Tag: rape

Too far to go still: India’s struggle against gang-rape continues

by Jessica, posted in Human Rights

This was cross-posted to my professional blog.

In the worst news you’ll read today, yet another gang-rape – of another tourist, and the second one this week – has surfaced in India.

An 18-year-old German was allegedly raped on Friday after falling asleep on a train heading to Chennai in southeastern India, where she was going to do volunteer work with a charity.

“The young lady took several days to muster courage to report to the police,” Inspector General of Police Seema Agarwal told NDTV. “Though it’s too late for medical examination, we have handled the case in a very sensitive manner.”

The attack brings the toll of publicized rapes on foreigners in the country to two in just a week, after a 51-year-old Danish woman was allegedly gang-raped in New Delhi on Tuesday.

En route to do charity work – they say no good deed goes unpunished, but damn.

Rape in general, and gang-rape in particular, has been the subject of a lot of scrutiny, and (thankfully) a whole lot of national soul-searching in India since the report of a brutal gang-rape on a bus in New Delhi made international headlines in 2012. Naturally, the stories involving tourists tend to garner more attention that those of locals, but there have been plenty of those to go around. Take the case of the German tourist raped by her yoga instructor in December. Or the British woman who jumped from her hotel window to escape a rape by the hotel manager. Or the Swiss woman who was brutalized by five tribesmen while her husband was tied to a tree. All of these news article mention, and often link to, stories of multiple other women who went through similar ordeals. You could spend all day following the links and questioning the humanity of humanity, or seriously wondering if Antoine Dodson had it right after all.

In response to the 2012 Delhi case and subsequent uproar, the Indian government worked very quickly to strengthen existing rape laws and increase punishments for perpetrators. However, while cases involving foreigners are seen through, too many cases reported by Indian women are just dropped, or completely ignored. Meanwhile, no one can really explain why this keeps happening.

A few obvious things spring to mind. Feminists in the west wage a never-ending battle against rape culture and victim-blaming, but the terms take on a whole new light in Indian culture, which is dominated by men and dictated by strict social rules. In the Delhi case, the defendants’ lawyer offered this gem to the press:

“Until today I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,” Sharma said in an interview at a cafe outside the Supreme Court in India’s capital. “Even an underworld don would not like to touch a girl with respect.”

…

Sharma said the man and woman should not have been traveling back late in the evening and making their journey on public transport. He also it was the man’s responsibility to protect the woman and that he had failed in his duty.

“The man has broken the faith of the woman,” Sharma said. “If a man fails to protect the woman, or she has a single doubt about his failure to protect her, the woman will never go with that man.”

A spiritual guru and a politician offered a different perspectives:

A spiritual guru, Asharam, sparked an outcry earlier this week when he said the New Delhi victim was equally responsible and should have “chanted God’s name and fallen at the feet of the attackers” to stop the assault.

Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the pro-Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that underpins the country’s main opposition political party, said rapes only occur in Indian cities, not in its villages, because women there adopt western lifestyles.

Pearls of wisdom, to be sure.

One factoid that has been indicated is the stark gender imbalance, propagated by sex-selective abortions and female infanticide. Another issue is the widespread prevalence of abject poverty; the perpetrators are bored, desensitized, and have nothing to lose. An October article in the New York Times examined the issue in depth through coverage of a case in Mumbai:

One problem is that perpetrators may not view their actions as a grave crime, but something closer to mischief. A survey of more than 10,000 men carried out in six Asian countries — India not among them — and published in The Lancet Global Health journal in September came up with startling data. It found that, when the word “rape” was not used as part of a questionnaire, more than one in 10 men in the region admitted to forcing sex on a woman who was not their partner.

Asked why, 73 percent said the reason was “entitlement.” Fifty-nine percent said their motivation was “entertainment seeking,” agreeing with the statements “I wanted to have fun” or “I was bored.” Flavia Agnes, a Mumbai women’s rights lawyer who has been working on rape cases since the 1970s, said the findings rang true to her experience.

“It’s just frivolous; they just do it casually,” she said. “There is so much abject poverty. They just want to have a little fun on the side. That’s it. See, they have nothing to lose.”

Global Health News Last Week

by ihsection, posted in News

May 12 was International Nurses Day.
USAID’s Frontlines magazine is running an exclusive interview with Dr.

Margaret Chan, the WHO Director-General, in which she discusses current global health priorities and systems strengthening.

Peoples-uni, an open-access education initiative, offers open-access resource and online learning materials for capacity-building in low- and middle-income countries.

POLICY

  • Excessive bleeding following childbirth is the leading cause of maternal deaths in the developing world, but the World Health Organization (WHO) has now approved the use of misoprostol, a drug that considerably reduces this risk.
  • Shanghai’s health authority and local hospitals are seeking to reduce the rate of births by cesarean section this year after a recent report showed that far more Shanghai women are undergoing the procedure than is recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
  • For the fifth time, at next week’s WHO General Assembly, countries will debate whether or not to destroy the last two known stockpiles of smallpox.
  • The Director General of Nigeria’s drug and food regulator, Dr. Paul Orhii, was in London last week where he lodged a strong case before members states of the World Health Assembly to institute a legal platform to combat the spread of counterfeit drugs.

