India Asks YouTube To Remove Delhi Rape Documentary

India has asked YouTube to remove all links to a controversial documentary about the gang rape and murder of a woman in Delhi after banning its broadcast, a government official told Reuters on Thursday.
Leslee Udwin's "India's Daughter" features an interview with Mukesh Singh, one of four men sentenced to death for the rape and torture of a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in December 2012.
Comments released to the media show that Singh blames the victim for the crime. He says that women are more responsible than men for rape.
"We just forwarded the court order and asked them (YouTube) to comply," an official at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology told Reuters.

More at Huff. Post

It’s Her Fault She Was Gang Raped, Says Rapist

"Indian authorities ordered television stations Tuesday not to broadcast a documentary about a gang rape on a New Delhi bus in which one of the attackers blames the victim and says she could have avoided being killed if she had not fought back, a government official said.
The order followed an outcry over giving a convicted prisoner a nationwide platform to express repugnant views about a horrific crime that shocked Indians and prompted hundreds of thousands to take to the streets in protest. In response to the 2012 attack, India's government rushed through legislation doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalizing voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women.” *

The Young Turks

How to Not Get Raped

Iraq illegally detains, tortures and rapes thousands of women

Iraqi authorities are detaining thousands of women illegally and subjecting many to torture and ill-treatment, including the threat of sexual abuse, Human Rights Watch said in a report published on Thursday.

Many women were detained for months or even years without charge before seeing a judge, HRW said, and security forces often questioned them about their male relatives' activities rather than crimes in which they themselves were implicated.

In custody, women described being kicked, slapped, hung upside-down and beaten on the soles of their feet, given electric shocks, threatened with sexual assault by security forces during interrogation, and even raped in front of their relatives and children.

"The abuses of women we documented are in many ways at the heart of the current crisis in Iraq," said HRW's deputy Middle East and North Africa director Joe Stork in a statement accompanying the report, titled: "'No One Is Safe': Abuses of Women in Iraq's Criminal Justice System."

"These abuses have caused a deep-seated anger and lack of trust between Iraq's diverse communities and security forces, and all Iraqis are paying the price."

More on Reuters - HRW

'Some girls enjoy rape', Israeli judge tells court

An Israeli judge has caused widespread outrage after announcing to a court that "some girls enjoy being raped" during a hearing centred on the gang rape of 13-year-old girl.

The hearing was to debate whether the rape of the young Israeli Jewish teen by four Palestinian youths from the Shuafat refugee camp was an act of terrorism, and thus the girl would be entitled to compensation from the state. The four were captured, convicted and imprisoned, but the Defense Ministry ruled that the rape was not a “hostile act” — that is, an act of political aggression. This meant the victim was not be entitled to government compensation and other benefits which terror victims receive. The Defense Ministry oversees criminal cases involving West Bank Palestinians.

During a heated debate, Judge Nissim Yeshaya of Tel Aviv District Court said: "There are some girls who enjoy being raped".

Times of Israel

Rape victim and 'black virgin' condemned to die in Pakistan over rape

When she was gang-raped by four men at the age of 13, her village classed her as a "black virgin" and ordered her killed. In the rural village of Dadu in southern Pakistan, tradition held that Kainat Soomro's own family should murder her, as her sexual assault had made her a token of disgrace.

Four years later, Kainat is alive and a documentary about her story is premiering on television in the US. But that doesn't mean she or her family is safe. As the film Outlawed in Pakistan shows, Kainat Soomro is still "destined to be killed" because she took the step - extraordinary in Pakistan - of fighting for justice.

The film is a testament to her family’s strength and endurance in a life which has only become more difficult the longer they have stood up against tradition. The Soomros have faced isolation, fear and intimidation from the four men Kainat accused of raping her, and from the members of the small village who were afraid of challenging moral laws which have been in existence for centuries. By virtue of making the rape accusation, Kainat is an outlaw in her own country.

