Statist insanity: India’s ‘Two-Finger’ Test for Rape

While India has promised swift justice in the case of the woman who died Saturday after a brutal gang rape, human-rights groups say the problem is much thornier than punishing the six men accused in this case.

Statist insanity: India’s ‘Two-Finger’ Test for Rape Obvv214ihumandv20121230

The country won’t make progress in combating rape until there’s a wholesale shift in the way men, including those in power, treat woman, they say.

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.

More: http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/12/30/indias-two-finger-test-for-rape-needs-to-end-experts-say/

Statist insanity: India’s ‘Two-Finger’ Test for Rape

Statist insanity: India’s ‘Two-Finger’ Test for Rape

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