No see, the problem with me is, I had a British couple who cycled from Kerala to London couchsurf with me while they were in Delhi. I’m horrified at the thought that this could easily have been them.
I’m not concerning myself with India’s image. I’m concerned about India’s reality. Which is undeniably poor, although, hopefully, improving. After all, are you seriously trying to imply that something like this wouldn’t have occurred anywhere else in India? Just yesterday there was the issue of the Briton in Agra. She was in her hotel room. Is that also not a safe place to be?
how did you get this idea? arguing for the sake of it?
More similar to the case in the topic would be the abductionof 2 italians last year from naxal affected areas of orissa. that was an unsafe area, likewise that jungle where this incident happened is an unsafe area.
Your argument that poor men rape because they want to settle scores with the rich is absurd, not the least because even wealthy males commit the same kind of crimes. It is just that the latter have the means to prevent crimes from being registered or brought to trail (Indian justice system is notoriously corrupt).
Again, the argument does not hold water. Sudden largess has nothing to do with the desire to rape someone. Moral outlook on such an intimate level does not change overnight. The real and only problem here is that misogyny is a fundamental part of Indian culture. Let us examine the incidences: Bride burning, anyone? How about Sati redux? Female Infanticide? “If you spend INR 500/- on an abortion today, you will save INR 2500,000/- 18 years later”. “Oh, you stay too far away for the ultra sound followed by abortion? No problem, we can always kill her outright by drowning her in a pot of milk or water or burying her alive.”. "What??? The mother does not want to do any of that? Well, then we will just feed the baby girl a little less, and why waste money on taking her to the doctor when she sick? Taking much care of a girl is like watering someone else’ garden. ". The declining sex ratio and the (ever persistent) incidence of sexual crimes are a direct outcomes of a corrupt and morally bankrupt society, and the sooner the Indians admit it, the better it will for India.
Fact. I know about misogyny in the IITs (and other institutions of higher education) because I have spent >10 years of my professional life in the employ of several, highly-regarded Indian academic institutions. Your unwillingness to acknowledge the problems within are not unique to you; they are symptomatic of the mindset of educated Indians.
No, several “morons” get away with this regularly, in crowded and sparsely populated places all over India. If you know of a way to get them beaten up, please let the women (residents, visitors and all) know. As of now, we take upon ourselves the task of beating them up, whenever we can lay our hands on them. :mad:
Btw, “moron” is an interesting choice of words. It implies someone of low intelligence; a stupid person. I would say that this is a fall back on the old “he could not help himself, it his nature.” excuse. Methinks you need a different terminology to start off with. THEN you can start the hard work of changing your mindset.
Good lord man. Fine. Here’s something something that happened while I was in Delhi. In the SIRI FORT fucking parking lot. That unsafe too now?
no, not to settle scores. Seeing things around them, then seeing their own lives gets them frustrated, they can target rich as well as poor women. gap between rich and poor IS a major factor.
I am talking about rapes. But since you talk abt misogyny. It does exist - no denying this. Thats an embarrassing reality which every progressive Indian so desperately wanna change.
Female Infanticide happens because of the practice here that only boys will stay with, work for and support their parents in their old age after their marriage, dowry system - where even the poor people have to raise money to get their daughters married. Sati has been eradicated. Bride burning - again, very very uncommon, but if even a single case surfaces, is extremely embarrassing.
No you are absolutely wrong. that is your propaganda, pure rubbish. There’s no more misogyny in higher education here than there would be in USA. This will be my last reply to you because I do not want to waste my time replying to propaganda.
No but I consider the idiots who bike/walk/fap or whatever the fuck they do in a dangerous area figuring that because they are scandanavian/swiss/american/canadian/green or white martian they are safe are fucking idiots. Not that they actually deserve what they get, but they really should get taken aside and whacked with a clue by four if they are thinking of going into a dangerous area. Same goes for those damned bible pounders who go and preach in islamic countries where missionaries are defacto illegal and under pretty much an automatic death sentence.,
You’re guilty of painting with too broad a brush. The bride burning and dowry death issues? Your own cite says 2500 cases on average are reported each year. That’s 2500 too many. But is it necessarily symptomatic of widespread moral bankruptcy in a country of 1.2 billion people?
Also, declining sex ratios are not a problem everywhere in India. They’re much more pronounced in certain states than others. Some Indian states have increasing sex ratios. Encouragingly, the rate of decline in sex ratios in the country as a whole has slowed in this past decade. Surely that’s a sign that things are improving?
There are also other huge signs of progress. Female literacy rates have been rising much faster than male literacy rates(yes, because they started off lower. So?). Primary school enrolment ratios for girls are the same as those for boys(around 100%), when in the 1980’s they were almost half - around 60%. Yes, middle and high school ratios are still lower, but these too have improved, and continue to do so. There are no institutional barriers facing women. There are cultural ones, but several cracks have appeared in those barriers. There are many, many, women who are independent and doing well for themselves, and in my judgement the process of producing more such is close to critical mass. Things will only get better.
ETA: This does not mean things are hunky dory. Only that your characterisation is patently unfair.
