About 200 people stood shielding tiny candles from the whipping rain at Surrey’s Bear Creek Park Sunday afternoon, determined to pay tribute to the New Delhi gang rape victim and demand a stop to violence against women.
The vigil, attended mostly by those from Surrey’s South Asian community, started at 3 p.m. and included speeches from event organizer Lucky Gill and others about the plight of women in India and around the world.
“It’s the 21st century and it’s very very shocking, I must say, that worldwide, from all walks of life women face the worst kinds of atrocities including: infanticide, abortion, sex-selective abortion, honour killing, trafficking, forced prostitution, genital mutilation, child marriages, physical and sexual abuse, young kids going into pornography, forced labour, neglect and body and health issues,” said Gill, who founded the non-governmental organization Global Girl Power to raise awareness of these problems. “All these many forms, it’s a huge list.”
The initial anonymity of the 23-year-old victim, who Gill said was a medical student born to a Hindu family, helped rally India’s myriad ethnic groups behind the plea to stop violence against women.
Gill said she was impressed about half of those in attendance Sunday were men. “We need men to be a part of the solution too,” she said.
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Across from the main gathering, 30-year-old Ravinder Reel held onto the stroller holding his infant daughter as he stood with his wife Jyotish Narain in the downpour.
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“(We) just want to let other people know about the crime and have people ask for change, demand change,” he said.
Accountant Amer Randhawa, 34, said she came out to the vigil to see what type of pressure Surrey’s Indian diaspora could exert to help change the way women are treated in her ancestral homeland.
“I remember my experience of going on just a trip to India: how my mother gave us this huge lecture on how we had to be because of how men in that society were,” she said. The trip took her to the Punjab in 1986. “I was 13 years old and men would gawk at you like they’d never seen a woman before.”
Randhawa said she is raising her four-year-old son to treat every human being with respect and is “trying to educate whoever comes in my path the same thing.”
Under a small shelter, attendees signed a petition addressed to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh demanding immediate steps be taken to curb incidents of rape and violence against women.
Gill said she planned to have a small demonstration at 12:30 p.m. today outside India’s consulate general in downtown Vancouver. She said she will then try to hand the letter to the consul general.
Some of the letter’s suggestions include: timely prosecution of all rape cases, creating a comprehensive law against all forms of sexual assault, ending police immunity from accusations of sex crimes and enacting “rape shield” laws to protect alleged rape victims from inquiries into their past sexual history.
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