VANCOUVER – Indian media has drawn comparisons between the gang rape of a young photojournalist in Mumbai on Thursday to an attack last December on a bus in New Delhi.
But what’s different about this most recent assault is that Mumbai – India’s financial epicenter – had long been considered a safe city for women, according to a local women’s rights advocate.
Nasreen Contractor, co-director of the Women’s Research and Action Group, said Mumbai is a city where women don’t have the same kind of restrictions as in other areas of the country.
News of the attack was disturbing for her personally, she said on the phone from Mumbai.
She lives and grew up not far from the scene, at the abandoned Shakti Mill compound in Mumbai’s Lower Parel neighbourhood.
The woman wasn’t alone. Her male colleague was tied up by the assailants while she was beaten and raped by five men.
What’s troubling for Contractor is that the attack happened as the woman was going about her business – reportedly on her first assignment as a magazine intern.
She pointed out the 23-year-old woman who was gang-raped last year in New Delhi, and later died from her injuries, was also in the early stages of her career.
Men that haven’t kept up with the society’s progress may see such women as “loose” or “too brazen,” she explained.
Social awareness of violence against women has increased exponentially since last December, following widespread outrage over the rape and death of the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern in New Delhi.
Protests following that incident prompted legislators to enact stricter laws and recognize acts such as sexual harassment, voyeurism and stalking as criminal. The changes to the penal code also provide harsher punishments for gang rape.
Government officials did not waste time in reacting to what happened to the 22-year-old woman in Mumbai.
Condemning Thursday’s attack, Union Law Minister Kapil Sibal said the perpetrators would be punished in the “severest manner,” the Times of India reported.
“We cannot afford to let our women and children live in insecurity and must make sure that such attacks against women are dealt in the severest manner,” he said.
Meanwhile Maharashta State Home Minister R.R. Patil called for police protection for female journalists who are “reporting from isolated areas,” NDTV reported.
Regardless of the new laws and swift reaction from authorities, some media outlets asked if anything had changed in the past eight months.
On Friday, NDTV anchor Barkha Dutt questioned the “impunity of rapists and the impotence of the system to instill a sense of fear in them.”
Dutt asked why Indian women still “need to be scared or vulnerable” and can’t “go out where we like, when we like, dressed as we like?”
Contractor thinks police and politicians have improved how they deal with sexual violence against women. She also thinks the treatment of victims – both medical and psychological – has gotten much better.
But she believes the real progress is seen in how many more women and families are willing to come forward about sexual assault.
People are talking about sexual violence more openly and the stigma surrounding rape victims is beginning to disappear, she said.
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