“It’s appalling that a country as educationally advanced as India is still mired in the caste system where women and people of lower rank are treated as inferior, and male government officials still make excuses for rapists. This is a country that had a female prime minister before the whole western world did, and half their country is still ignored and things like this are still allowed to happen. Yes, that same dichotomy exists in our country; we have ghettos with desperately under-educated people living in poverty and crime, but I still don’t think our country takes any crimes as casually as this.” –Julie Howard

In 2012, a young Indian woman was beaten and gang-raped on a moving bus, and the injuries she sustained proved to be fatal when she died from her wounds. This caused a huge uproar among India’s citizens.

Before this incident, laws against rape were lightly enforced, and rape victims were often shamed by the authorities. After the 2012 bus rape, politicians promised that rape would be treated as a serious crime and that perpetrators would be punished accordingly. Many changes have taken place since then, including harsher laws against sexual assault and less media avoidance of the topic. However, last week, two teenage girls, cousins, were brutally gang raped and murdered, their bodies left swinging from a mango tree, and the reaction to this crime is considered largely disproportionate by many. Politicians have said little on the matter, media coverage died quickly after the rapes, and few protests of the rapes have taken place. Many think this seeming indifference can be attributed to the fact that the girls were “untouchables”, the lowest and most highly discriminated against group in India’s severe caste system. Ranjana Kumari, a prominent women’s activist in India, believes the rapes could have been a brutal form of political revenge, as the group the girls belonged to, the dalits, had very few supporters of the Yadavs, the ruling party that the men accused of the crime belong to. The crime has not gone completely ignored–suspects have been arrested, as well as negligent police officers–but the reaction the rapes received was quiet and showed little outrage.

In 2011, only 24,000 rapes were reported in India, and while that may seem like a lot, experts estimate that fewer than one in ten rapes are actually reported, due to how stigmatized rape in India really is. In the US, rape victims are seen as just that–victims. In India, they are shamed and ostracized.

I believe Rape is one of the worst things a person could ever do to another human being, possibly the worst. It goes beyond violation of the body. Sexual assault is the deepest invasion of someone’s rights, their freedom, their choice. Their CHOICE. Rape takes away someone’s choice on whether they want to give their body to someone, whether they want to be vulnerable, whether they want to trust the person they are with. Rape makes a person into a plaything for others to use for their own pleasure. It is the deepest and most horrific form of abuse there is. It is sex in its worst form, in a way sex was never meant to be: not an act of love, not an act of pleasure, but a way of putting someone down to the point where they don’t feel safe in their own skin.  Rape takes away someone’s control in the surest and most cruel way possible and leaves them powerless. Rape is violation. It is abuse. It is terror. It is hell put into a person, who burns and burns others with no remorse. It is shame. It is stigma. It is pain. It is rage. It is everything we as humans are supposed to despise.

Now imagine a society where Rape, capital R stigma shame abuse terror hell rage

goes unsaid, unpunished. Imagine a society where Rape can be inflicted on two young girls, girls my age, and not be cried about. Imagine a man who hears about this and says, “Boys will be boys.” Imagine your daughter, sister, mother living in such a society. Imagine that. Now tell me there is progress being made in such a country. Tell me there is change. Tell me there is fairness. You can’t. You can’t because there is not. You can’t because not everyone in India, not everyone in the world, will be saddened by the gang rape of two girls. There is no fairness. There is no justice. There is Rape, and there is acceptance of it. And that is the deepest violation this world will ever know.