One in five women raped in US, says White House report

WASHINGTON: Nearly 22 million women — about one in five— have been raped in their lifetime in the US, with nearly half of the victims subjected to sexual assault before the age of 18, according to a report by the White House. 

Though women of all the races have been targeted, however, women beolonging to some races are more vulnerable than the others, thr report added. 

The report also said that about 33.5% ofmultiracial women have been raped, as have 27% of American-Indian and Alaska's native women, compared to the 15% of Hispanic, 22% of Black, and 19% of White women. 

Most of the victims know their assailants and a vast majority (which is nearly 98%) of the perpetrators are male, according to the report released on Wednesday. 

Nearly 22 million American women and 1.6 million men have been raped in their lifetime, it said. 

The report was issued by the White House ahead of a cabinet-level meeting of the White House council which was chaired by President Obama on women and girls with the council representatives from each agency to examine the progress made and to renew a call to root out abuse wherever it exists. 

The report titled "Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action" outlined the facts surrounding rape and sexual assault and identified the key areas to focus on and improve including efforts towards changing social norms, improving criminal justice response etc.

West Bengal gang-rape, allegedy ordered by village council, stuns Supreme Court

BIRBHUM Rape

New Delhi:  The Supreme Court today staged an intervention in the horrific case of a young woman in Bengal who was allegedly gang-raped on the orders of a village council.
The court called the case "disturbing", and asked the district judge in Birbhum, the area where the sexual assault took place on Monday, to visit the village where the woman lives and file a report on the facts within a week.
The 20-year-old woman in Birbhum, 180 kms from the state capital of Kolkata was gang-raped by 13 men on the orders of village elders as punishment for having a relationship with a man from a different community, police officers have said.
The woman and her male companion were first tied up to a tree and asked to pay Rs. 25,000 each as a penalty for their relationship, the woman's family said. They could not afford the fine, so the woman says the village headman then ordered others to "enjoy" her.
"We arrested all the 13 men, including the village chief who ordered the gang rape. The accused have been produced in court which remanded them to jail custody,"  said Birbhum's Superintendent of Police, C. Sudhaka.
The assault comes after a spate of high profile rapes in West Bengal which have brought Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee under fire for not doing enough to stop violence against women.
West Bengal recorded the highest number of gender crimes in the country at 30,942 in 2012 - 12.7 percent of India's total recorded crimes against women. These crimes include rape, kidnapping and sexual harassment and molestation.
Earlier this month, Kolkata witnessed public protests against police who have been accused of failing to act on the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl who was later burnt alive. NDTV

The girl bomber ran away from her male guardians ask for the protection of the Afghan police

She said she is the sister of a local Taliban commander. Spozhmai, a young girl said to be about 10 or 11-years-old, gave herself up to the Afghan police in the city of Lashkargah. Her father and brother, she said, had forced her to put on the suicide vest and ordered her to blow herself up at a checkpoint in Helmand province. Only the targets would be killed, her father had told her. Her brother Zahir gave her more specific instructions. She was to approach the Deputy Commander at the checkpoint and ask for a ride to the neighboring Kunar province. Then she was to blow up the vest attached to her body.

Spozhmai didn’t follow instructions. Instead, she ran away from her male guardians and chose to ask for the protection of the Afghan police. Taken into protective custody, she appealed to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to not send her back home. “God did not make me to be a suicide bomber. I ask the President to put me in a good place,” she pled. Her life with her family was like that of a slave. She was not allowed to learn to read and write. Instead she stayed indoors always and cooked and cleaned, day and night. The Afghan authorities asserted that they would not return the girl to her family unless tribal elders guaranteed her safety.

On the other side, the spokesperson of the Afghan Taliban denied the group’s involvement in coercing the girl to engage in a suicide attack. The story was false, they said, and the girl’s story was nothing more than Government propaganda. “We never do this, especially with girls,” Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the media. The last three words of his sentence were important. Girls, after all, were to be indoors and unschooled; the political act of martyrdom, something they sell as an ultimate act of heroism to their conscripts, is something too important to be wasted on the unholy and female.

