It is not often that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon comments on the internal situation of a member country, especially one of India's size and importance. The very fact that the UN chief had to urge India to take action against sexual violence against women twice in 18 months shows the seriousness of the problem this South Asian country is facing. It was the brutal rape and murder last week of two teenage Dalit girls in Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh (UP), the largest state in India, which attracted Ban Ki-moon's latest intervention. The earlier call to New Delhi to protect women came in December 2012 after a 23-year-old student died of injuries sustained during a gangrape in federal capital. In the latest incident, a 12-year-old girl and her female cousin, 14, were found hanging by their scarves from a mango tree. Autopsy reports confirmed the girls had been raped and strangled. The gangrape and killing was shocking even by Indian standards. After all, this is a country where a rape occurs every 22 minutes, according to Indian government statistics. No country is free of sexual violence. But in India sometimes a rape is more than a crime of passion, assuming sinister caste and communal dimensions during Hindu-Muslim riots as well as in inter-caste conflicts. Lower castes, especially the Dalits (once known as untouchables), complain they are routinely raped by the land-owning upper castes. “You have not really experienced the land until you have experienced the Dalit women” is a popular saying among the landowning Jats, a politically powerful group that, though relatively low caste themselves, are above the Dalits. An analysis of UP's crime statistics for 2007 by the People's Union for Civil Liberties showed that 90 percent of rape victims in 2007 were Dalit women (though Dalits comprise only 21 percent of the state's population). The suspects in the Badaun incident belong to the Yadav caste, which is the dominant caste in the village. While attacks against Western tourists and women in urban centers attract a great deal of attention (one Malaysian woman was raped on Saturday in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan), rapes of lower-caste women fail to provoke outrage. Though caste and political factors drew national attention to theBadaun tragedy, the sexual violence against women is not confined to UP. The national capital of New Delhi has long been maligned as the rape epicenter of India. 2012′s widely publicized rape took place in New Delhi where this year a 51-year-old Danish tourist was allegedly gangraped. In the past four decades, the number of reported rape cases in India surged nearly 900 percent to 24,923 in 2012, according to the statistics from National Crime Records Bureau. Most experts estimate that fewer than one in 10 rapes is ever reported in India. This is regrettable. Even more regrettable is the low rate of convictions in rape cases. Indian judiciary is notoriously slow and the legal system weighted against rape victims. But this is not the only reason why many rapists escape with light punishment if at all they are convicted. There's pressure from family members including parents of victims to keep quiet about the crime. The stigma of rape runs deep. Women accused of rape may face embarrassing questions from lawyers about their sexual history, the nature of their dress and whether it was consensual. Much has changed in the 18 months since the 2012 gangrape in New Delhi leading to the death of the victim — harsher laws against rape, increased media focus on sexual violence, new police units dedicated to helping women. But unless there is fundamental change in the attitude of police and society toward rape victims, the violence against women will continue.
