Misogynistic Psychopathy

"We are ready to send the victim to anywhere in the world for treatment.  I have given that assurance to the parents of the girl that we will give every kind of help, no matter what it costs."
Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit

Vulnerable girls are indeed horribly victimized in India by sociopathic ignorance that helps men feel that women are there for their brutal pleasure.  The 'victim' in this horrendous instance of forcible confinement, abduction, violent battery and gang rape, was a young woman, a 23-year-old university student, out for an evening of film entertainment in the company of a young man of her acquaintance.

The six assailants who beat both young people repeatedly with metal rods after they boarded a bus (bus transport in India is not very regulated and is operated by private entrepreneurs who may own a single bus or a line of buses) and for an hour or more drove around the city, past police check points with no one apparently detecting what was occurring past the heavily shaded windows, as the violations continued.

There will be long-overdue new regulations now imposed on bus operators requiring them to prominently display identification in their vehicles, tinted windows are to be removed, and plainclothes police will be placed on buses for the protection of female passengers commonly assaulted and groped by male passengers. 

At least in the short term, police will be assigned to such duty; in the long term when the outrage has subsided it may be another story.

For the time being university students have been protesting in great numbers, marching through the streets, shouting angry slogans, carrying signage that they are fed up with the lack of personal security for women and girls.  And their parliamentarians are hastening to assure their constituents that there are aghast at the horror of the brutality displayed and intend to make penalties for such dreadful social transgressions harsher.

The six men [and a boy] arrested as perpetrators of the crime are being charged with attempted murder, along with kidnapping and rape.  They had stripped their victims of all clothing and dumped them for dead on the streets, then drove on as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.  And in a sense nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. 

It's just that what happened on this occasion occurs far more frequently - with even worse outcomes - to girls and women in the lower echelon of society.

On this particular occasion it was a pair of university students that were involved, whose lives were imperilled; one of whom was subjected to a depth of vicious violence meant to utterly destroy her for the satisfaction of men completely lacking the restraints of conscience and humanity.  The social fixes that India is looking to will represent a band-aid on the oozing ulcer that is contempt for women and their security. 

Women and girls who are represented by endemic poverty and lack of any kind of social opportunities will continue to be vulnerable to the worst excesses of misogynistic brutality.  It is this larger issue, shared by India's cultural neighbours in Pakistan and Afghanistan which must be addressed. 

The putrefaction of violence, shame and misery of women and girls is beyond shameful.