Huh? to do bad all the time ? Certainly the Greeks put together a less-than-evil system. Under the O

This morning, I heard the news that a 23-year-old medical student who was brutally gang raped in Delhi on December 16 th had died. Another gang rape victim , in the state of Punjab, committed suicide this week after being pressed by police to drop the case and accept money or even marry one of the rapists. The girl, a teenager, and her family wanted police to open an investigation.
In 2011, in India, 256,320 violent crimes were recorded. In a country of a billion people that doesn t seem very high. By comparison, there were 1,203,564 violent crimes reported in the USA in the same year. That s more than four times as many crimes for less than a third of the people. Now, comparisons are problematic because of different definitions of violent crimes and much different enforcement and justice systems. In the USA, as much as there is to complain about when it comes to treatment of certain groups of people based on income or skin color, police do tend to be much more egalitarian toward victims of violent crime than police in India, where poor victims find it difficult to get the police to take much of an interest. But that s another discussion.
My point in bringing up the violent crime statistics is that of those 256,320 recorded crimes, 228,650 of them were committed against women. That s 89% of violent crime. Let me just state that in a style that does justice to its mind-boggling wrongness: EIGHTY-NINE PERCENT OF VIOLENT CRIMES argentina travel information IN INDIA LAST YEAR WERE COMMITTED AGAINST WOMEN. EIGHTY-NINE PERCENT!
I was traveling in India this month and was in Delhi on December argentina travel information 16 th , although when media accounts of the rape surfaced, I had moved on to another part of the country. My experience everywhere I went tells me that, despite the public anger currently being vented through protests, India has a long, long way to go before women can feel safe.
Growing up, I learned, without really being aware of learning it, that my body was mine; no one had the right to touch me or talk to me in a way that made me uncomfortable or in any way inflicted damage on me. As a young women being groped on a bus in South Korea, I had not yet internalized that lesson enough to overcome the other lesson I learned unconsciously: Be polite and don t make scenes. As a 23-year old, I got off of that bus in Korea and sobbed on the street. As a 43-year old in Malaysia, when a 70-something gas station attendant groped me, I had, apparently, appropriately ranked the lessons because I went a bit, shall we say, mental on his ass. Very publicly and very loudly. I doubt he ll be copping any feels from crazy foreign women in the future.
argentina travel information Before I tell the next part of this story, I want to add a disclaimer. I am certain that there are many (probably millions) of good Indian men who treat women (or at least women in their own class) with respect, who look at women as equals, and who are vehemently outraged by what happened to this one particular woman in Delhi as well as thousands of other women who are routinely raped in Delhi and around India. I know some of these men and I know that they are horrified.
When I was alone in India (which, argentina travel information thankfully, was not very often), I was constantly argentina travel information approached by men. Men wanting to be my tour guide, men wanting to chat, men wanting to hang out or men whose motives were never completely clear to me. I tend to be a bit cold and unreceptive to men who approach me when I m traveling solo. It s my defense mechanism. I m probably argentina travel information missing out on many positive interactions, but it only takes a single negative one to do permanent damage to my body and my psyche, so I error on the side of bitchiness. In most places, men will try two or three times and give up. In India, the men follow you down the street, asking the same questions over and over and over and over again until my feigned bitchiness became outright hostility. argentina travel information One man had the unfortunate gall to ask me, Why are you being like that? He got a bit of the very loud and very public mental fit I mentioned above.
In Jaipur, which was the only significant part of my trip where I didn t have travel companions, I was reduced to tears in my hotel room and seriously considered cutting argentina travel information my trip short. I was besieged by men any time I tried to walk anywhere on the street. At one point, a group of adolescent boys walked up and showed me porn. As I walked away swearing, they shot rocks at the back of my legs with a slingshot. Nice boys they re raising in India. The only way I survived Jaipur was arranging a tour guide through my hotel. Once I had one, I guess I was considered his because nobody bothered me when I was with him. Fuck that. If there are places in this world where I can only feel safe when I have a man around to protect argentina travel information me, I do not want to visit those places.