These are the two visible ends of the argument. On one, are those who want to save girls like Spozhmai, whose stunning story garners her more attention than the perfunctory bits awarded to the everyday abused girl who tries to run away from the cruelties of home and captivity. On the other, are the Taliban, for whom the very idea of a girls’ school has become so imbued with imperialism and occupation that all iterations of female education, even the barest possibility of a female presence beyond the home, must be obliterated.

The details of Spozhmai’s story present a third reality. The mercenary benefits that the Taliban and their affiliated groups attach to those that volunteer for suicide bombings are an important denominator here. In the hardscrabble economy of this area, where war is the past, the present, and the future, several thousands of rupees can mean the difference between a family’s survival and its extinguishment. A son sacrificed to a suicide bombing means a one-time payment, a complete loss of earning potential to the promises of heaven mouthed by recruiters. Enter daughters, all only costs and burdens and promises of future debts. Slipping a daughter instead of a son into a suicide vest thus presents the opportunity to maximise the yield from the transaction of terror. A blown up girl minimises losses, leaves behind the boys for other things, and allows for the survival of the family in whose servitude she lives.

The calculations are dark; but similarly dim are the prospects for the girls that are not yet blowing themselves up. In the tribal areas and in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, thousands of schools have been bombed in the past several years as Taliban encroachment has graduated from a possibility to a reality. In the paltry few weeks of 2014, three girls’ schools have already been bombed. In Charsadda, explosives were lobbed over the boundary wall to maim the main building. In Landi Kotal, armed men sowed bombs in the empty rooms of Said Akbar Kali Girls School, their explosions blowing through the silence and destroying all intentions of education. A few days later, bombs bloomed at a school in Bannu. The Government Girls Primary School, located in the limits of the Huwed Police Station, thus breathed its last.

None of the culprits planting bombs in these fallow fields of female enrichment have been apprehended, and there is no likelihood that they will be. The songs to female education in Pakistan, so resounding in the years of international aid agencies and urban do-gooders, do not echo in these school-less climates. Stuck are they between the Western desire to cover up with schools the stabbings of strategic imperatives and the Taliban insistence on sacrificing girls at the altar of an imagined Islamic authenticity.

The girl bomber exists because, to both of them, her existence represents the vacuity of their meaningless mantras. In the land of the Taliban, the schools have bombs and the girls too have bombs. The buildings of one lie maimed and mangled; the bodies of the other are reduced to just that — only bodies — their tasks to carry the burdens of others, always babies and now bombs.

The Greta Garbo of Bengal Suchitra Sen,

Suchitra Sen remains an enigma even now

Suchitra Sen, the Greta Garbo of Bengal, 

The screen icon remained an enigma even in her death as the hearse carrying her body was covered with white flowers and black-tinted glass making it difficult for fans to catch a glimpse of the star. Onlookers, news channel cameras and thousands of those who gathered at the hospital, outside her house and at the crematorium to mourn her death, were left disappointed after being unable to see her face. 

Sources close to her family said this was done keeping with the last wishes of the veteran actress whose acting prowess and magnetic personality had mesmerised audiences in Bengali as well as Hindi films like Agnipariksha, Devdas, Saat Paake Bandha, Aandhi and Deep Jele Jai. 

Suchitra Sen became a recluse in 1978. But if there is one journalist that she kept in touch with throughout her life, it is Gopal Krishna Roy, who used to work with the news agency UNI. Gopal Roy has written four books in Bengali on Suchitra Sen. But even he has only a clue about why she became a recluse. She never gave him a direct answer. 

However, in 1978, Roy recalls that Suchitra Sen had starred in a film called Pranaye Pasha which flopped. She was deeply upset about it and went to Belur Math, the headquarters of the Ram Krishna Mission just outside in Kolkata. There she met Bharat Maharaj, one of the holy men there, and talked to him for a long time. 

