Indian 16-year-old burned alive after reporting rape - Sensationalist Headlines

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44016176 A 16-year-old girl in India was burnt alive after her parents complained to village elders that she had been raped, according to police. Fourteen people have been arrested in connection with the attacks in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. Police said the elders had ordered the accused rapists to do 100 sit-ups and pay a 50,000 rupee (£550; $750) fine as punishment. They were so enraged they beat the girl's parents then set her on fire. "The two accused thrashed the parents and rushed to the house where they set the girl ablaze with the help of their accomplices," Ashok Ram, the officer in charge of the local police station, told AFP news agency. Fucking neanderthals, the elders for dishing out such a piss-poor 'sentence' and the perpetrators. In the case of the latter I wouldn't feel any measure of pity seeing the country's new death penalty being put to use to make an example of what happens when you can't respect another person's basic human rights.

wtf kind of punishment is 100 situps even supposed to be?

And what kind of person sets a girl on fire because they were forced to pay a meagre fine and do some situps? Obviously a rapist, but what thoughts go through someone's head that that is the correct response?

A punishment to say 'yeah we punished them' without actually doing anything at all It's clear that they have a warped view on rape, they only fined him because he was caught.

[quote=Article]About 40,000 rape cases were reported in India in 2016. Many cases, however, are believed to go unreported because of the stigma that is attached to rape and sexual assault.[/quote]

What kind of person would do this, I can't wrap my head around this shit

The stigma is that in these places it's a woman's place to make herself available to the whims of men. To many people in India, there's no such thing as rape.

There's a lot of stigma's like that here in the West, we've just improved a shitton on the issue to the point it's becoming less of a thing. You can see this sort of mentality in incel communities though, it's just not to the degree of actually burning women alive. Like the whole meme of how a woman gets raped she's at fault SOMEHOW, be it clothes/the way she acted/etc, as if men are somehow uncontrollable monsters and literally cannot help themselves. It's a very toxic mentality that's detrimental to both how men and women are perceived.

It's basically saying the victim doesn't have power over their own body. It has, in the past, been used as a tool in the aid of forcibly subjugating conquered villiages, peoples, and even today it's used as a power play. The point isn't necessarily 'getting off', it's driving home the point of 'You are subject to my whims whether you like it or not'.

Maybe in western cultures, but India's relation with rape has less to do with the victims being ashamed of having been raped and a lot more to do with the fact Indian society actively despises rape victims. It's a backwards and archaic culture with backward and archaic views on women. They're property first and human beings second and a rape victim is used goods, they're culturally worthless and the shame is less supposed to be on the woman for being raped and more on the family for harboring a rape victim, hence the amount of honor killings. If you just project western logic onto the issue then you are only solving a small part of it. Rape victims do not report the crime because that is often a death sentence for them. Like in most backwards cultures, people are quicker to jump to the defense of the rapist because of an intrinsically misogynistic/sexist mindset. They'll assume it's the girl's fault and the rapists just did an honest to god mistake and was tempted by some vile dishonorable whore.

I can more or less confirm about all of this, having lost count of the number of times rape victims get threatened with their death or the deaths of their families, not to mention especially so if the rapist has connections with small time crooks or bad eggs among the local law enforcement. The question they get asked is never about the perp, it's always "did you wear revealing clothes" or "did you look too attractive" or moronic shit like that. The government recently put its foot down and said anybody caught raping a minor would get the death penalty with no exceptions, as well.

You see the "Used goods" mentality in the West a bit as well, see incel communities, or hell, even a John Oliver video covered it slightly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0jQz6jqQS0 See the sneakers bit somewhere in this. Obviously we're far less likely to murder someone over it but the mentality is still there

Councils of village elders carry no legal weight. However, they have significant influence in many parts of rural India and are a way of settling disputes without having to go through India's expensive judicial system. Hmm sounds great

Holy shit that sounds like something out of a humanitarian crisis.

Every last one of those 14 people should be hanged. Seriously, these people absolute monsters, beyond rehabilitation.

Guess India's got another century or two before it pulls itself out of the middle ages in many senses.

Sorry if it's been asked but why is rape such a huge problem in India?

I think the fine is supposed to be the real punishment, although that just betrays the objectified view of women at play, like rape was just property damage

That is a humanitarian crisis. It's just been ongoing for a while.

Huh, I've never heard of this used goods thing. I don't think that's something that occurs in the Netherlands, I dunno...

Because of the culture, women are seen more as a man's property than a person and virginity is like a lifetime pact. A girl raped is less a victim and more a permanently defiled object that no man would want. Their feelings are taken into little account and coming forth about a rape would have consequences for both the man and woman, possibly for the woman even more so.

The stigma is victim-blaming in this place. The fucked up logic behind this is that the woman got raped because she had 'loose character' (slut shaming) which is really code-speak for 'was popular for hanging out with or even talking to boys', she was dressed a certain way. In short, she was somehow responsible for being raped because, you know, 'boys will be boys' (btw, actual statement a minister actually said after a rape case. Not even joking.). Mind you, this pervasive thinking isn't just something you'd expect from semi-illterate rural bumpkins, hell even urban poor in India. There are educated Indian men out there, some of them likely even working with you right now who think this shit, deep down. To top it off, since virginity until marriage is considered virtuous for most Indians, a lot of whom practise arranged marriage, a rape victim (fitting with the theme of women being chattel) is considered 'damaged goods' on the market.

jesus fucking christ, being a woman in India would be horrible. Is this why my female Indian neighbours rarely ever go outside, or if they do theyre covered from head to toe in clothing? Because experiencing shit like that back in my home land would do that to me.