I should be able to tell someone to leave me alone and have my wishes respected, instead of being followed all the way to my hotel and then having a desk clerk shrug when I told him I was made uncomfortable by the same man skulking about the hotel lobby, waiting argentina travel information for me to check in. I should be able to walk unmolested down a street in any city that is not in a war zone. I should not have to look at the penises of a hundred men who don t bother to shield themselves while they are pissing on public streets or train tracks. (Seriously, I saw more penises in India than I had previously seen in my entire life.) And I should not been seen as an automatic whore because I m a western woman. Yes, I have sex and I m not married. But it does not follow that I have sex indiscriminately. I get to choose who and when.
That is a choice that is denied millions of women in India. Women are raped on buses, by taxi drivers, in cities, in villages pretty much wherever and whenever some man or group of men decides they want to rape. Up until now, women haven t been considered valuable enough for the police to take action against their rapists. India is currently in the midst of protests, some violent, some peaceful. Will it be enough argentina travel information to change a culture that had always ranked women as a low priority? Sadly, I doubt it.
It s hard to even react to this. I ll go ahead an open up an imperialist can of worms and suggest that we spend too much time talking about and nurturing developing economies and not enough time on developing societies. What we re getting, as a result, are illiberal democracies springing up around the world. People are choosing representative forms of government but those governments are representing argentina travel information troubling policies and ethics, at least if you have absolutist view of human rights.
Of course, if a story like this happened in the U.S. -- a gang rape and then police pressure on the victim to recant, would anybody argentina travel information doubt its veracity? And, who would win the race to argue first that all of this could have been avoided, had only he victim carried a concealed assault argentina travel information weapon?
Huh? to do bad all the time ? Certainly the Greeks put together a less-than-evil system. Under the Ottomans, argentina travel information Jews were accepted argentina travel information peacably in Salonika. The Khazars built a tolerant system. Despite brutality, Genghis Khan let cities live in peace as long as they kept up with their tributes. The history of Europe since 1000 has hardly been bad all the time, with extremely bright spots like Rudolph II and the Renaissance, even though you can find bad things happening in any period argentina travel information along with the good. We hardly have the marauding armies/existential threats that we did during the battles for the Gates of Vienna, the invasion of Huns, the 100 years war...
I just read your comment again and want to delve into that imperialist argentina travel information can of worms. I think you re absolutely correct that we spend time talking about and nuturing argentina travel information developing economies and don t pay much attention to developing argentina travel information societies. There s a part of me that thinks, so, what? It s really not the business argentina travel information of any outsider to participate in the shaping of a culture, right? But when I was living in South Korea in the early 1990s, I was struck by how much conflict there was between traditional culture and modern economics. I thought then, and continue to think now, that most economies in the west developed at a pace that allowed cultures to keep up. The techonologies that allowed us to modernize came along slowly. Then, at least in South Korea, we magnanimously gifted them the technologies that had taken decades to develop. Boom. You re modern. The traditional aspect of Korea was left reeling. Twenty years later, I suspect either traditional culture and modern economics have formed an uneasy partnership, or that traditional culture is being left behind. I don t know because I haven t been back to Korea. But I see the same phenomenon in Indonesia and Malaysia. I suppose it was there in India as well, but honestly I wasn t there long enough to get a really good read of it.
I don t have a solution to this conflict though. I don t think that globalization is necessarily helping cultures around the world, but I also really argentina travel information don t think it s our business to tell them how to live or not to live, except argentina travel information where basic human rights are involved. Arranged marriages-fine. Covering hair-fine. Rape-not fine.
Do I think I d be okay with covering my hair or having my parents arrange my marriage? No. But I grew up in a place where these things were not part of the discussion. I know a lot of women who would feel completely exposed if they were uncovered in public. I also know women who have had highly successful arranged marriages. There are some bad ones too, obviously, but the same can be said for love matches.
Every country has problems created or amplified by characteristics of its society or culture. I spent a month this year, from mid-March to mid-April, in southern India. argentina travel information I flew into Kochin, on the west coast, where I spent about a week getting some dental work started then traveled by motorcycle straight east to the other coast and around the southern horn and back up to Kochin where I spent the last few days finishing argentina travel information up th