Two Suicide Letters That Symbolize India's Misguided Shame | Nita Bhalla

Shame.

It’s a word I often hear when speaking to women in India, where a combination of patriarchy, misogyny and extreme conservatism makes women feel ashamed of the crimes being committed against them.

They are ashamed of being sexually harassed when walking home from school, ashamed for being molested by a colleague, ashamed after suffering a beating at the hands by their husbands, ashamed when their neighbor rapes them and ashamed when he shares mobile photographs of the crime with his friends.

On August 25, this misguided shame drove two Indian teenage girls, who were being repeatedly sexually harassed and stalked by a group of youths, to take their own lives.

Before drinking fruit juice laced with toxic chemicals at their school on the outskirts of Delhi, engineering students Madhu and Nikita both wrote telling suicide letters about how Indian society views women.

The letters, which were found by police near their desks, speak of fear, shame, and disrepute. They talk of neighborhood tongues wagging against them because the men were following and harassing them, wrote the Indian Express.

“Every day a new man would come and chase us. They would pass lewd remarks and offer us phone numbers. The people around us would stare as if we had done something wrong,” wrote 16-year-old Madhu.

“You know how bad our colony is, how people will say we encouraged these men to follow us even though we are innocent,” she added in her six-page letter written in Hindi.

Seventeen-year-old Nikita spoke of similar distress.

“I have not done anything wrong to bring shame on my family. I am ending my life because I cannot take this daily tension,” she wrote, urging police to crackdown on sexual harassment and warning of more suicides happening if action is not taken.


Excerpt, read The Suicide Letters That Symbolize India’s Misguided Shame -By Nita Bhalla | Trustlaw Women (TRF)

India's Inability to Stop Gang Rapes

Indian students of Saint Joseph Degree college participate in an anti-rape protest in Hyderabad on September 13, 2013.(NOAH SEELAM/AFP/Getty Images)
 
By Terrance McCoy, Washington Post 

One of the girls wore crimson, the other emerald. They had long black hair. They were barefoot. They were cousins and of a low caste. As shown in gruesome photographs, they were barely more than children.

One was 14 and the other was 15, police said. Without a toilet in their home, they had gone outside to relieve themselves the night before and had now been found dead, hanging from a mango tree framed by a rising sun.

A crowd of villagers swelled underneath the bodies Wednesday morning. Reports said they wouldn’t allow anyone to cut down the girls until arrests were made, so for hours, they waited in near silence. Then came news that four men had been arrested for the crime. Two of the accused were villagers who lived in Katra in Uttar Pradesh state. The other two, the Associated Press reported, were police officers.

Autopsy reports confirmed the children had been raped and strangled. News of the attack splashed across nearly every major publication in India. Even in a country where a rape occurs every 22 minutes, according to Indian government statistics reported by the AP, the gang-rape and killing was shocking.

Shocking because of its sheer brutality. Shocking because two suspects are police officers. And shocking because even after 2012′s fatal gang-rape — in which a woman’s insides were mangled with a metal rod — and tightening of national anti-rape laws, men in India have committed the crime again.

Excerpt, read more here.

Free Teleconference: Combating Violence Against Women - What's Working?

Presented and co-sponsored by the ABA Section of International Law, International Human Rights Committee (IHRC); International Models Project on Women's Rights (IMPOWR); Asia /Pacific Committee; India Committee; NGO & Not-For-Profit Organizations Committee

Thursday, May 29

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM EDT

This is a FREE Non-CLE Teleconference 

Recent horrific and highly publicized attacks against women, international advocacy to combat sex trafficking, and efforts to pass I-VAWA and other legislation have heightened awareness about the global epidemic of violence against women. Less well-know are the various innovative and practical strategies and approaches around the globe that have significantly increased prosecutions and convictions of offenders, empowered women to vindicate their right to be free from violence, and otherwise improved the safety and security of women.

This teleconference will highlight best practices throughout the world to combat violence against women, including: mobile courts to enhance access to justice for victims in rural areas; coordinated response centers for victims of sexual violence; and, specialized units training of judges, police officers, prosecutors and local leaders/elders to educate them about gender violence and to ensure effective and timely investigations, prosecutions and convictions. Speakers will include representatives from advocacy groups operating in various regions of the world and judges/law enforcement personnel involved in developing/implementing these approaches.