Do you deny that an ambience wherein a woman is discouraged from reporting sexual crimes (because it will bring dishonour upon her family) makes it easier for a rapist to get away with it? If so, then how is the incidence of rape in India disconnected from the prevalence of misogyny?
Tell that to these ladies.
The number of deaths may be “small”, but the number of women harassed and degraded because of inadequate dowry is not. If you understand hindi, Here is a recent TV program which covers this topic. The presenter (Mr. A. Khan) states that on the average there is a dowry related death each hour in India. I do not know the right statistics, but putting up an entrance fee in order to marry into a family is repulsive to me.
Who are you to dismiss my experiences as pure propaganda, when you don’t even know me??? How often have you heard US academics state that Sati is simply a part of their religion? How many academicians do you know of who will directly tell a female colleague that she resembles a “south Indian actress because she is as round and fleshy as one”, and not face a sexual harassment tribunal? How many professors in a US university will go into debt, or withdraw money from their 401 Ks to to pay for their daughter’s dowries? I am aware of IIT students who complained to the faculty against a pervert harassing them on the campus, and were told that “if that is how they dress, then this is the treatment they should expect”. Misogyny exists on various levels (I know that it exists in the US as well), but in 1st world it is NOT as socially acceptable as it is in India.
Anyway, truthseeker2, seeking the truth is not important to you in this debate, so I am going to stop wasting time on it. Indians can be even more insular than Americans when confronted with criticism of their country, so it is unlikely that your 1.2 billion people will care if someone points out their faults. But if you do not change, well then, even with economic improvements you will be no power (much less a super power).
Good lord, try being a women in fucking Delhi for once. I myself feel both ways about these tourists but there is no doubt that young men think Eve teasing is great fun and just enjoy themselves. And yeah, they get beat up, and they’ll beat someone up if it’s their sister who is being teased, but a strange woman, or a foreigner? Forget it.
That being said, I can’t come down on the side of “India is a terrible horrible place” either. India hasn’t even had its independence for 100 years yet and it’s still finding its way. For as long as the US has been around we still have major womans’ rights violations regularly. The Indian mindset is backwards in many ways but they are trying to change, and they are trying to be forward thinking.
India has a strange dichotomy when it comes to women, and it’s a big part of the problem - women are put on pedestals or not at all. So either you are Sita or you come tumbling down and you are a kanjari (whore). There’s not much in between and not much room to be an ordinary woman.
Does this cause problems? Absolutely. But as I said, there really isn’t a country that hasnt’ violated womans’ rights, regularly, in their history.
Yes it is. Because the death is the end result of a married life of absolute misery for the bride. Sometimes, a young woman will find death preferable to watching her parents struggle pay off huge debt (and constant demands from the in-laws) which her marriage incurred.
I dispute that my charaterisation of your 1.2 billion people is patently unfair. In fact, I believe that it is fairly accurate. After all, Indian women have had equal rights as men since 1947, but they have seldom, if ever, used them. Something is truly wrong with a country wherein women are equal to men under law but still 2nd class citizens in their daily lives. What else is it if not a sign of complete moral, social, judicial and political bankruptcy? Formal education of your daughters is just one part of female emancipation. Social education of your sons is the other. Teach them how to cook, clean and to woo a girl now, or face the problems of rapes and abductions (link to Hindi presentation, sorry about that) in the next generations.
I think I/we have derailed this thread on rape sufficiently. If you disagree with me, well, it is your country and your problem. Do with it what you will; I have had enough of this subject so I will not returning back to it. Goodbye and Good luck to all 1.2 billion of you.
India has also had a female prime minister. Where is the female US president?
No denying the relative difficulty for women over here.
But if you think people here in general do not stand up to help unknown women who are getting harassed, you have absolutely zero clue.
If you think majority of people here think Eve teasing is not wrong and tht that number is not a tiny minority,you’ve got zero clue.
if you think sexual harassment is common at IIT campuses or ANY educational institute and tht they are any more misogynist than USA’s institutions, again you’ve got zero clue. some guy carrying the idea that women can not be good at engineering, math etc seeing the low sex-ratio at an engineering college, unfortunately there will be tht sort of misogyny(to a minimal extent) and this is not encouraged.
Well, I’ve heard rumors about Martin Van Buren…
What is YOUR point? Yes, crime takes place in high criminal areas. News at 11. My point is that we likely wouldn’t be going on and on about how stupid it is to “let yourself be a victim” in a high criminal area if the story was about a local woman, even though the same argument (“What was she doing there for? Why didn’t she act smarter?”) would apply. Because the victim blaming would be more obvious.
I’m not saying it’s not foolish to throw all caution to the wind and endanger yourself by not doing diligent research before traveling, so calm that mess down. But it’s crazy how the tourist’s actions–who were lost…it’s clear they didn’t intentionally set out to camp in the most dangerous place they could find–has become the centerpiece of this story. Seriously, get over it. The tourists did a boneheaded thing that night by getting lost in the bad side of town, but you know what? Such boneheadedness is so boringingly commonplace no one would be writing a story about if a crime hadn’t taken place.
