A girl in India resists threats and bribes to pursue the upper-caste men she says gang-raped her.
Source: A Rapist’s Nightmare – The New York Times
It begins:
LUCKNOW, India — FOR as long as anyone can remember, upper-caste men in a village here in northern India preyed on young girls. The rapes continued because there was no risk: The girls were destroyed, but the men faced no repercussions.
Now that may be changing in the area, partly because of the courage of one teenage girl who is fighting back. Indian law doesn’t permit naming rape victims, so she said to call her Bitiya — and she is a rapist’s nightmare. This isn’t one more tragedy of sexual victimization but rather a portrait of an indomitable teenager whose willingness to take on the system inspires us and helps protect other local girls.
This column by Nicholas Kristof got my usual reaction–rage–even though its primary focus is on a very courageous young woman, a girl really, who refuses to accept her fate, and is fighting the men and the system that raped her.
What is always so disturbing to me is to read how cultures and sub-cultures all over the world still use women and use us violently without apparently even a sub-conscious thought that we have basic human rights. That we are simply human.