"I later heard she sat at his feet and wept and wept," says Roy. "And Bharat Maharaj told her, 'Ma, ghridho, lobh koro na, don't be greedy. And that, I think, Mrs Sen translated into her own life by becoming a recluse." 

But the Greta Garbo of Bengal had another side to her character, recalls Roy. "She was so humorous," he remembers, and relates a series of stories about her. 

Once, Mrs Sen told Roy she wanted to see a doctor, an urologist. So Roy sent one of Kolkata's best known urologists to her house. After he had seen her and left, Mrs Sen told Roy, " Well, your doctor held my hand for 10 minutes at least !" Roy replied, "He must have been checking your pulse. But Mrs Sen burst out laughing and said, "Even I know how to see a pulse. He was not just checking my pulse."

Another time, Suchitra Sen went with Roy to see a gynaecologist at the doctor's chamber. She had covered her head but other patients there started recognizing her. So Roy went to the doctor and asked her to see Mrs Sen as quickly as possible. The doctor obliged. They headed home. Then, Roy recalls, "Mrs Sen took young Moon Moon on her lap and said, 'Gopal do you know what the doctor told me? The doctor told me I am still...and then she paused. So I said anxiously, what? What? Mrs Sen laughed and said...the doctor said I am still a virgin."

"She was very humorous," says Roy, "but there is no humour left today."

Two other little stories that Roy recalls that must be shared. Once when Vasant Sathe was information minister, there was a huge controversy about whether kissing should be allowed on screen. So Roy decided to write an article on it. He sent to a 10-point questionnaire to Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Soumitra Chatterjee and Suchitra Sen and several other luminaries. Most replied almost immediately but not Mrs Sen. When he insisted, she told him to come over to her house. He went. 

"Mrs Sen smiled and said the truth is chumban ato shohojay dewa jaye na - it is not easy to kiss anyone," Roy recalls. And she did not want to be quoted. So he told her, fine, he would leave her out of his story. He kept his word, except to add at the end, "Mrs Sen declined to comment." The story was carried in all major dailies and Mrs Sen saw it and called Roy. "She said, 'you had said you would leave me out of your story.' I said I had. 'But you have used my name in your last line', she said. I thought she was upset but then she said, 'ok, lets call a truce. Come and have tea with me one day'."

Finally, many people thought Suchitra Sen was haughty and reserved. She was, says Gopal Roy, but not always. "One evening, I was taking a walk with her on Ballygunge Circular road. It was about 9.30pm and that was her habit - the evening walk," Roy says. "Suddenly one gentleman walking past recognized her and stopped and said he wanted an autograph. I didn't know how Mrs Sen would react. But she smiled and said, ok. Give me a paper and pen.

"The man said he didn't have either a pen or paper. So she turned to me. I said I had a pen, but no paper. So Mrs Sen suddenly bent down and picked up an empty cigarette packet from the road, tore it open and on its clean side, she gave her autograph," recalls Roy who was as surprised as the lucky man. 

If only that lucky man would come forward. The man who got Suchitra Sen to give him an autograph on an empty cigarette packet. What a story that would be.

Suchitra Sen's actress-daughter Moon Moon Sen completed the last rites in the presence of her daughters Riya and Raima, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Bengali film industry stars like Prosenjit Chatterjee and Dev. 

A gun salute was also accorded to the legendary actress from the state government. Her body was also taken to her apartment at Ballygunj for around five minutes but no outsiders were allowed to enter. All the places to which the body was taken were under a thick security blanket as VIPs and thousands of her fans jostled to pay their last respects. 

Even in the Belle Vue Clinic where she was admitted for her illness, a tight security and secrecy drill was maintained. Mamata Banerjee became the first public personality in the last 35 years to have met her face to face at the clinic.

Old-timers recall that when Bharat Maharaj of the Ramakrishna Mission passed away in 1989, she had walked barefoot at Belur Math, near Kolkata.