2014/06/17

BBC 12 June 2014: Why are women being hanged in India?

Four women have been found hanging from trees in remote villages in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in the last fortnight.

The families of at least three of the dead, two of them teenage cousins, have alleged that they were murdered after being raped.

Is this spate of grisly murders new?

Such crimes are not new to Uttar Pradesh, indeed to India.

As a young girl, when I visited my grandparents in my tiny ancestral village in Pratapgarh district in the state during my annual summer vacations, I sometimes heard my mother and our neighbours talk about assaults on women.

The perpetrators were almost always men from my community - high-caste Brahmins. And the victims were almost always lower-caste or Dalit (formerly untouchable) women.

Sometimes the women attacked raised the alarm and managed to escape, at others they were overpowered.

Nobody went to the police because, as my mother said, they were often considered part of the problem.

In 2011, I visited Uttar Pradesh to report on a spate of exceptionally brutal rapes there. One of the victims was 14-year-old Sonam who was found hanging from a tree inside a police station right in front of her house. more