The 2012 gang rape of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi, and the subsequent trials of five men for her murder, transfixed India for most of a year, prompting passionate discussions about women’s safety in this rapidly urbanizing country.
A new documentary, which includes an interview with one of the men who raped and brutalized the woman aboard a private bus, has reignited passions about the case.
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Dec. 18, 2012Indians Outraged Over Rape on Bus in New Delhi
The brutality of the New Delhi rape raises the ire of Indians who fear that sexual assault against women happens with disturbing regularity, especially in the capital. In one highly publicized case in September 2012, a 16-year-old girl in the neighboring state of Haryana was raped repeatedly by a group of eight men, perhaps more, who recorded the assault on their cellphones and threatened to kill her if she told anyone.
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Dec. 29, 2012Six Charged With Murder in India After Rape Victim’s Death
The suspects are accused of taking their victim to the back of a private bus in New Delhi, raping her, then damaging her internal organs with an iron rod. She died two weeks later of her injuries. Her death prompted mass protests in India.
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Jan. 11, 2013For India Rape Victim’s Family, Many Layers of Loss
The victim of the Dec. 16, 2012, gang rape becomes a symbol of all that is wrong with how India treats its women and girls. But before her death, she had been an example of how far ambition, hard work and parental love can remove one generation from the rural poverty that is the lot of most of India’s 1.2 billion people.
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Sept. 2013Many Doubt Death Sentences Will Stem India Sexual Attacks
Four of the six men are convicted of raping and killing their victim and, a day later, prosecutors ask that they be put to death, calling the crime “a case of extreme depravity." (One of the defendants in the case hanged himself with his bedsheet in his prison cell before the trial and a juvenile defendant received a lighter sentence under the law.)
Many in India express doubt that the sentence would do much to stem sexual attacks in the country.
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March 3, 2015Man Convicted of Rape in Delhi Blames Victim
One of the men on death row for the crime, Mukesh Singh, has told a British filmmaker that his victim invited the rape because she was out too late at night and that she would have lived if she had submitted to the assault.
"A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night," he said in a documentary that was to be aired on the BBC. "A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent of girls are good."