Indian woman calls for rape of girls in 'short' dresses in viral video

Twitter has been ablaze with posts condemning her comments


Sarah Price May 02, 2019
PHOTO: FILE

KARACHI: It’s sad but not-so-surprising to witness an Indian woman calling for the rape of girls at a shopping center in Gurgugram. Their crime? Wearing ‘short’ dresses.

The video of the woman verbally attacking a group of girls has gone viral after she asked some men sitting at a restaurant to rape them because she did not approve of their clothing. The girls confronted the disgruntled women though, demanding an apology and threatening to post the video on social media. But instead, the woman asked the girls' parents to “control” them.



“This middle aged woman you’ll see in the video addressed seven men at the restaurant to rape us because she felt we deserved it for wearing short clothes and bashing her unsolicited opinion,” wrote Shivani Gupta, who uploaded the video on Facebook after the incident.

“We gave her the chance to apologise, to no avail, of course. Nothing moved the needle for her, not even another woman who learned the story on the spot and implored this ghastly woman to apologise.”

An uproar of Twitter posts have followed the video, which has received over one million views since April 30. One Twitter user wrote, “While we are calling for the death penalty of rapists in India, we have women saying other women should be raped because of the length of a girl's skirt.”



Another female user tweeted, “I wish people could leave their conservative thoughts behind.”



Meanwhile, some male tweeters were also quick to condemn the incident.

A bystander’s daughter also took to Facebook, telling viewers to excuse her mother’s language after she stuck up for the girls saying "Aunty, aapka kurta bada tight hain."

PHOTO: INDIA TODAY PHOTO: INDIA TODAY

It’s disconcerting that still, in 2019, women’s clothing are the reasons for men raping them. In a time when women the world over are breaking boundaries around the world, how can they not support each other, especially when it comes to an abhorrent act like rape?

Besides, clothing choices cannot stop a rapist from raping someone. Have we forgotten the macabre rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim nomadic girl in Indian-occupied Kashmir?

How will justice for women prevail when women themselves are perpetuating the idea that it is okay for men to rape them if they were relatively revealing clothes? We can only hope these kind of mentalities start to change.

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