The Fatal Gang Rape of a Young Woman Is Forcing a Reckoning in India Over the Caste System – By Billy Perrigo (TIME) / Oct 15 2020
On Sept. 29, a 19 year-old woman died of injuries after she was allegedly gang raped by a group of men in a field in Hathras district, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She was a Dalit, member of a community at the bottom of India’s rigid caste hierarchy, while the four alleged perpetrators, who have been arrested and charged with murder and rape, are members of a dominant upper caste.
The woman had spent two weeks fighting for her life in a Delhi hospital after the alleged gang rape on Sept.14, which left her with severe damage to her spinal cord. (The woman has not been named in the Indian press due to a law that prohibits identifying the victims of sexual violence.)
The night of her death, police returned to the family’s village with her body. But instead of handing her over to her mourning family, the family has said the police insisted she be cremated there and then. When the family refused, saying they wanted time to say goodbye, police locked them in their home and took her to a field where they burned her body using gasoline, the family said.
In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power with a pledge of “zero tolerance” toward violence against women, after the gang rape and murder of a 23 year-old woman in Delhi in 2012 shocked the nation. But India is still the most dangerous country in the world to be a woman, according to a 2018 survey of experts by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, citing sexual violence, cultural traditions and human trafficking as the main reasons for the ranking. In 2019, there were an average of 87 reported rape cases per day, according to official statistics.
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