A woman who was brutally gang-raped by six men on December 16th died from her injuries on Saturday. The pressure on the Indian government to be tougher on crimes against women reaches its boiling point.
Image by Rupak De Chowdhuri / Reuters
The 23-year-old student, whose name has not been released, was brutally raped by six men on the bus after seeing "Life of Pi" with a friend. After the rape and beating, she was tossed on a roadside. She died in the early morning Saturday, unable to recover from her numerous injuries.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Mount Elizabeth Hospital executive Kevin Loh said that "despite all efforts by a team of eight specialists in Mount Elizabeth Hospital to keep her stable, her condition continued to deteriorate over these two days. She had suffered from severe organ failure following serious injuries to her body and brain. She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome.”
Six men are in custody for their role in the attack, and they have now been charged with murder (in addition to rape and kidnapping). In this case, the Indian government has said their trial will be expedited and could begin as early as next week. Rape support organizations in India say that rape cases routinely take years to be heard in the Indian court system.
Writer Nilanjana Roy wrote a blog post early Saturday morning that this was "enough."
"Let there be an end to this epidemic of violence, this culture where if we can’t kill off our girls before they are born, we ensure that they live these lives of constant fear. Like many women in India, I rely on a layer of privilege, a network of friends, paranoid security measures and a huge dose of amnesia just to get around the city, just to travel in this country. So many more women have neither the privilege, nor the luxury of amnesia, and this week, perhaps we all stood up to say, 'Enough.' no matter how incoherently or angrily we said it."
Image by Amit Dave / Reuters
Image by Danish Siddiqui / Reuters