The Australian – Facebook

Indian 10-year-old rape victim behind bars

Lawlessness continues to haunt Uttar Pradesh. Who you are seeing on your screen is not a thief or a juvenile criminal but a rape victim, a 10-year-old rape victim who had been locked up by insensitive Uttar Pradesh police. The victim was put behind bars by women cops after she approached them to file a complaint along with her mother. The victim spent several hours behind the bars after her mother brought her to a women's police station to lodge a complaint against a local goon for allegedly raping her. She was rescued only after locals protested over the matter.

Somali fighters stone 'rape victim'

A Somali girl who said she had been raped has been stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery, a human rights group has said. Amnesty International said in a press release on Friday that the victim, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, had been 13 years old - not 23 as earlier reports had suggested.

Duhulow was stoned to death on October 27 by dozens of men in a stadium packed with 1,000 spectators in the southern port city of Kismayo, Amnesty International and Somali media reported, citing witnesses. The armed group in charge of Kismayo had accused her of adultery after she reported that three men had raped her, Amnesty said.

"This child suffered a horrendous death at the behest of the armed opposition groups who currently control Kismayo," David Copeman, Amnesty International's Somalia campaigner, said in a statement. Initial local media reports said Duhulow was 23, but her father told Amnesty International she was 13.

Al Jazeera English

New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As 'Tampering With Evidence'

A Republican lawmaker in New Mexico (USA) introduced a bill on Wednesday that would legally require victims of rape to carry their pregnancies to term in order to use the fetus as evidence for a sexual assault trial.

House Bill 206, introduced by state Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R), would charge a rape victim who ended her pregnancy with a third-degree felony for "tampering with evidence."

“Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime," the bill says.

More on Huffington Post

Paul Ryan Bill Would Allow Rapists To Sue Victims

In an unsurprising turn of events (in the USA), Paul Ryan has signed on as cosponsor to the Sanctity of Human Life Act again. The original bill — which declares that life begins with fertilization, and would give states the right to ban all abortion, even in the cases involving incest, rape, or the life of the mother — thankfully died in Congress in 2011.

But now it's back, which is scary because not only is the above terrifying, there's all sorts of other creepy shit hidden in this monster. Like, if a woman who was raped in a state that banned abortions went to a state that didn't ban abortions and had an abortion? Her rapist could theoretically sue to stop the abortion from happening, and probably win. And it doesn't stop there with the reproductive weirdness, if passed, it'll probably make many forms of IVF illegal

Jezebel.com

Indian Guru Suggests Late Gang Rape Victim 'Was Equally Responsible For Attack'

A popular Indian guru has caused mass offence after suggesting the Indian gang rape victim who died on December 30 was equally responsible for the attack.

Addressing his followers, Asaram Bapu said upon being confronted by her attackers, the woman: "...should have taken God's name and could have held the hand of one of the men and said I consider you as my brother and should have said to the other two 'Brother I am helpless, you are my brother, my religious brother.'

"She should have taken God's name and held their hands and feet... then the misconduct wouldn't have happened." According to the Hindustan Times, Bapu went on to say: "Galti ek taraf se nahi hoti hai (mistake is not committed from one side)." Bapu is said to have added: "The accused were drunk. If the girl had chanted hymns to Goddess Saraswati and to Guru Diksha then she wouldn't have entered the bus."

Huffington Post

‘Two-Finger’ Test for Rape in India

Indian women have made it to the tops of their professions in India. There’s been a female Indian president, women run multi-billion-dollar enterprises and Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party, is the most powerful politician in the country.

But on the peripheries of big cities and rural areas of the nation, women continue to fight for equal rights – and this is reflected in how authorities treat rape victims, human-rights groups say. Human Rights Watch, in a report released Sunday in India, points to the so-called “two-finger test” as evidence of how India had failed to take rape seriously, often blaming women’s behavior for the offense.

In the test, which appears in Indian jurisprudence textbooks and is admissible in court, a doctor inserts two fingers into a women’s vagina to determine its laxity and whether the hymen is broken, signaling previous sexual activity. The test perpetuates stereotypes of rape survivors as loose women and often is used by defense counsels to achieve acquittals, human-rights groups say.

Comments by politicians that most rape is actually consensual sex, has deepened this way of thinking. There were 24,206 rape cases registered in India in 2011, according to the National Crimes Record Bureau. But the number of convictions of alleged rapists occurred in only a quarter of cases, the statistics show.