What’s not so commonplace is gang rape, robbery, and Indian officials making public statements that lay blame on visitors pumping much-needed dollars into their economy rather than the predators responsible for the actual crime. If anything good comes out of this crime, I hope it’s that it leads to people to reexamine their thinking and their casual disregard for women’s freedoms.
Also, your pure and absolute ignorance on this matter is telling in the words and situations you are describing. Let me repeat we are not talking about walking down the streets of Baltimore, Baltimore is, despite all its ills, a civilized, policed city in the United States. We’re talking about walking around wilderness where the only people who travel through it that aren’t bandits know the situation and are not traveling with a “chaperone” but probably in a convoy with armed people of their own around. These aren’t areas locals “travel to for their daily tasks.” That’s like saying “if the DMZ is so dangerous you’d think Korean women would get killed there all the time doing their daily tasks.” No you wouldn’t, no one that isn’t fucking insane goes into the DMZ at all, period.
The DMZ is the most extreme situation, because it’s basically a death sentence to wander around it. Stretches of South America and Africa that largely are outside established settlements of human beings are simply dangerous. No one “goes about their daily tasks” in those areas because it is simply too dangerous to be outside of settled places in those parts of the world, the people outside are dangerous people traveling around that territory because they hide in hostile terrain when not up to trouble elsewhere and/or they are on their way to somewhere else to start problems.
Now, I have absolutely no idea if this region of India is like that, but all I’m saying is there are parts of the world you simply don’t travel, period. And I felt that was the core point truthSeeker2 was trying to point out, albeit not worded all that well. While I don’t know what the situation is in this part of India, they weren’t raped in a village where “locals live” they were raped in wilderness. I know first hand in some parts of the world the locals don’t get into the wilderness precisely because 1) you don’t need to in order to live your daily life and 2) it’s incredibly dangerous.
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Gah, editing.
This is cute, but you have no idea the hell holes I’ve lived in and traveled to. Perhaps monstro will come along and school you like she does from time.
In other words, your opinion is all emotional anecdote and zero fact, with a huge dollop of man-hate on top.
I’ll stick with information I get from actual Indian women’s groups.
@ywtf, I think it’s valid to talk about tourists going into dangerous areas they do not understand when things like this happen. It’s an important point to make that a tourist often lacks the ability to properly understand what’s dangerous and what isn’t in a totally foreign culture.
By and large in the United States rural recreational type areas are very safe, the people you’re most likely to see are other vacationers or locals going about their daily life. The highest violent crime areas (stranger-targeted anyway) tend to be cities, and most Americans overreact to that danger (being too afraid to drive through lower income residential neighborhoods, for example, where the risk of random violence is higher than normal but still extremely low.)
People need to understand wilderness isn’t inherently “safe” in a lot of the world, and in fact is downright dangerous in much of it. This wouldn’t come up if it was a local because 1) it wouldn’t be international news and 2) most likely the local wouldn’t be “touring” the countryside, whatever their reason for being out in the wilderness wouldn’t relate to the issue of recreational travel through dangerous areas.
truthseeker refuses to believe that women in North India are routinely sexually harassed so let’s just leave that. Misogyny in the preference for women and the dowry stuff is actually out of control. Even when there is no express dowry requirements they try to sneak it in the form of gold requirements, prezzies for the families blahblah. The increased economic power of women, we all hope, will diminish these horrid cultural practices over time but they are still far too prevalent in a country where opportunity is increasing as rapidly as it is for India.
But I am more intrigued about this sexual harassment is out of control at the IITs claim. A significant portion of my family are IIT-Bombay alumni, including dad, husband, BIL and almost all my male cousins (the girls are mostly doctors and avoid engineering schools). IIT also exports a solid percentage of kids to American b-schools and I have lots of friends from there, male and female from MBA days. I have yet to hear about rampant sexism from anyone-if anything hazing gets brought up wayyy more than sexism. I don’t really have a dog in this fight to defend IIT but am really surprised at this claim-a lot of my girlfriends out-ranked guys there, did better on standardized tests and got better jobs in the end. They seem really satisfied with the opportunities.
Seriously, where is the evidence that the institutionalized sexism at IIT in the student body or staff is so much worse than US institutions? For every one of St Joan’s anecdotes I can claim the same crappy shit being said to my female academic friends over here-in fact a goodly portion of female academics claim that the Old White establishment that run the departments here make their lives miserable too. As to the claim that professors in the US can’t get away with saying shit about women…umm Lawrence Summers and how many dudes (and Dopers) jumped up to clap wildly for his bullshit women-so-dumb at science statements. I’ve been on the boards for a while and I remember certain Dopers just salivating to validate the idea that women are idiots at science.
Women in public places in India, particularly in the north, routinely have to ensure sexual harassment and the vast majority of the time there’s no one to “stand up to help them,” not that that’s much comfort anyway.
And this might just be a cultural bias, but I find the very term “Eve-teasing” to be offensive and minimizing. It’s not “teasing.” It’s sexual assault.