Respect for women begins at home

India has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons: corrupt officials and ministers, nationwide protests against corruption, falling economic growth rate and most recently the rape of a 23-year-old paramedical student on a moving bus in the capital New Delhi.

The incident is too gory and barbaric to be repeated here; suffice it to say that the victim was raped, battered and thrown out of the moving bus on the night of Dec 16 and breathed her last on Dec 29 in a Singapore hospital where she was flown a couple of days before. Five of the six accused in the case face trial for abduction, rape and murder. The sixth is a minor and will be tried in a juvenile court.

Many rapes have been reported from India after the one in New Delhi but none have forced Indians across the country to take to the streets in such large numbers. This may suggest that rapes are rare in India and Indians react vociferously, even violently as we recently saw in Delhi, against rape. Neither, however, is true.