Fury spread throughout India recently as a ‘spiritual guru’ Asaram Bapu said that a 23-year-old rape victim who died after being assaulted by six men was partly responsible for her own attack.
He stated that he should have been more friendly to her attackers if she wanted to preserve her own life and that she is in fact ‘as guilty as her rapists’.
However the people of India and in fact the world have once again been infuriated as Mukesh Singh, one of the men who gang raped 23 year old medical student Jyoti Singh in December 2012 has told the world how the victim died because she ‘fought back’.
BBC, who are making a documentary on the rapists interviewed Singh from prison where he explained that the murder had been an ‘accident’ and explained how women are to blame if they go out at night and attract the attention of gangs or molesters “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” he said.
The brutal attack sparked anger across the world as reports that the victim Jyoti Singh, was returning from an evening at the cinema with a male friend when the six-strong gang offered them a lift in the mini-bus they were driving. Jyoti Singh was raped and beaten with iron bars, prompting widespread demonstrations for Indian women to have greater protection from sexual violence.
During the interview Singh spoke about how she shouldn’t have fought back and should have just accepted the rape,
”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 clap with one hand – it takes two hands. 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% of girls are good.”
Singh who is appealing his death sentence has said that will make it more dangerous for rape victims:
”The death penalty will make things even more dangerous for girls. Now when they rape, they won’t leave the girl like we did. They will kill her. Before, they would rape and say, ‘Leave her, she won’t tell anyone.’ Now when they rape, especially the criminal types, they will just kill the girl. Death.”
You can catch the documentary Sunday 8 March, International Women’s Day, on BBC Four.