India Real Time

'Easy,' 'Enjoyable,' 'Honest' Rape

US Republicans so far have referred to legitimate rape, forcible rape, easy rape, honest rape, emergency rape, enjoyable rape and now gift-from-God rape. Check out this unbelievable Republican Party Rape Advisory Chart for all of the direct quotes from Republicans on this issue.
They're not saying all of this because they just keep slipping up with words. They're stating whole theories on rape. That's not misspeaking; that's accidentally telling us what you really think.

TYT Network

No pregnancy from 'legitimate rape'

If there is something everyone can agree on, it would seem that the idea that rape can result in unwanted pregnancy would be right up there at the top of the list.

Not so in Missouri, where the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Rep. Todd Akin, a tea party candidate, on Sunday advanced the theory that the female reproductive system shuts down when a woman is being raped, thus preventing conception.  

"It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare,” Akin said, referring to conception following a rape. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child."

More on latimes.com

Why is India so bad for women?

In an ashram perched high on a hill above the noisy city of Guwahati in north-east India is a small exhibit commemorating the life of India's most famous son. Alongside an uncomfortable-looking divan where Mahatma Gandhi once slept is a display reminding visitors of something the man himself said in 1921: "Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex (not the weaker sex)."

One evening two weeks ago, just a few miles downhill, a young student left a bar and was set upon by a gang of at least 18 men. They dragged her into the road by her hair, tried to rip off her clothes and smiled at the cameras that filmed it all. It was around 9.30pm on one of Guwahati's busiest streets – a chaotic three-lane thoroughfare soundtracked by constantly beeping horns and chugging tuk-tuks. But for at least 20 minutes, no one called the police. They easily could have. Many of those present had phones: they were using them to film the scene as the men yanked up the girl's vest and tugged at her bra and groped her breasts as she begged for help from passing cars. We know this because a cameraman from the local TV channel was there too, capturing the attack for his viewers' enjoyment. The woman was abused for 45 minutes before the police arrived.

Within half an hour, clips were broadcast on Assam's NewsLive channel. Watching across town, Sheetal Sharma and Bitopi Dutta were horrified. "I was fuming like anything. There was this horrible, brutal assault being shown on screen – and the most disturbing thing was, the blame was being put on the woman, who, the report emphasised, was drunk," says Sharma, a 29-year-old feminist activist from the North-East Network, a women's rights organisation in Guwahati. "The way it was filmed, the camera was panning up and down her body, focusing on her breasts, her thighs," says Dutta, her 22-year-old colleague.

When the police eventually turned up, they took away the woman, who is 20 or 21 (oddly, Guwahati police claimed not to know exactly). While NewsLive re-played pixellated footage of her attack throughout the night, she was questioned and given a medical examination. No attempt was made to arrest the men whose faces could clearly be seen laughing and jeering on camera. Soon afterwards, the editor-in-chief of NewsLive (who has since resigned) remarked on Twitter that "prostitutes form a major chunk of girls who visit bars and night clubs".

Full story on The Guardian – The Hindu - More on reporterindia.com

Archbishop says that it is OK to rape women who had an abortion

Javier Martinez, the archbishop of Grenada, Spain is in hot water after saying during his Christmas speech that it is OK to rape women who had an abortion. According to the Bishop, Hitler’s and Stalin’s acts against humanity are not as bad as a woman who had an abortion and that makes it perfectly alright for any man to abuse such a woman’s body without limitations because she committed sin as if she had the right to do that. The bishop stated that the church will not budge from its decision that abortions are a great sin against God’s will and should not be tolerated.

Pope Benedict XVI was asked to comment on the bishop’s statement but thus far the head of church has remained silent. No word on the church possibly taking sanctions against Archbishop Javier Martinez.

Voice from the Desert

Letter to Archbishop Javier Martinez of Granada

Perry To Oppose Abortion Even For Victims Of Rape Or Incest

US presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) declared that he’d experienced a “transformation” following an anti-abortion film and now no longer supports allowing women to get an abortion if they are victims of rape or incest.

