Violence against women

India, we have a rape problem. What are we doing about it?

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The latest horror story out of Jharkhand has inflamed social media—not so much because of the violence of the crime, but because the woman is a foreign national who has spoken about her ordeal on a now deleted Instagram post, her bruised and battered face for all the world to see.

Here’s what happened. On the night of March 1, the woman travelling on a Spanish passport along with her husband, was attacked in Dumka, Jharkhand. According to the first information report (FIR), the woman has said she was gang-raped by seven men (at the time of writing all seven have been arrested along with one more) and her partner was beaten, assaulted and robbed. They were found by a night police patrol and taken to a hospital where the woman told the doctors she had been raped.

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Laws by public emotion

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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

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No country for women

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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’

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December 16 gangrape: Five years on, why the streets don’t belong equally to women

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Every woman has a story, the man who ‘accidentally’ touches her in the metro, the schoolboys who chase her in the park for sport, the masturbating pervert late at night on the bus. We learn to ignore it – rule #1 of the street: never, ever make eye contact – but sometimes it spills over

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No naming names: India’s Harvey Weinstein moment is passing by in deafening silence

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The price of speaking up is simply too high. We have a law, but most companies remain mindful of hierarchies that make it easy for powerful men to prey on subordinate women. When it comes to the crunch, who’s more dispensable, the boss or the one who reports to him? Did you know he…? Oh,

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What women want

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To not be raped. To not be subject to dowry. The right to be acknowledged as their children’s natural guardian. Meet four women who forced the law to recognize these basic rights. A protest march can sometimes tell us just how far, or how little, we have travelled. In 1972 a girl called Mathura was

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Medical examination norms for sexual assault cases await nod

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Women’s groups argue for a more humane approach to survivors that focuses on holistic treatment. New Delhi: News reports of a ban on the so-called two-finger test and the issuance of national guidelines on dealing with sexual assault cases by the ministry of health are wrong and misleading, say women’s groups. The file on this has

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