PROGRAMS

  • Humanosphere’s Tom Paulson writes that funding for childhood vaccinations is not keeping up with the need and is struggling to compete with more high-profile priorities.
  • The phenomenon of “poverty tourism” – in which charities and aid organizations take donors on trips to “experience poverty” and meet their beneficiary – is coming under increased scrutiny and generating controversy.
  • John Donnelly, writing in GlobalPost, characterizes the Obama Administration’s Global Health Initiative as off to “a slow, stumbling start” in a short series called “Healing the World.”
  • Last Wednesday, the WHO launched a campaign to reduce the huge but largely unrecognized burden of traffic deaths and injuries over the next decade.

RESEARCH

  • An HIV-positive person who takes anti-retroviral drugs after diagnosis, rather than when their health declines, can cut the risk of spreading the virus to uninfected partners by 96%, according to a study.
  • New research has revealed that a bacteria present in the gut of mosquitos may be another tool to fight the spread of malaria.
  • An experimental drug helped monkeys with a form of the Aids virus control the infection for more than a year, suggesting it may lead to a vaccine for people, or even a cure.
  • A study by US scientists, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that 400,000 females aged 15-49 were raped over a 12-month period in the DRC 2006 and 2007. That comes out to an average of 48 women and girls being raped every hour.
  • A new report by MSF argues that switching from using quinine to artesunate to treat malaria could save up to 200,000 lives a year.
  • A US study has suggested that homosexual men are more likely to have had cancer than heterosexual men.
  • According to the findings of the last Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey, getting pregnant soon after childbearing, miscarriage or abortion places mothers and newborns at a higher risk of health complications or even death.
  • Results announced today by the United States National Institutes of Health show that if an HIV-positive person adheres to an effective antiretroviral therapy regimen, the risk of transmitting the virus to their uninfected sexual partner can be reduced by 96%.

DISEASES AND DISASTERS

  • According to statistics released by the National Coordinator of the Nigeria’s National Malaria Control Program (NMCP), Dr. Babajide Coker, Nigeria contributes a quarter of the malaria burden in Africa, and a staggering 90 per cent of its citizens are at risk for contracting the disease.
  • Johnson & Johnson’s recalled at least 11,700 bottles of HIV/AIDS drug Prezista in several countries, after discovering trace amounts of a chemical emitting offensive odors in five batches of products sold in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Austria and Canada.
  • In China, around 1.5 million people require organ transplants, but just 10,000 receive them each year, as few Chinese agree to donate their organs upon death. Illegal organ traffickers have stepped in to fill that gap.

TOTALLY UNRELATED TO ANYTHING ELSE: Princess Beatrice’s atrocious weird attention-grabbing hat, worn to the royal wedding, is now being auctioned on eBay for UNICEF and Children in Crisis. Um, yay?

The “Angel of Bukavu”: A light in the heart of darkness

by Jessica, posted in Human Rights

Blog contributor: Jessica M. Keralis

To most, the Rwandan genocide that began in 1994 is a page in the history books, and the resulting instability in the Kivu region of eastern DRC is old news.  But for Dr. Denis Mukwege, a surgeon who specializes in the repair of vaginal fistulas, the atrocities of Congo’s “second war” are a harsh, every-day reality.  Vagina fistula, a condition in which the tissue wall between the vagina and the bladder and/or colon is torn, is a common result of the systematic rape to which the women of this region of the Congo are subjected.

During Rwanda’s civil war and genocide in 1994, thousands of refugees and armed militant groups fled to the eastern region of the Congo, generating a climate of political instability and local anarchy.  A “second war” began in 1998, in which Rwanda and Uganda organized and fostered armed bands to terrorize the local people and maintain the insecurity to justify militarization that enables them to plunder the resource-rich region.  This conflict has been the deadliest since World War II, and more people have died than in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur combined.  Intermingled with the high death toll is the widespread calculated rape of women of all ages.  It is used to physically and psychologically terrorize: the women are raped or gang-raped in broad daylight and in plain view of their families and neighbors.  As a result, social networks are destroyed and family ties are fragmented.    The widespread sexual violence has taken its toll on public health both physically and socially. Sexually assaulted victims outnumber wounded soldiers 4 or 5 to one and civilians with gunshot wounds 2 or 3 to one.  Medical sources estimate that between 19 and 30 percent of the victims test positive for HIV.  Half of them have syphilis.  The women are virtually destroyed, often abandoned by their husbands, and their children are traumatized.  Those that survive become outcasts.

In the midst of such atrocities, Dr. Mukwege has been called the “angel of Bukavu.”  He typically performs ten surgeries per day, often working 14 hours or more.  To the women he heals, he is more than just their doctor: he is their brother, their counselor, their confidant.  He has been featured by CNN, the New York Times, and Glamour magazine, and has been given numerous awards, including the Olof Palme Prize and the UN Human Rights prize.  But while Mukwege is grateful for the attention drawn to the conflict and money for the hospital, what is truly needed, he says, is a political response to the violence.  “Visitors come from the international community.  They eat sandwiches and cry, but they do not come back with help. Even President Kabila has never put his foot here. His wife was here. She wept, but she has done nothing.”

Interview with Cécile Mulolo Kamwanya, psychologist at Panzi hospital: