Rape- a heinous crime

Hey Guys. Today I am not going to be reviewing any book or movie nor am I going to do a tag. Today I am going to be talking about a really serious topic- Sexual Harassment. I am glad and grateful that I have a voice in this massive internet, and I intend to use it.

Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault and physical assault

Sexual harassment and rape is a really really vicious thing to do. My heart aches every time I hear a piece of news of rape. And recently, when we should be supporting each other, this has been increasing even more.

On 14th September, a girl in the district of Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, India was brutally assaulted as she fought against being raped. She was dragged away by her dupatta injuring her spinal cord, leaving her paralyzed. The accused tried to strangulate her as she resisted their rape attempt. The girl finally died on 29th September. When the news initially broke out, it was called fake.
This incident provoked me to write this post.

According to a recent news study, a woman is raped every 16 minutes in India. This is after almost eight years after the terrible Nirbhaya case. Even though the rapists and murderers of Jyoti Singh were hanged to death, that didn’t instill fear in everyone. What is the reason for this? Those monsters were given to the hands of death eight years after the crime happened. And thanks to the justice system in India, they were hanged to death. Hanging is the least painful form of death. This makes me feel that the men weren’t tortured enough.

For those who do not know, the Jyoti Singh rape case famously known as Nirbhaya took place on 16 December 2012 in Delhi. Jyoti was gang raped, beaten and tortured in a private bus wherein she was travelling with a male friend.  A medical report later said that she suffered serious injuries to her abdomen, intestines and genitals due to the assault, and doctors said that the damage indicated that a blunt object (suspected to be the iron rod) may have been used for penetration. That rod was later described by police as being a rusted, L-shaped implement of the type used as a wheel jack handle .According to police reports Jyoti attempted to fight off her assailants, biting three of the attackers and leaving bite marks on the accused men. After the beatings and rape ended, the attackers threw both victims from the moving bus. She was found with injury marks, including numerous bite marks, all over her body. According to reports, one of the accused men admitted to having seen a rope-like object, assumed to be her intestines, being pulled out of the woman by the other assailants on the bus. 
This is what man is. Such a dirty, disgusting monster.

While researching for this post, I found quite some shocking cases. I was disgusted and nauseated and to be honest, scared. Here is a brief account of the cases:
1.The Aruna Shanbaug Rape Case: Aruna was a nurse who was raped by a sweeper, Sohanlal Bhartha. During the rape, Sohanlal choked Shanbaug with a dog chain – causing permanent brain damage. Shanbaug was kept in a vegetative state for over 40 years and finally died due to pneumonia. Sohanlal on the other hand was a free man after serving his sentence.

2. The Priyadarshini Mattoo case: Priyadarshini was raped and murdered by Santosh Kumar at her own house in 1996. The trial case cleared Kumar but due to media pressure he was sentenced to death.

3. The Imrana Rape Case: Imrana was raped by her father-in-law in 2005. The village panchayat treated it as a case of adultery and not rape. They also ordered Imrana to leave her husband and marry her father-in-law. Just imagine that. Someone asks you to leave a man you love and marry another man twice your age against your will. However, after media attention, her father-in-law got sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment.

To read more, click here.

And the funny thing is that they do not stop here. A man raped 4-month-old baby. 90-year-old women are being raped. For god’s sake animals are being raped!!!! This is what humans have fallen to. I feel disgusted after reading such things and if you don’t then I don’t know what sort of monster are you.

Many people seem to believe that women are raped because they travel late at night or wear short clothes and so on. Women who wear salwar kameez and a burkha are raped. Women are raped in broad daylight.

People also seem to believe that a woman lets herself get raped. Are you kidding me?!?!!!! Did a 4 month old baby let herself be raped? She was defenseless for god’s sake. Men are physically stronger than women and that is a fact. But that does not mean that they use it against women.

I know I have highlighted rape of women more than I have highlighted than that of men. I know men get raped too, but it is much much less common than women. They are suffering too but it becomes difficult for them to even talk about rape. According to a survey, 1 out of every 5 males is assaulted or molested in India.

I have seen some people say that some girl deserves to be raped. Okay first off who are you to even say that? Second off, no woman, I repeat, no woman deserves to undergo that sort of torture. Nothing can justify rape.

When I decided to do this post, I decided to take the opinions of a few other girls. Let’s see what they are:

The worst attitude I’ve ever encountered is accepting something wrong being done to you as normal.If a girl feels conscious wearing something out of the fear of being touched or groped, everyone tells her that “men won’t change but you should still wear that” , it is still a  completely WRONG attitude and people fail to understand that. Men SHOULD change. They HAVE to change.
We deserve better. We should be able to walk talk wear whatever we want freely without even a second thought in the back of our minds that WE are in the wrong. We have to stop considering the men will be men attitude to be normal. Its not.

-Rhea Sharma

Parents of a girl child name her with happiness, pride and a lot of hopes, not to listen to her name as a victim of a brutal rape case and wait for slow justice, not even expecting her to face such pains and an untimely and certainly an undeserved death. People you don’t even know how much courage, faith, hardships and pains are taken to bring that daughter to this world, and you kill her and kill all this in an instant? All her dreams and her parents’ dreams in a moment just to pleasure yourself? Really? Why are people becoming these violent sex maniacs? Question yourselves and the society is this where we really want to live?

-Riya Mehta

The fact that you are removing yourself from discussions about the oppression of women with your favourite “not all men” slogan means that you ARE part of the problem. You want to exempt yourself from how the patriarchal society treats women, and just because you have never assaulted a woman, does not mean you have not propagated the patriarchy or rape culture.

-Aahana Sujnani

The worst thing about rape is that society has the mentality to BLAME THE VICTIM. Of COURSE she must have done something or the other to lure the man into RAPING her right? Why wouldn’t she enjoy it? If the man is enjoying it, SO SHOULD SHE. She must have said something, worn something, or done something provocative. after all, men will be men. If you didn’t want it, you shouldn’t have worn that.
One of the top counters to the topic of rape is that “Not all men are rapists”. I came across a very apt answer to this in an article, “ALL WOMEN ARE AFRAID OF BEING RAPED”. And that is something we as a society must fix.

-Aashita Miglani

Rape is NEVER the girl’s fault. How she dresses or how she ‘seems’ is never because she was asking for it. It’s always the man’s fault so I feel it is wrong to blame a girl for being herself.

-Anoushka Bhatha

Rape is the fourth most common crime against women in India. A case is reported every 16 mins and then there are several cases which go unreported. The justice system isn’t harsh enough on these people and it needs to be.

That’s all I have to say today. I hope you learnt something from this post and I hope it had a positive effect on you. Let me know your views in the comments.

Let’s fight rape together!
SAY NO TO RAPE!!

Edit: Recently, the famed cricketer, Mahendra Singh Dhoni hasn’t been performing well. One of his ‘fans’ has threatened to rape his five-year-old daughter, just because he hasn’t been performing well. Here’s a screenshot of the message.

This is what people have fallen to. Rape threats over a player’s bad performance. A player who is 40 years old. What. The. Hell.