For as long as anyone can remember, upper-caste men in a village in northern India preyed on young girls. The rapes continued because there was no risk: the girls were destroyed, but the men faced no repercussions.
Now that might be changing in the area, partly because of the courage of one teenage girl who is fighting back. Indian law does not permit naming of rape victims, so she requested she be called Bitiya, and she is a rapist's nightmare. This isn't one more tragedy of sexual victimisation but rather a portrait of an indomitable teenager whose willingness to take on the system inspires us and helps protect other Indian girls.
Bitiya, who is from the bottom of the caste system, is fuzzy about her age, but thinks she was 13 in 2012 when four upper-caste village men grabbed her as she worked in a field, stripped her and raped her. They filmed the assault and warned her that if she told anyone, they would release the video and also kill her brother, so Bitiya initially kept quiet.
Six weeks later, Bitiya's father saw a 15-year-old boy watching a pornographic video and was aghast to see his daughter in it. The men were selling the video in a local store for a dollar a copy.
Bitiya is crying in the video and is held down by the men, so her family accepted she was blameless. Her father went to the police to file a report. Full story...
Related posts:
Now that might be changing in the area, partly because of the courage of one teenage girl who is fighting back. Indian law does not permit naming of rape victims, so she requested she be called Bitiya, and she is a rapist's nightmare. This isn't one more tragedy of sexual victimisation but rather a portrait of an indomitable teenager whose willingness to take on the system inspires us and helps protect other Indian girls.
Bitiya, who is from the bottom of the caste system, is fuzzy about her age, but thinks she was 13 in 2012 when four upper-caste village men grabbed her as she worked in a field, stripped her and raped her. They filmed the assault and warned her that if she told anyone, they would release the video and also kill her brother, so Bitiya initially kept quiet.
Six weeks later, Bitiya's father saw a 15-year-old boy watching a pornographic video and was aghast to see his daughter in it. The men were selling the video in a local store for a dollar a copy.
Bitiya is crying in the video and is held down by the men, so her family accepted she was blameless. Her father went to the police to file a report. Full story...
Related posts:
- India: Courts fail thousands of rape victims...
- A 15-year-old girl in India was kidnapped and repeatedly gang-raped in a car...
- When low-caste Dalits in India are raped and killed by upper-caste thugs...
- 14-year-old Dalit girl in India burnt alive for resisting rape...
- Rape in India, Dalits and shadow politics...
- If you're a Dalit and resist rape, you may get burned to death.
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