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The situation for journalists in India is becoming increasingly perilous. A CNN reporter there reported a close call with an attempted “rape” on live TV when the lighting failed. Sadly, India is well-known as being a dangerous place for women. Females, including young girls, have been assaulted by adult men. This crisis has only gotten worse since the COVID “pandemic.”

Ironically, this woman, who took a safe selfie with the Taliban, of all people, was later gang-raped by several men in India.

This latest incident with the CNN reporter has a lot of people asking what is happening in India. In the clip below, you can see the female reporter encircled by men, shouting for someone to “stop” their actions, right as the lights cut out.

Why is India so “rapey?” According to statistics, the US might seem like it has a higher rate of sexual assaults, but experts in India suggest there’s a significant “under-reporting” problem there, hinting that their actual numbers could be much, much higher.

NPR:

Statistics about rape in India

In the past few years, other high profile rapes have called attention to the issue of sexual violence in India. And one of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries. To Kill a Tiger, is about the gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in her village.

After the gang rape this month, an American journalist posted online about the “sexual aggression” he has witnessed on visits to India. His allegation elicited a response from Rekha Sharma, the chairperson of India’s National Commission for Women, a government body that advises on issues related to women and also investigates complaints. Sharma wrote on X: “According to data, over 6 million tourists arrive in India every year, many of them are single women, and they holiday safely in India, as India takes the safety of women very seriously, as evidenced by its implementation of stringent laws over time.”

What does the data show? Official government statistics do indicate an increase in the reporting of rape cases in recent years. In 2022, India’s National Crime Records Bureau cited just over 31,000 cases for a country of 1.3 billion people. In 2005, that number was a little over 18,000.

But by comparison, the U.S. reported 133,294 rapes in 2022 in a population of 331 million – a higher prevalence of sexual violence.

However, activists in India question the official count. They assert that underreporting of rape is common because of the stigma for survivors. According to the 2017 edition of India’s National Family Health Survey, four out of five women who have experienced sexual violence never tell anyone about it.

The culture of rape in India is a stark reality. It’s sad to say, but some might argue that in India, being a cow is met with more respect than being a woman.

Why does rape seem almost accepted in India? A big part of the problem ties back to cultural issues and the tough situations in areas hit hard by poverty and a lack of education, where people struggle to act with basic human decency. Sadly, we see the same thing in many diverse, liberal-run cities in the United States as well.

And what’s even scarier is that it’s not just a “rape” culture; it’s a “gang rape” culture that’s growing in India.

The New York Times:

It is the specific horror of gang rape that weighs most heavily on Indian women that I know. You may have heard of the many gruesome cases of women being gang-raped, disemboweled and left for dead. When an incident rises to national attention, the kettle of outrage boils over, and women sometimes stage protests, but it passes quickly. All Indian women are victims, each one traumatized, angry, betrayed, exhausted. Many of us think about gang rape more than we care to admit.

In 2011 a woman was raped every 20 minutes in India, according to government data. The pace quickened to about every 16 minutes by 2021, when more than 31,000 rapes were reported, a 20 percent increase from the previous year. In 2021, 2,200 gang rapes were reported to authorities.

But those grotesque numbers tell only part of the story: 77 percent of Indian women who have experienced physical or sexual violence never tell anyone, according to one study. Prosecutions are rare.

Indian men may face persecution because they are Muslims, Dalits (untouchables) or ethnic minorities or for daring to challenge the corrupt powers that be. Indian women suffer because they are women. Soldiers need to believe that war won’t kill them, that only bad luck will; Indian women need to believe the same about rape, to trust that we will come back to the barracks safe each night, to be able to function at all.

Reports of violence against women in India have risen steadily over the decades, with some researchers citing a growing willingness by victims to come forward. Each rape desensitizes and prepares society to accept the next one, the evil becoming banal.

Gang rape is used as a weapon, particularly against lower castes and Muslims. The first instance that women my age remember was in 1980, when Phoolan Devi, a lower-caste teenager who had fallen in with a criminal gang, said she was abducted and repeatedly raped by a group of upper-caste attackers. She later came back with members of her gang and they killed 22 mostly upper-caste men. It was a rare instance of a brutalized woman extracting revenge. Her rape might never have made headlines without that bloody retribution.

Even though sexual assault and violence are problems worldwide, they’re not often chalked up to “culture” elsewhere. But in India and much of Southeast Asia, culture gets a lot of the blame. Whether you’re traveling solo or with your partner, like that Brazilian influencer found out, safety for women in that corner of the world is a big issue.

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