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Rapes double in capital despite public outrage
Sydney Morning Herald - September 10, 2013
On Tuesday, a judge will sentence the four surviving adult offenders who brutally gang-raped and murdered a 23-year-old student on a bus in south Delhi last December.
The woman was brutally assaulted for an hour before being thrown, naked and unconscious, from the moving vehicle onto the road. She died 13 days later in a Singapore hospital.
The ringleader of the planned assault, Ram Singh, was found hanged in his prison cell in March, while a juvenile offender – alleged to be the most violent attacker – has been sentenced to three years in a corrections home. There have been widespread calls for the remaining offenders to be hanged.
The case sparked mass street protests and public scrutiny of a culture that devalues women and permits attacks against them, as well as a police force regularly accused of blaming women who are assaulted. Police data shows that, from January 1 to August 15 last year, there were 433 cases of rape reported in Delhi.
From January 1 to August 15 this year, there were 1036, at a rate of more than four a day. Sixty per cent of rape victims are under the age of 18. Cases of molestation have climbed from 381 to 2267. Police say that the increase is due largely to an increased reporting of crimes.
"On one hand, we can say that cases of rapes and molestation have increased but, on the other, we can say that more cases are now being registered," special commissioner Deepak Mishra said. "The police is doing its duty and we would try our best to make the city safer for women."
The four remaining Delhi gang rapists – Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta – will be sentenced at Saket court under high security on Tuesday. They face a possible death sentence, which India reserves for the "rarest of rare" crimes.
The outrage over the Delhi case, and other high-profile cases in Mumbai, has largely been confined to India's urban, aspirational middle and upper classes. In rural India, there is little knowledge of the cases and rape and sexual assaults against women are common but rarely reported.
A man in Bhopal in central India was charged on the weekend for allowing his bosses at the bank where he worked to gang-rape his wife, whom he drugged with sedatives, over 12 years in exchange for promotions.
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