The Gentle Sex

They have always been vulnerable to attack. Men prized them for their bodies, giving them the means by which to reach sexual gratification. There is nowhere on the face of this Earth where women and girls and young boys can be entirely safe from predators. Nature constructed her animal kingdom in such a way that infused within our biology is the urge to reproduce. And to ensure that her creatures did reproduce and thus perpetuate the species, she made it pleasurable for men, to entice them to rut.

For women, not so much, though there is the physical pleasure of sex, and far more than that the contentment and pleasure in close physical and emotional confluence with another human being. The pains of giving birth are soon forgotten, if the mother and the newborn survive the physical ordeal. In advanced countries of the world these things present few problems; the mechanical biological systems involved. Far more complex are the emotional portions.

In developing countries of the world it is an entirely different story. Where mass rapes are regularly on schedule during times of tribal conflict, or when one clan settles a score with another. Or just simply a society's culture which accepts that men have the right to accost and take advantage of any woman or girlchild who is in an unprotected and vulnerable place.

And in India there are now an estimated 37-million more men in the immense population of 1.2-billion people, than there are women, thanks to the cultural preference for male babies, and the equally acceptable cultural method of female baby restraints like infanticide. The culture carries its customs over into abortion when in advanced societies the gender of a fetus can be ascertained before birth.

India is so assailed by relentless incidents of brutal and often deadly rapes that it finally made rape a capital crime punishable by the death penalty after the infamously horrific incident where a young woman in the company of a male friend had been repeatedly gang-raped on a moving bus, then mutilated, leading to her death.

In India, social equality for women is yet a dream to be realized. There are certain comparisons to the state of women's status in countries of the Middle East, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Six in ten women cover their heads in cultural modesty in India, somewhat similar to the enforced head-to-toe garb women must wear in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, to 'preserve their modesty'.

Eight of ten Indian women require permission to enable them to visit a doctor. Almost half of Indian women marry before they reach the age of 18. Four of ten have no influence on their marriage; they must submit to the decisions made by their families on their behalf. These figures were released as a result of a recent survey undertaken by India's National Council of Applied Economic Research.

The barbaric abduction, rape and murder of two teen-age girls from a field in their village where they had gone -- as do most of the villagers through lack of toilet facilities -- nearby their home to evacuate their bodily functions, has roiled Indian society. The raw entitlement of upper caste Hindus to do as they wish with the lower caste 'untouchables', was starkly evident in the blatant openness with which the girls were abducted, though they were seen, and attempts made to stop their kidnap.

Members of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union shout slogans during a protest against a gang rape of two teenage girls in Katra village, outside the Uttar Pradesh state house, in New Delhi, India, Friday, May 30, 2014. A top government official said the northern Uttar Pradesh state has sacked two police officers who failed to respond to a complaint by the father of the two teenage girls who went missing and were later found gang raped and killed. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

The local police did nothing to apprehend the event which led to the rape, strangulation and public hanging of the two cousins, 14 and 15. The villagers gathered beneath the tree where the bodies of the two girls dangled, refusing to move until their rapist-murderers had been taken into custody. The plight of the Dalit in India whom their own religion has consigned to poverty and disdain by the upper castes seems irremediable

But then, India is not alone in the horrific scourge of rape. While it is endemic throughout Africa, and used as a weapon of war through mass rapes, the developed world also has its shameful and seemingly incorrigible statistics of rape befouling the culture and social pride of socially-advanced and culturally-progressive nations where equality of women is a standard legal entitlement.

One in four women in Sweden report that they were at one time raped, according to a European Commission-funded study. The United States can boast the highest number of reported rapes at over 83,000 annually, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. The occurrence of child and baby rape in South Africa is among the highest in the world; between 28 and 37 percent of South African men admit to having raped, according to the Africa-based Institute for Security Studies.

A survey by the United Nations revealed that men living in Asia and the Pacific region admit in a one-to-four ratio of having raped at least one woman. And in Canada, every 17 minutes the estimate is that a girl or woman is raped. What's notable about all these reports is that just six percent are reported to police leading to fewer than half of those resulting in criminal charges. Of those charges, one in four leads to a conviction.