(Birbhum district) West Bengal, Jan 22, 2014
On orders of the panchayat (the village judiciary) a tribal woman in Rampurhat was gang-raped by 10-12 men as ‘punishment’ for falling in love with a man from another community.
The 20-year-old woman, who is hospitalized in a critical state said she had been gang-raped through the night. Most of these men were neighbors who had seen her growing up and who she addressed as “uncle” and “brother.”
The panchayat initially wanted the woman’s family to pay a hefty fine. When they said they didn’t have that kind of money, they then decided that she had to be gang raped as punishment. The police have arrested 12 men that the victim has identified.
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Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: gang rape, panchayat, rape, West Bengal |
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Reblogged this on REVOLUTIONS IN MY SPACE: A BLOG BY RITA BANERJI.
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[…] Rita points out that this becomes clearer in how all brutal and lethal rapes do not evoke the same public outrage. She explains with examples that the cases that have caused public furor in India, and have spilled into the international media, are inevitably about an individual man’s ‘woman’ or a community’s ‘women’ being ‘violated’ by another man, or by men of another community. Rita emphasizes how brutal rapes within a family or gang rapes within a community do not cause the same public outrage, because it is perceived in some way as a man or men’s right over their ‘own resource.’ So for e.g. the gang rape of a teenager by men of a different caste will cause an uproar as in the Badayun case (click here), but not if the men are from the same community (click here and here). […]