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发帖数: 10330 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/world/asia/27india.html
Rapes of Women Show Clash of Old and New India
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: March 26, 2011
GHAZIABAD, India — The young lovers met at a secluded spot next to a
field of wheat at the edge of this sprawling suburb of New Delhi, where
the timeless India of mustard fields and bullock carts abuts the
frantically rising apartment towers of the budding middle class. They
went seeking solitude, but instead found themselves at the violent cusp
of old India and new.
There, according to the police, five drunken young men from a nearby
farming village accosted the couple last month, beating the young man
and gang-raping the woman. It was the latest in a series of brutal
sexual assaults and gang rapes of women in India’s booming capital and
its sprawling suburbs.
¶ In each case there has been an explosive clash between the rapidly
modernizing city and the embattled, conservative village culture upon
which the capital increasingly encroaches. The victims are almost
invariably young, educated working women who are enjoying freedom
unknown even a decade ago. The accused are almost always young high
school dropouts from surrounding villages, where women who work outside
the home are often seen as lacking in virtue and therefore deserving of
harassment and even rape.
¶ “If these girls roam around openly like this, then the boys will
make
mistakes,” the mother of two of those accused in the rape said in an
interview, refusing to give her name.
¶ It is a deeply ingrained attitude that has made New Delhi, by almost
any measure, the most dangerous large city in India for women. The rate
of reported rape is nearly triple that of Mumbai, and 10 times as high
as Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, according to government records. A survey
completed last year by the government and several women’s rights groups
found that 80 percent of women had faced verbal harassment in Delhi and
that almost a third had been physically harassed by men.
¶ Nearly half the women surveyed reported being stalked, a statistic
grimly illustrated on Tuesday when a student at Delhi University was
shot in broad daylight by a man the police suspect was stalking her. |
