"No Places for Women": What Will It Take to End Rape Culture in India?
The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in Kolkata has shocked the country. But will it spur real change?
Early last month, a 31-year-old trainee doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College was midway through a 36-hour shift when she took a break to eat a late dinner with her colleagues around 2 am local time. After the meal, they left her alone in the seminar room, where she was reportedly going to rest because there were no facilities for exhausted doctors. The next morning, her body was found with signs of extreme sexual abuse. Hospital administrators told her family that she had committed suicide, but when her parents – who had toiled and saved to send their only child to medical school – saw the body, it was beyond evident that she had been tortured and murdered. Her father, a tailor, had worried about her safety traveling home late at night after her shifts and had borrowed money to buy a car. “I wanted her to be safe on the roads at night,” her father said, “but she wasn’t even safe at the hospital as a doctor on duty.”
After the story broke and a hospital volunteer was arrested, protests erupted in Kolkata and across India. The principal of the medical college didn’t, at least publicly, offer his deepest condolences or promise an inquiry. Instead, Sandip Ghosh asked why the female doctor was resting alone in a room at night. The India Medical Association, the country’s largest group of doctors, called a nationwide strike shutting down all non-emergency services for 24 hours across the enormous country. Women across India joined the protests to express their anger and grief. Junior doctors in Bengal kept their strike going for weeks, ending it only recently.
This is not the first time that India has been rocked by such a barbarous crime. A young woman was horrifically gang raped on a bus in Delhi in 2012, sending shock waves across the world. In 2018, an 8-year-old Muslim girl, Asifa Bano, was gang-raped, held for days in a temple, and then killed. When her alleged rapists were arrested, two ministers from the ruling BJP party attended rallies in support of the men. Though they later had to resign, it was that same year that a Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual report called India the most dangerous country in the world for women, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Four years later, in 2022, it was estimated that an average of 86 rapes took place in India every day.
A Deadly Combination
Why India, then?