MODERATOR:
Elizabeth Brundige, Executive Director, Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell Law School

SPEAKERS:
Gabriela Pastorino, Esq., Policy Advisor, Office of Women, Supreme Court of Argentina

Maimbo Ziela, Esq., Deputy Chief State Advocate - Gender Based Crimes, National Prosecutions Authority, Zambia

Smirti Minocha, Senior Program Officer, Human Rights Law Network, New Delhi, India

Please RSVP to Jonathan Lewis at jonathan.lewis@americanbar.org


WANT TO ASK OUR PANEL A QUESTION DURING THE TELECONFERENCE?

★ Email us at inthumrights@gmail.com or

★ Tweet us using #ABAIHRC

★ Follow us on Twitter @ABAIHRC

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UPDATE (Jun 2): An audio recording of the above teleconference now available.

Bring Back Our Girls!

Dozens of heavily armed terrorists rolled into the sleepy little town one night in a convoy of trucks, buses and vans. They made their way to the girls’ boarding school. The high school girls, asleep in their dormitory, awoke to gunfire. The attackers stormed the school, set it on fire, and, residents said, then herded several hundred terrified girls into the vehicles — and drove off and vanished.

That was April 15 in northern Nigeria. The girls were kidnapped by an extremist Muslim group called Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa language means “Western education is a sin.”

These girls, ages 15 to 18 and Christians and Muslims alike, knew the risks of seeking an education, and schools in the area had closed in March for fear of terror attacks. But this school had reopened so that the girls — the stars of their families and villages — could take their final exams. They were expected to move on to become teachers, doctors, lawyers.

Instead, they reportedly are being auctioned off for $12 each to become “wives” of militants. About 50 girls escaped, but the police say that 276 are still missing — and the Nigerian government has done next to nothing to recover the girls.

“We are now asking for world power countries to intervene,” the desperate father of a missing 18-year-old girl, Ayesha, told me by phone. He said that the parents had given up on Nigerian government officials — “they are just saying lies” — and pleaded for international pressure on Nigeria to rescue the girls.

The parents pursued the kidnappers, carrying bows and arrows to confront militants armed with AK-47s, but finally had to turn back. The father, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said that the parents are now praying to God for the United States and United Nations to help get their daughters back.

While there has been a major international search for the missing people on Malaysian flight MH370, and nonstop news coverage, there has been no meaningful search for the even greater number of missing schoolgirls.

Read more of Nicholas Kristof's article here.

ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE ❤ V-DAY 2014

February 14 (GLOBAL) – The ABA IHRC join with activists around the world for ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE. The campaign will build upon the energy and momentum that was created on February 14, 2013 when one billion activists in 207 countries and territories came together to rise, strike, and dance, in the biggest mass action in human history, to demand an end to violence against women and girls.

This year, we will focus on the issue of justice for all survivors of gender violence, and ending the rampant impunity that prevails globally. ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE is a call to women, men, and youth around the world to gather safely on 14 February 2014 outside places where they are entitled to justice – court houses, police stations, government offices, school administration buildings, work places, sites of environmental injustice, military courts, embassies, places of worship, homes, or simply public gathering places where women deserve to feel safe but too often do not.

The campaign is a recognition that we cannot end violence against women without looking at the intersection of poverty, racism, war, the plunder of the environment, capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. Impunity lives at the heart of these interlocking forces.

About One Billion Rising
One Billion Rising was the biggest mass action in human history. The campaign began as a call to action based on the staggering UN statistic that 1 in 3 women on the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime. With the world population at 7 billion, this adds up to more than ONE BILLION WOMEN AND GIRLS. On 14 February 2013, people across the world came together to strike, dance, and RISE in defiance of the injustices women suffer, demanding an end at last to violence against women. Over 10,000 events took place on the ground and the campaign took over media and social media worldwide for 48 hours, trending in 7 countries – 4 times in the US alone. The wildly successful grassroots campaign was covered widely by media in all corners of world including The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and many more.



About V-Day
V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of Playwright/Founder Eve Ensler’s award winning play The Vagina Monologues and other artistic works. The V-Day movement has raised over $100 million; educated millions about the issue of violence against women and the efforts to end it; crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns; reopened shelters; and funded over 13,000 community-based anti-violence programs and safe houses in Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Kenya, Egypt, and Iraq. V-Day has received numerous acknowledgements and awards and is, one of the Top-Rated organizations on both Charity Navigator and Guidestar. V-Day’s most recent global campaign, ONE BILLION RISING, galvanized over one billion women and men on a global day of action towards ending violence against women and girls.


❤ ONE BILLION RISING

❤ V-DAY