Three years after a horrific gang rape in Delhi brought global attention to India's sexual assault epidemic, a new documentary has quoted one of the rapists saying something so inflammatory that it has provoked a whole new wave of outrage.
"A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy," Mukesh Singh, one of the six rapists convicted in the 2012 attack, says in the documentary, because "a decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night."
"Housework and housekeeping is for girls," he claimed, "not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent of girls are good."
If women are not "good," he said, men have a right to "teach them a lesson" by raping them. And if that happens, the woman being raped has a responsibility to silently accept the assault. "When being raped, she shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape."
What has made the comments so outrageous is not just the callousness and victim-blaming expressed by this one rapist, but the degree to which his comments reflect attitudes that are disturbingly common in India, and that are central to its climate of hostility toward women and, often, impunity for male violence against them.
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