16, 2012 gang-rape victim had a name. To honour her memory, we could start by reclaiming her identity. Indian law does not permit the naming of rape victims. Presumably, this is because the crime of rape is so terrible that, in society’s eyes, it stains not the rapist but his victim with shame; […]
Women who speak up against sexual assault will almost always sought to be silenced by men who are backed by institutional support. When classics professor Mary Beard tells the story of Tereus who, in Greek mythology, cuts off the tongue of Philomena after raping her, it is to point to a particularly grisly example of
There are many words — cheat, lowlife, scoundrel — that describe men who lie to women and promise them marriage just in order to have sex with them. Rapist is not one of them. My Hindustan Times column: He was a doctor, she was studying pharmacy. They met in 2009 and fell in love, or
When the religion of the perpetrators becomes more important than the crime of rape itself, then you know you are witnessing a civilisational breakdown. To find evidence of the epidemic of violence against young girls and women gripping India, you have only to flick through your newspaper. In the recent past: Two minor sisters, 13
India’s child rape crisis Read More »
The world’s longest and largest march by survivors of rape and sexual assault covering 24 states over 10,000 km in India seeks to break the silence and stigma around rape. My Hindustan Times column. Y’s husband beat her senseless when he found out that she had been raped by three men in the fields where she
The long march to justice Read More »
A new book by my friend and college room-mate Sohaila Abdulali explores the idea that victims of sexual violence are not broken beings. Awful as it is, rape is survivable, and those who have been raped are deserving and capable of happiness again. I don’t remember the precise moment when my then college roommate, Sohaila
What we talk about when we talk about rape Read More »
Now that we are making our child sexual offences law gender neutral, isn’t it time we started talking about adult male rape survivors? Sohaila Abdulali is telling me about the time many years ago when a man called up a Rape Crisis Centre in the US. He had been raped by a teacher some years
It’s time we recognised that men can get raped too Read More »
In IndiaSpend: Anti-trafficking activist Sunitha Krishnan, one of three finalists for the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity spoke to me on sex slavery, rehabilitating victims of sex trafficking and death for raping children. New Delhi: She’s dodged an acid attack, had a fatwa issued against her and survived 17 separate physical assaults. But Sunitha Krishnan, 46, doesn’t seem
Children don’t seem to be a priority in this country Read More »
In response to public outrage against a spate of reported rapes of children, the government has now brought in an ordinance that imposes death to anyone convicted of raping a girl below 11. Why I think this ordinance won’t work, and what I think will. The remarkable fact about recent Indian law-making, particularly when it
Laws by public emotion Read More »
In Hindustan Times: Recent gang-rapes and our reaction to them tell us how far we’ve descended in six years after Nirbhaya. When we allowed our anger to spill over into the streets following the December 2012 gang-rape of a physiotherapy student, we didn’t ask about her religion. We didn’t put labels on our fellow protesters’
No country for women Read More »