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  • Girl blamed for rape: Did Delhi rapist say something?

    In what appears to be a shocking statement, one of the convicts in Delhi Bus Rape case, Mukesh Singh, has said that if a girl remained out of her home after 9 pm, it was her to be blamed for rape.

    In an interview to BBC for a documentary, which is yet to be aired on the channel, Mukesh Singh said that if a girl stays out late at night, she is bound to attract opposite sex.

    It was a night in New Delhi some two years back when a girl along with a male friend was returning home after watching a movie at the cinema. A gang of six offered them a lift in their bus and later on raped the girl inside that very bus.

    Despite the fact that there were massive demonstrations throughout the country after this incident and the judge also remarked that the incident had shocked India’s collective conscience yet there is this man who has come up with this logic out of the blue that “it takes two hands to clap”.

    Blaming the victim for the rape is not new

    Blaming victims for their rape is not new. The tendency is not only common but appears to have infiltrated the minds of people coming from all classes.

    Last year in November, after raping 5-year-old girl in Ohio, 51-year-old man blamed the kid for the rape. The 51-year-old Clifford Taylor had maintained that his “girlfriend’s daughter” was to be blamed for the rape. It is pertinent to mention here that the rapist was a former research scientist.

    Less than two months prior to this event, CNN reported another such incident when none other than the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office blamed a 24-year-old clerk for her own rape.

    In 2011, 18 men and teenage boys were arrested for raping an 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas. The community people were quoted as saying that the girl dressed older than her age and used to hang out with teenage boys. This attracted widespread outrage after a New York Times article used the information as by-line.

    A Montana state judge, Satcey Rambold, 54, had also blamed a 14-year-old for her rape and had later apologized for having said that the girl was also to be partly blamed for being raped by her teacher.

    Earlier this year, a Muslim from Iran in Australia named as Amir Mohebbifar had blamed Iranian media for portraying Western women in a bad manner. He had told a psychologist that the Western women were “portrayed as whores” in Iran.

    In fact an Indian politician, who is also a woman, named as Asha Mirje, had partly blamed the ‘dressing and behavior’ of the women for inviting the rapists. She had later apologized though.

    This tells that the thinking is not just common throughout the world, from Australia to the United States, but also that many people, ranging from politicians to judges and scientists to rapists, had such tendencies.

    It definitely points towards the general discrimination towards women. It proves that men, and many women, after all the so-called modernization, still believed the women to be inferior and not allowed to act according to their will.