Tag Archives: victim

US President Barack Obama has nominated an Indian-American survivor of human trafficking to a key post in his administration which deals with the issue of trafficking. Harold d’Souza from Vadodara in Gujarat was today named a member of the US Advisory Council on Human Trafficking (ACHT), the White House said. …

The man who was with the Delhi gang rape victim on the night of the attack has slammed a documentary on the incident, describing it as “fake”. Speaking to Indian portal IBNLive, Avanindra Pandey described Leslee Udwin’s ‘India’s Daughter’ as an “unbalanced” portrayal of the tragic incident. Mr Pandey was …

The Indian government has banned the broadcast of a documentary film about the 2012 Delhi gang rape in which one of the men convicted of the attack blames the victim for her death. In the film, titled ‘India’s Daughter’, Mukesh Singh tells filmmaker Leslee Udwin that the 23-year-old victim Jyoti …

One of the men behind the horrific gang rape and murder of a young Delhi student in December 2012 has blamed his victim for her own death.

Mukesh Singh told a BBC documentary filmmaker that 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey was beaten to death because she had "fought back" instead of "being silent and allowing herself to be raped".

Ms Pandey - later nicknamed "Nirbhaya" or "Brave Heart" by the Indian media - had been returning home after catching a film with a male friend when the pair were attacked inside a bus just north of Delhi.

Five men took it in turns to rape the physiotherapy student before one proceeded to insert a metal rod into her, causing what doctors later described as "unimaginably horrific" injuries.

She died days later at a hospital in Singapore where she had been flown for emergency treatment by the Indian government.  Her death caused widespread revulsion around the world and sparked huge demonstrations across Delhi and other Indian cities.

In an interview from jail, Singh said: "A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.  When being raped, she shouldn't fight back.  She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they'd have dropped her off after 'doing her', and only hit the boy."

Singh's interview is featured in 'India's Daughter', a documentary by Leslee Udwin for the BBC 4 series Storyville and which will be broadcast on International Women's Day on 8 March.

In court, Singh claimed that he had not raped Ms Pandey because he was driving the bus when the attack was taking place.

However, he was linked to the attack through DNA evidence and was sentenced to death along with the other four attackers.

In the interview, Singh remains unrepentant.

"You can't clap with one hand – it takes two hands.  A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night. Boy and girl are not equal.  Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.  About 20 per cent of girls are good."

Singh also claimed that stricter punishments for rapists would result in more deaths for rape victims. 

He argued that in future rapists would be "compelled to murder their victims" rather than letting them go "in the knowledge they will keep quiet".

Those stricter penalties were brought in the aftermath of Ms Pandey's death which created what Udwin calls an "Arab spring for gender equality".

She told the Guardian: "Unprecedented numbers of ordinary men and women, day after day, faced a ferocious government crackdown that included teargas, baton charges and water cannon.

"They were protesting for my rights and the rights of all women. That gives me optimism. I can’t recall another country having done that in my lifetime.”

For India's Daughter, Udwin spent hours interviewing a wide variety of Indian men as well as a number of convicted rapists.

She says she remains shocked by attitudes towards women in India, encapsulated by a comment made by a 34-year-old man serving ten years in jail for the rape of a five-year-old girl.

Asked by Udwin why he had ruined the life of such a young girl, he replies: "She was a beggar girl, her life was of no value".

A Pakistani teenager who was injured in the horrific attack on a school in Peshawar in December will undergo life-changing surgery at the same Birmingham hospital where teenage activist Malala Yousafzai was treated. Ahmed Nawaz, 15 suffered life-threatening injuries in the 16 December attack on the Army Public School in …

Above: The alleged rapist, Uber driver Kumar Yadav outside a Delhi court A passenger who said she had been raped by an Uber driver in New Delhi is suing the online car service in a US federal court. The lawsuit claims that the San Francisco-headquartered company failed to maintain basic …

A mother and uncle accused in the so-called “honour” killing of a young Canadian-Sikh woman from Vancouver have been ordered extradited to India to face trial for her murder. A Supreme Court judge British Columbia state on Friday recounted the tragic details of Jaswinder ‘Jassi’ Sidhu’s life and death as …

A Pakistani teenager died Friday after setting herself on fire after a court dropped charges against four men accused of raping her, police said. The incident occurred in Muzaffargarh district of Punjab province, where the horrific 2002 gang rape of Mukhtar Mai, an illiterate women, made headlines around the world. …

The 20-year-old woman who was gang raped in a village in rural West Bengal has been placed under police protection, along with her family, after villagers said they did not want the family to return, officials said on Sunday. The woman was assaulted by up to 15 men from the …

The head of a British Government-funded charity that helps victims of crime has been accused of behaving like a criminal himself over a long-running land dispute in his native Pakistan. Javed Khan, Chief Executive of Victim Support, is reported to have travelled to the village of Haveli Baghal in north …