The Culture of Misogyny

"A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy."
"When being raped, she shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they'd have dropped her off after 'doing her', and only hit the boy."
"You can't clap with one hand -- it takes two hands. A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal."
"Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent of girls are good."
Mukesh Singh, one of the six Indian men convicted of the Delhi bus gang rape

"If my daughter or sister engaged in premarital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight."
A.P. Singh, defence lawyer, India

MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images   In this photograph taken on September 11, 2013, Indian Defence lawyer AP Singh addresses the media outside the Saket Court complex in New Delhi.

The gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, 23, a university student returning from an evening out at the cinema with a male friend, horrified the world. India was embarrassed enough that its parliament voted in new laws on punishment for rape. The atrocity where this young woman was beaten, gang-raped and had iron bars inserted in her stomach cavity destroying her viscera and killing her, was an expression of the contempt in which certain members of Indian society view women.

Dibyangshu Sarkar / AFP/Getty Images   Indian activists from the Social Unity Center of India (SUCI) shout slogans against the state government in protest against the gang-rape and murder of two girls in the district of Badaun in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh and recent rapes in the eastern state of West Bengal, in Kolkata on June 7, 2014. The protests came amid a growing uproar over the killings in Uttar Pradesh, with the United Nations saying violence against women should be regarded as a matter of basic human rights. The two cousins, aged 14 and 15. 

 

Despite a toughening of the laws against rape, women and girls continue to be attacked, raped, and murdered. Low-caste girls and women have few protections against the predators that think nothing of committing these crimes. Indian police notoriously are disinterested in pressing charges, much less investigating complaints. The shame inherent in a girl or woman having been raped -- if she survives -- is such that families make every effort to conceal the event.

AP Photo

The interview where this convicted rapist/murderer made his statements was for the production of a BBC documentary. Mukesh Singh claimed that Jyoti Singh, the victim, was the criminal, not the victim, and by extension the six men who brutalized and murdered her are victims of her criminal act of resisting them. Had she and her friend not attempted to fight back to protect her from what occurred, the gang would have had no reason to inflict the savagery she experienced.

The killing was a mere "accident", according to this odious man. Indian courts passed death sentences on the gang. Mukesh Singh, 26 at the time of the carnage, was a slum-dweller and he drove the bus the gang had commandeered. The presiding judge at his trial rejected his claims of non-involvement in the gang rape, stating that the case had "shocked the collective conscience" of India.

Evidently not the conscience of those like Mukesh Singh, and lawyers like A.P. Singh -- representing low and high social order -- who will continue to believe they did nothing wrong, and that custom validates that belief, evident in the ongoing reports of repulsively vicious attacks on girls and women throughout India, including unfortunate tourists, innocent in their belief that they can be safe as women in public in India.