nilanjana s roy

Tag: rape

  • How can we look away?

    How can we look away?

    My piece in Time magazine on hangings, and the impossibility of closure: People could not look away from her death and her rape, from every last, painful detail; so many Indians mourned bitterly, as though they had lost someone of their own. But if these four men are hanged, when the process of appeals and…

  • For Anonymous

    That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the newspaper. Sometimes, when we talk about the history of women in India, we speak in shorthand.…

  • Talking rape

    Survivors, not victims: This goes beyond semantics. The rape victim, in the minds of many Indian families and some of the media, is expected to suffer a kind of death along with her rape. It is not the violence that people are thinking about, when they say “her life is over”, of a rape victim;…

  • How to illustrate your news story on rape

    (From the Feb 2012 Times of India story, ‘Constable booked for raping minor’: (From the Times of India story on the Kolkata car rape victim) (From IBN Live news reports; this seems to be a standard IBN visual for rape news stories) (From IBN Live news reports; FirstPost carried the same screengrab)

  • Department of Rants: The 2 am rule for rapists

    “If you travel alone after 2 am and become victim of a crime, the police alone can’t be blamed. It is advisable that a relative or friend is with you at odd hours.” Delhi Police chief, BK Gupta, on crimes against women in the capital. I’m assuming the Delhi Police chief, Mr BK Gupta, is…

  • If we discussed men the same way that we talk about women…

    (Thousands of women come out on the streets to protest via SlutWalks, after a Toronto constable suggests that women could protect themselves better by not dressing like sluts.) “Of course he’s a rapist, did you see the trousers he was wearing? And that vest? Why would a man wear that kind of clothing if he…

  • A quiet rant on the Assange case, and a response to Kavita Krishnan

    I have a lot of respect for Kavita Krishnan and her work in the field of women’s rights in India. Reading the first four paragraphs of her opinion piece in the Huffington Post on rape, I was in complete agreement with her. Krishnan confirmed my understanding of the way rape laws work in this country-—the…