Taslima alerts us to an interview with one of the Delhi rapists reported in the Telegraph.
In an interview from jail, Mukesh Singh said that women who went out at night had only themselves to blame if they attracted the attention of gangs of male molesters. “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” he said.
His victim, Jyoti Singh, 23, was returning from an evening at the cinema with a male friend when the six-strong gang offered them a lift in a mini-bus they were driving. She was raped and frenziedly beaten with iron bars, prompting widespread demonstrations for Indian women to have greater protection from sexual violence.
In an interview for a BBC documentary, Singh also claimed that had Jyoti and her friend not tried to fight back, the gang would not have not have inflicted the savage beating, which led her to die from her injuries two weeks later.
Describing the killing as an “accident”, he said: “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after ‘doing her’, and only hit the boy.”
You can’t get misogyny much purer than that.
while the judge said that the case had “shocked the collective conscience” of India, Singh appears to show little remorse.
“You can’t clap with one hand – it takes two hands,” he says in the interview. “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. 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 per cent of girls are good.”
…
The lawyers who defended the gang in court express similarly extreme views about women who venture out at night. In a previous televised interview, lawyer AP Singh said: “If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.”
Pre-marital activities like going to a movie? He would set his daughter or sister on fire for going to a movie with a man?
I don’t think very much of the human species right now.
Ophelia, I don’t see why this should change your views about the human species at all. Clearly, ‘beings’ like that are not members of the Human species. they may superficially appear, walk and speak like humans, but Humans they are not!
It’s sickening that we can’t tell the difference until something like this happens though.
Oh, alas, yes they are. This way of thinking is so so common. It’s very human. That’s why I made that remark. It depresses the bejeezis out of me.
Ah, India, the ‘world’s largest democracy’ where women have a lower status than cows.
Let me see if my math skills are still up to snuff. Only 20% of girls are good. That means 80% of girls are bad. And that means 80% of girls deserve to be raped, beaten to death, and have gasoline poured on them and then set alight to be burned alive.
Got it. Nice country, India. Very progressive.
Mukesh Singh is less than the silt on the bottom of the ocean.
It’s is scary, how people are able to justify this with a set of rape culture defined beliefs about “good” and “bad” women. The worrying thing is how many people agree with him, even partly. There sure are a lot of people over this side of the world willing to criticise women for not dressing correctly, or going out at night, or drinking. IMO a scarily small gulf between them and these rapists, not the large gulf their “monsters” compared to “normal” people narrative would seem to imply.
There’s something I don’t quite get here:
So… “roaming in discos and bars” is something only for boys. Who will, in Mukesh Singh’s ideal world, only meet other boys there. Is there something he’s not telling us/himself?
What a horrible, backward culture.
“only meet other boys there. Is there something he’s not telling us/himself?” Yeah, really. That was my first thought too. Chuckle, snort.
But, more seriously, it’s just a plainspoken version of the mindset that is everywhere. Women are chattel. Not real human beings.
As Ophelia and others have said, the most depressing part is that so many people are okay with that. We (humanity) are so far behind the curve on this that the abolitionists are barely even there on this subject.
Of course by just letting it happen the argument would then become that there was no rape and she was just a sexual deviant prowling the night streets in pursuit of weak-willed men who would succumb to their lust. After all, if you’re not beaten to within an inch of your life then clearly you wanted it.
@quixote, 8: I had no humorous intent.
And the Indian government has banned the documentary in India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Delhi-high-court-upholds-ban-on-telecast-of-Nirbhaya-documentary/articleshow/46454887.cms). Apparently the documentary projects India in a negative light.
It is indeed sad that the views of the rapist are shared by many political leaders in India. Also, the outrage over the airing of the documentary citing a ‘damage to India’s reputation’ conveniently ignores the fact that such views are rampant.