© India Today/ZUMA Press
People at a rally in Kolkata, India light candles to honor a 23-year old gang rape victim.
Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the
rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren't that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who
gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the
gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who
gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who
gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they're everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.
There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that's broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a
celebrity or
lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including
Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.
