The attack on the Brazilian travel blogger and her Spanish partner took place in a forest late on Friday, while the couple were camping while traveling by motorbike through eastern India to Nepal.
Struggling to fight back tears and showing bruises on their faces, the couple said in an Instagram post on Saturday morning that seven men held knives to their throats and took turns sexually assaulting the woman while beating and restraining her male partner.
Local police in Jharkhand state said in a press release that they had taken the victims to a nearby hospital and confirmed the outlines of their story. Police in Dumka district said that the seven men have been identified and a special investigation team has been formed to arrest the four who are still at large.
While rapes targeting Indian women from lower castes and indigenous tribal communities are common, and often receive little attention and go unprosecuted, this incident involving a foreigner — which went public on social media to her more than 200,000 followers — has focused attention the National. To an unusual degree.
National newspapers covered the issue, and women's rights activists, politicians and even Bollywood celebrities spoke out on social media to condemn what they described as an intractable problem despite efforts at cultural and legal reform.
Karanjit Kaur, a writer who published an op-ed on Monday about her outrage over sexual violence against Indian women, said the case sparked a lot of discussion because the survivor rose to prominence by sharing an experience that is all too common for Indian women.
“We have become so accustomed to violence against women that only when the contours of the issue are completely different does it affect our conscience,” she said in a phone interview. “Otherwise our bodies, minds and autonomy don’t matter at all.”
In December 2012, thousands of Indians took to the streets to protest the gang rape and killing of a 22-year-old student, a case that prompted the Indian government to expand the legal definition of rape and introduce the death penalty as a possible punishment. For rapists.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi first ran for office in 2014, women's safety figured prominently in his outreach to women voters, and nearly a decade later, his administration remains sensitive to any potential political backlash from controversies over crimes against women.
Yet violent crimes against women continue to rise, according to national statistics, and high-profile rape cases continue to crop up with alarming regularity, largely due to what many say is a culture of downplaying sexual harassment and violence — and granting perpetrators impunity. Perpetrators – in a patriarchal society.
Last year, India's Supreme Court criticized the government of Gujarat state, led by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, for its early release of 11 men convicted of gang-raping a Muslim woman, Bilkis Bano, during the 2002 riots in the state. The convicts were decorated with flowers by well-wishers and a BJP lawmaker praised them as good Brahmins, the highest Hindu caste. In January, the Supreme Court annulled their release and ordered them returned to custody.
Indian wrestling organized demonstrations that began in January last year against the president of the wrestling federation, accusing him of repeatedly harassing women over the past decade. But the powerful BJP politician did not face any consequences until the court ordered police to investigate the case in April 2023
The head of India's National Commission for Women, Rekha Sharma, was accused of downplaying sexual violence shortly after the Brazilian blogger's experience became public.
When an American journalist said He retweeted the couple's account about their assault He told him about his own experiences, saying that he had never witnessed so much sexual abuse as in India, so Sharma took him on a mission. “Defamation” of India.
