Trigger Warning!
Men assaulted a 16-year-old girl in a town near Kolkata, India, on October 26 and then the day after, as she walked home from the police station after reporting the first rape, a group of more than six men attacked her again.
Friends of the men she reported to the police set her on fire on December 23 and she died, pregnant, on New Year’s Eve. She was able to reveal who the perpetrators were before she died and police made their arrests, although at first they covered up the information and tried to rule it a suicide. They also tried to force a cremation of her body.
USA Today reports: “In Kolkata and New Delhi, the nation’s capital, hundreds of women and their supporters took to the streets in protest Thursday and later held candlelight vigils.”
Her death comes a year after the fatal gang-rape of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi that ignited a firestorm worldwide and led to Parliament enacting tougher anti-rape laws.
Street harassment, sexual assault, gang-rapes, and murder: no person should be subjected to any of these crimes, yet so many people, especially girls and women, are. The slow, incremental change we are seeing is not happening fast enough for my liking. We need continual pressure and outcry and revolution.
Speak out. Create change. Challenge sexism, harassment, and violence.
Resources in India: Jagori | Blank Noise | Breakthrough
