I was reading an article on a Indian news site (the Country of India) and when I finished the article I looked at the linked articles. Out of the eight links six were about rapes or gang rapes. Clicking on those article I found more links referencing even more rapes. What the hell India? Why does there seem to be so many women raped in that country? Is rape overlooked by the authorities or something? Is it a favorite pastime there, national sport?
I don’t know why, but reading those articles and seeing how many rapes there appears to be really pisses me off. What the hell is wrong with the men in India or am I seeing something that isn’t as bad as I think it is?
Also, one of the articles mentioned a “love marriage”. Am I correct in thinking that it means a couple wed for love vs an arranged marriage? It must be because some poor woman was stoned to death by her father and brothers for entering into a love marriage. Way to stay classy there India.
I have read many articles that have stated that US is the country with the most rapes. USA is the rape capital of the world.
And yet India only ranks third for the number of rapes reported each year. What country ranks first? The United States. In India, a country of over 1.2 billion people, 24,206 rapes were reported in 2011. The same year in the United States, a nation of 300 million, 83,425 rapes were reported. In the United States, every 6.2 minutes a woman is raped.
The rape problem seems worse in India because it is now getting a lot of national and world attention. Many more cases are being reported and the media is giving it a lot of space (which is a good thing). But note that the conviction rate for such crimes is very high in India. Compare that to the US where colleges and universities try and hide rape statistics.
Emphasis on reported. In societies where there is a lot of mysogyny, shame, sexual repression or where rape is not taken seriously by the authorities the rates of reported rapes is going to be lower.
Huh. When I reported it I figured it would go to the pit. Anyway OP, here’s a link to an older thread on the topic, where it has been discussed at great length.
I wouldn’t pay any heed at all to which country has the most rapes reported. Convert those numbers into at least an estimate of the number actually committed, and then we’ll talk.
Thanks. And what amazed me ant so much the statistical reporting of the rapes, buy the sheer amount of coverage on that new site I was on. It almost seemed like they were reporting sports scores. Someone unfamiliar with India would get the impression by raging their news that India’s most participated social event is rape. I just found it shocking. And I’m under no illusion that rape is noon-existent in the US, but I can’t ever recall reading a newspaper here and seeing:
Keep in mind those are just the ones that admitted to it, and those are just ones who admitted to raping their wives (as opposed to raping someone else like girlfriends, strangers, female family members, male family members). This also ignored female sexual abusers.
That means at minimum, 1/5 of Indian men are admitted rapists. The idea that in a given year only 0.004% of women are raped (based on the statistics of about 580 million women and 24k reported rapes a year) when a minimum of 20% of men are admitted rapists makes no sense.
No, it seems worse because women in India are discouraged from reporting rape because victims get punished, sometimes instead of their rapists. Generally speaking reporting a rape in the US won’t get you stoned to death.
? In terms of reported incidents of rape, the US has four times as many as India. The only reason you don’t see papers like that is because American papers don’t think of it as news. If news sites in India are prominently reporting rapes and thus bringing pressure on authorities and society to do something about the problem, surely that’s a good thing?
I looked up the survey those domestic violence findings are from. It samples 1500 men total (it samples more -2000 - from Rwanda) from India, and ALL the men it samples from India come from two metropolitan areas - 70% from Delhi, which is notoriously, and correctly, deplored for having terrible attitudes towards women, and the remaining 30% from a small city called Vijaywada, which is actually in Andhra Pradesh, but which the survey wrongly locates in Tamil Nadu, and I have absolutely no idea why they went there. Long story short, I wouldn’t trust that survey’s numbers, and I most certainly wouldn’t extrapolate them to India as a whole.
To your larger point, that India’s rape numbers are probably underreported to a large degree, you’re right they probably are, but I have never seen any evidence(or even a good estimate) for what that degree is, nor have I seen any credible evidence that it should be significantly worse than average.
Delhi reported 489 rapes in a year out of 22 million people, so roughly 10.5 million women. That implies in a given year in Delhi about 0.005% women report being raped. This roughly matches with national reported rates of about 0.004%. How does that imply the study is wrong? Are you implying outside of Delhi, India is a far stronger bastion of women’s rights and that just happens to be a city that is several standard deviations to the right on sexual violence? What evidence do you have of that? Are you implying the reported rates of rape are the same outside of Delhi, but the actual number of rapes is far lower outside of Delhi? Why would women outside Delhi be more likely to report rape?
Also Delhi is a metro area, not a rural area. If anything you would assume a rural area would have more backwards attitudes towards women’s rights and sexual violence than a large international city. I don’t know how much it extrapolates to other nations, but in the US the large cities tend to be more progressive than the rural areas.
Actually, recent reports seem to indicate that rape is more common in rural states of the US. By comparison, New Jersey and New York have very low levels of reported rape.
Of course, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the extent to which the reported statistics match actual occurrence is an open question. How would one measure the “actual” rate of rape if it isn’t getting reported?
All the conclusions that you draw from the survey(which has piss poor sampling, and doesn’t know where its own samples are drawn from) are about domestic violence in India, when at most you could talk about Delhi. That badly biases the sample because Delhi is widely recognised for its high incidence of violence against women.
And I don’t know where you’re getting the Delhi rape data from, but that’s wrong too, as is the population data.
Your urban/rural distinction is important, but the conclusions you draw are incorrect. More conservative does not equate more rapes. I’ll give you my theory for why this is, you’re free to accept it or not as you wish. Most of North India is highly patriarchal, and the rural areas in particular are very conservative. However, they’ve been this way for centuries, and have developed social conventions and norms to deal with it. Women are married early, and are rarely, if ever alone or independent. This is not a good state of affairs by any means, but it has evolved to keep non domestic violence/rapes against women to a minimum, and there is no reason to think that rapes (outside of marital rape) in rural areas in India are an order of magnitude higher than reported. I repeat, this is not a desirable state of affairs, and marital rape needs to and must be included in this, but I would remind you that the taboo against domestic violence is relatively recent even in western society. Marital rape was only criminalised in all of the US in 1993.
I don’t have any clue about the actual as distinct from reported rape rates in India, but I will say I have some family in Delhi and they uniformly complain about how difficult life is there for women, in terms of sexual harassment. I also have family in Bombay and in the south, and things there are generally supposed to be better. On second glance, I see that bldysabba says the same thing.
Also, even in terms of reported rapes, the US is far from the highest in the world. I believe that dubious honour belongs to South Africa and Lesotho.
