A huge row has erupted in India over India’s Daughter, a film made by the BBC on the gang-rape and murder of a young medical student on a Delhi bus in November 2012. What aroused particular anger was how the film, designed to be shown in seven countries to mark International Women’s Day, seemed to want to portray India as the rape capital of the world, with its headline claim that the country has “a rape every 22 minutes”.
But what has also come to light is that when the film was privately previewed in Delhi, its original version included evidence that in many countries in the West the incidence of rape is actually much greater. In Britain, the official Crime Survey for England and Wales 2014 estimated that there are 85,000 rapes every year, or one every six minutes. Equivalent US figures suggest that 1 per cent of all women are sexually assaulted each year, one every 25 seconds.
Those who saw the preview of India’s Daughter in Delhi have testified that the original version did make comparisons with the rest of the world. One, Anna Vetticad, praised it as a “balanced documentary”, because it ended with “worldwide statistics highlighting violence against women from Australia to the US”. But when the final version emerged, all this had been cut out. India was shown standing alone, as a country where rape is an exceptional problem.
What also led the Indian courts to ban showing the film was its portrayal of a country where violence towards women is part of its national culture. Particularly controversial was its prison cell interview with the bus driver, waiting on death row for the outcome of his appeal to India’s Supreme Court. He showed no remorse for the woman he had helped to rape and murder. He suggested that she had brought this on herself by travelling on a bus late at night. But again this picture of India as having a peculiar cultural problem over its acceptance of gang-rape is belied by the statistics. According to UK and US figures, 14 per cent of rapes are by strangers. In India the figure is less than 1 per cent. Full story...
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But what has also come to light is that when the film was privately previewed in Delhi, its original version included evidence that in many countries in the West the incidence of rape is actually much greater. In Britain, the official Crime Survey for England and Wales 2014 estimated that there are 85,000 rapes every year, or one every six minutes. Equivalent US figures suggest that 1 per cent of all women are sexually assaulted each year, one every 25 seconds.
Those who saw the preview of India’s Daughter in Delhi have testified that the original version did make comparisons with the rest of the world. One, Anna Vetticad, praised it as a “balanced documentary”, because it ended with “worldwide statistics highlighting violence against women from Australia to the US”. But when the final version emerged, all this had been cut out. India was shown standing alone, as a country where rape is an exceptional problem.
What also led the Indian courts to ban showing the film was its portrayal of a country where violence towards women is part of its national culture. Particularly controversial was its prison cell interview with the bus driver, waiting on death row for the outcome of his appeal to India’s Supreme Court. He showed no remorse for the woman he had helped to rape and murder. He suggested that she had brought this on herself by travelling on a bus late at night. But again this picture of India as having a peculiar cultural problem over its acceptance of gang-rape is belied by the statistics. According to UK and US figures, 14 per cent of rapes are by strangers. In India the figure is less than 1 per cent. Full story...
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