Why Everyone Is Still Quite?

'A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy', Mukesh Singh, one of the six rapists convicted in the 2012 attack, says in the documentary, because "a descent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night."

Housework and housekeeping is for girls, he claimed, "not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent of girls are good".

If women are not "good", he said, men have a right to "teach them a lesson" by tapping them. And if that happens, the women being raped has a responsibility to silently accept the assault. "When being raped, she shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape.

What has made the comments so outrageous is not just the callousness and victim-blaming expressed by this one rapist, but the degree to which his comments reflect attitudes that are disturbingly common in India, and that are central to its climate of hostility toward women's and often, impunity for male violence against them.

Singh made the comments in the new documentary India's daughther which screened Wednesday night that is on 24, April on the BBC. In the 2012 attack, Singh and five other men lured a young woman onto a bus and then gang-raped her, Violating her so brutally that she later died from her injuries.

The 2012 Delhi gang rape was a high-profile instance of the brutal sexual attacks that strike fear into Indian Women- more recently, a women in Rohtak was violently gang- raped and beaten to death by eight men. In a 2011 study, nearly one in four Indian men surveyed admitted to commiting rape- by far the highest of any country included in the samples.

Driving this problem is a widespread view among many tradition-minded Indians that women must adhere to certain conservative social norms, and that rapes are the fault of "bad" women who violate those norms.

At the same time, culturally modernizing forces are leading more Indian women to behave in ways that traditionalist society deems transgressive- dating, delaying marriage, pursuing career - thus making them "deserving" of rape. Not only are victims blamed and rapist forgiven, but aspects of India's legal system and police also support this view of rape, which for traditionalist is all about enforcing their demand that women adhere to their "proper" role in the traditional family structure, which just happens to mean subjugation.