Perry joined Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum at the screening of The Gift Of Life, a pro-life film produced by Citizens United, in Iowa last month. Though the 61 year-old Texas Governor had long supported allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest before yesterday, Perry said the movie prompted a change of heart and he now opposed abortions without exceptions for rape or incest.

AlterNet

Afghan woman jailed after being raped is freed after two years in Kabul prison

An Afghan woman who was jailed after being raped by a cousin has been released from the Kabul prison where she has spent more than two years, although her lawyer has warned her future remains far from certain.

Gulnaz, a 20-year-old who is known by one name, was set free on Tuesday night, nearly two weeks after Hamid Karzai, the Afghanistan president, ordered her release. Her case has highlighted the issue of "moral crimes", which lawyers say have no basis in Afghan law.

Despite being the victim of a rape at the hands of a cousin, a day labourer called Asadullah Sher Mohammad, she was charged with "adultery" after reporting the attack to police and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

For two years and three months Gulnaz had been living in the Badam Bagh prison in Kabul with her daughter, who was conceived by the rape. Karzai had come under growing pressure in the weeks leading up to the recent conference on Afghanistan held in Bonn to release Gulnaz, who has become a symbol of the highly conservative Islamic country's failure to substantially improve the lot of women in the last 10 years.

Although the government said she would be released without any conditions, she has come under heavy pressure, including from a judge, to marry Sher Mohammad, who is in another prison in Kabul serving a rape sentence.

The Guardian

EU wants to ban film on victims of rape in Afghanistan

A film-maker based in London has been threatened with legal action by the European Union after making a documentary that exposed abuse of women in Afghanistan.

The EU hired Clementine Malpas to highlight the plight of battered wives and rape victims convicted of "moral crimes" by anti-female Afghan courts. However, 24 hours before the film was due to be delivered, EU officials said they would block its release as they did not want to upset "relations with the justice institutions" in Afghanistan, and Ms Malpas, 30, is now accused of breaching her contract after claims the film was screened for outside viewers.

She obtained written consent to film Gulnaz, 19, who was jailed for 12 years for adultery after being raped, and Farida, 26, also jailed for adultery after fleeing her abusive husband. Both women risked their personal safety to speak out over their treatment at the hands of Afghanistan's judicial system. Gulnaz was filmed saying: "I have to [do the film] because when everybody sees this it will be a lesson for them and these things won't happen in Afghanistan." Her husband's cousin raped her, making her pregnant, but after going to police she was jailed in Kabul, where her little daughter is with her.

The EU insists it is protecting the women by hiding their identities, but it is understood Ms Malpas, from Kensal Rise, told EU officials they were silencing them against their will. Friends of the film-maker said it was a bizarre position for an international delegation publicly committed to improving women's rights.

This is London – More on The Plight of Afghan Women in Prison on Rawa

Rape and murder in Uttar Pradesh

A spate of exceptionally brutal rapes in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh has shocked India. Many of the victims were young girls.

Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state with 200 million people. It is also home to a staggering number of poor - official statistics show more than 60 million people here live on less than $1.25 (75p) a day . Poverty also makes a community more vulnerable. Many victims were raped or assaulted when they went to the fields because, like millions of Indians, they have no access to toilets at home.

Uttar Pradesh has always had a high rate of crime, but it is the viciousness of the recent attacks that has stunned people most. "These cases are so brutal that we wouldn't have believed that they could happen - we thought such things could happen only in novels and films," Mrs Vera says.

SR Drapery, vice-president of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) in Uttar Pradesh, says most of the rape victims are poor women and girls in remote villages. Many, he says, are low-caste Dalits (formerly known as "untouchables").

"I analysed the rape figures for 2007 and I found that 90% of victims were Dalits and 85% of Dalit rape victims were underage girls," he says. "It is well known that until not very long ago, in certain areas of the state's southern Bundelkhand region, new brides of Dalit farmhands had to sleep with their rich, high-caste landowners on their wedding night." Mr Drapery says the practice no longer exists - but Dalit women and girls remain vulnerable to predators.

More on BBC News