Thursday, May 29, 2014

Unbelievable rapes in India; police participate

Teen gets three years in gang rape, murder of Indian woman: a protester in India chants slogans as she braces herself against the spray fired from police water canons during a protest sparked by the gang rape of student. This is the first verdict in a case that has sparked international outrage over the brutal crime (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images/NPR).

Young girls hold banners during a demonstration Thursday in Lucknow, India, after police arrested several men for allegedly gang raping and murdering two teenage children, sisters, then hanging their bodies from a tree. At least one of the perpetrators was a policeman (Azam Husain/Barcroft Media/Landov).
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Slutwalk, London (Garry Knight)
NPR's Julie McCarthy reports today on another alleged gang rape and murder in India -- this one involving two teenage sisters from the lowest Hindu [slave or "untouchable"] caste, whose bodies were found hanging from a mango tree.
 
McCarthy says the two girls, ages 14 and 15, were killed in a village about 140 miles east of India's capital New Delhi.
 
What U.S. child rapists look like, incest, too
"They reportedly had gone to a field to relieve themselves but never returned," McCarthy says. "Like hundreds of millions of Indians, they lacked a bathroom at home."

The girls' family belong to the Dalit caste, formerly known as "untouchables," the lowest rung of India's ancient [social stratification-by-birth] system of societal hierarchy.

What Indian rapists look like. Men convicted in notorious case to be sentenced (npr.org)
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Men say no to rape of their female relatives
The Press Trust of India says charges have been filed against seven people, including two police constables. Local media report that one of the policemen allegedly participated in the attack. The other is said to have refused to listen to relatives who reported the two girls missing.
 
Prison guard and homosexual rapist
The Associated Press says: "Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree throughout Wednesday, silently protesting the police response. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls' bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down until the suspects were arrested."
 
Human Rights campaigners say Dalit women are frequently the target of attacks, and this incident is yet another in a series of violent rapes against Indian women in recent years that have united India in anger.

FEMEN says no to rape, no to patriarchy!
Last year, four men were sentenced in the highest-profile of the cases -- one involving a young woman on a bus who was gang raped [in front of her boyfriend who was beaten unconscious] and later died from injuries she sustained in the [violent sexual] assault. More (MORE)

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