On the Indian Sexual Assault and America

I have just returned from a group meeting for Davidson's chapter of Half the Sky, where we discussed the gang rape of a 23-year-old student which has gotten a lot of media attention recently. The discussion was both thoughtful and one which has opened my eyes.

A little bit of background first:

The Indian girl was with a male friend of hers after a movie. She and her friend boarded a bus to go home. The bus had been taken over by six young males. The couple knew something was wrong when the driver took a wrong turn and wouldn't let the two off of the bus. The six males then proceeded to rape the woman and beat the man. The woman was impaled with a pole and eviscerated. When medics found her, the great majority of her intestines were outside of her body. She was taken to a New Delhi hospital, where she stayed for ten days before being taken to a Singapore hospital, where she died three days later.

Her rape and eventual death have ignited massive protests all over India, and has attracted international attention.

There are hundreds of different lenses and analyses to see through or conclude from the horrific acts, the following protest, and the rhetoric being used by a number of different actors in the month following her rape and eventual death.

I'm an American male, so I will offer my perspective as one, and provide analysis particularly interested in American action/policy.




In order to balance numbers, I'm going to find a multiple for the population of India and the population of the United States to make the statistics provided equal per capita. India's 2011 census reports a population of 1.2 billion. The US Census Bureau's (rather nifty) POPClock Projection puts the United States' population at somewhere around 315 million at the time I'm writing this, which is about 25% of India's population.

According to the Wall Street Journal, India reports about 24,000 rapes per year. In a 2009 report on the invisibility of raped women, entitled "The iceberg of rape", Mihir Srivastava estimates that "as many as 90 per cent of the rape cases actually remain unreported." Assuming this unreported value is true, that would mean about 240,000 rapes/year in India.

About 13 months ago, New York Times Health writer Roni Rabin wrote on the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which found that 1 in 5 women claim to have been sexual assaulted. However, only 84,767 cases of forcible rape were reported (FBI data). According to the Justice Department and the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN), only about 46% of rapes get reported to police. In order to make this simpler, I'm going to round to 85,000 cases of rape and multiply by two (since ~50% times two is ~100%) to get around 170,000 cases of rape a year in the United States.

India has about 240,000 rapes per year. The United States has about 170,000 cases of rape a year.

The United States has a fourth of the population of India.

If the United States had the same amount of people as India (ceteris paribus), the United States would see over 680,000 rapes per year, compared to India's 240,000 rapes per year, which is almost three times that of India.

According to a CBS News report in 2009, the arrest rate for rape was about 25%, compared to 79% for murder. In addition, nearly 20,000 rape kits wait untested across sixteen key states and cities in America.

RAINN/DoJ reports say conviction rate for rape is as low as 5 out of ever 100 rapes in America (same page as earlier RAINN/DoJ). Compare this to a 26.4% conviction rate in India, according to the "Rape Map of India" via India Real Time. (Link to WSJ article discussing it.)

This means the rate of conviction for rape in India is 500% the rate of conviction for rape in America. I realize that fairness of courts or whatever could be a counterargument, in which one would say that Indian courts find more people guilty of rape than in America because American courts are more "fair" than "corrupt" Indian courts, but the World Bank reports that "although India's courts are notoriously inefficient, they at least comprise a functioning independent judiciary". (One would truly think an "inefficient court" would find less convictions than an efficient one, right? - but that's beside the point.) There are countless issues that Indian courts face (nepotism and ignoring injustice are but two of many), but getting convictions through fair trial doesn't appear to be one.

What's shocking to me is that India, with all of the numbers I've just provided, is protesting like mad. The Indian Express reports that a massive protest of 10,000-12,000 people in the center of Delhi. About 125 shells of tear gas were launched into the crowds and somewhere around 70 people were injured (protestors and policemen near 50/50).

There have been men protesting in skirts (depicted above), which I would never imagine seeing in America, sadly. Reuters' Mansi Thapliyal interviewed several women in New Delhi about their feelings on the rape of the 23-year-old student and the threat of sexual violence to women they live with. The feelings of the women pictured are strong, even though the timestamp on the NBC News link reads less than a day ago - more than three full weeks after the student died in the hospital.


Now let me turn to America. Nick Kristof, whom I adore (check out how giddy I was when he visited), wrote a provocative piece for his Sunday Column on the 12th of this month, entitled "Is Delhi So Different From Steubenville?". He contrasts the gang rape of the 23-year-old student with the rape of a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, and, specifically, the response of the media.

This young lady in Steubenville, Ohio, was drugged and carried from party to party by a high school football team, and was raped repeatedly throughout the night. Full story, via Juliet Macur and Nate Schweber of the New York Times located here.

The Atlantic Wire posted this screen-capture of an instagram by Cody Saltsman (these not embedded for graphic content) and BuzzFeed offers this screen-capture of a tweet by the same kid, in which Cody Saltsman said bluntly "I have no sympathy for whores". There is also a video leaked to vimeo of a very drunk Michael Colin Nodianos talking about how "dead" the poor girl was.

While there have been some protests to this horrific series of events, there has not been very much news coverage. The victim, according to a source I trust, allegedly killed herself earlier this month, and nobody seems to care.

The point I'm trying to make is that America has exploded over the gang rape of the student in India, but we continue to completely ignore the issues we have here at home. The people of India are protesting over their sister, but only the hacktivist group Knight Sec (of notorious group Anonymous) seems to be protesting. (Please correct me if I'm wrong; I really really really want to be wrong.)

Is it that the rape of an Indian is "exotic" to us? Is it that we want to turn away from our own problems, but enjoy pointing out those of others? Is it because the Indian girl is of a "high caste", and American victims appear to be younger or less wealthy or darker-skinned than the average American?

Frankly, I don't know what the answer is, but it's terrifying that Congress failed to reinstate the Violence Against Women Act, which provides additional monetary investment towards investigation and prosecution of crimes against women, including civil redress in cases chosen to be left unprosecuted by the prosecutors. And it is awful that Amendment One was able to be passed in North Carolina, which makes it so that women and men who are beaten or raped by a partner (heterosexual or not) are not able to press charges for domestic violence unless legally married.

It's too bad that it is taking two major tragedies to finally allow some of America and the world to see these problems, but hopefully enough people will become interested/angered that some actual change can come about in the next decade or so.

I just don't yet know what it is right now.