This is disgusting

[TheHobbit]

Sorry I'm lost for words!
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/11443462/Delhi-bus-rapist-blames-his-victim-in-prison-interview.html

I understand the Indian gov are seeking to ban the interview (documentary) on a worldwide basis because of these disgraceful comments

Not sure why people are surprised by this tbh. Men who do what he did to women, are bound to think like this. It's just that most of them don't say it as clearly as this.

I watched a bit about ths on Newsnight yesterday. It was truely awful. There are some equality issues in the UK that we get exercised about, quite rightly. But this is in a totally different league. Where do you begin with men who have such abhorrent beliefs?

I agree a lot of men think the same.

OK they might not think, "out at 9pm she deserves it", but they think "x y z she deserves it" Last week someone tweeted directly to me about Ched Evans' victim, "if the drunken mess can't remember it then it's her fault"

I think it's a big problem that in India there seems to be the notion that some lives are worthless (I read the BBC version where a man had raped a 5 year old street kid, and basically his defence was that she was a street kid, she didn't matter)

Women, poor they're all grouped into this category of people that just don't need to exist, so you can do anything you want to them.

I think this is what people in the UK have trouble comprehending sometimes, that we still have an underlying feeling that every life can be valuable, whereas in other countries that just isn't the case.

I think it's at a different level - perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps a large number of people in this country think that some people are intrinsically worthless and you can do anything you want to them, but it's not an attitude I've encountered myself.

I've lived in a few other places though, and colleagues have felt that way. Have felt that it's fine to put a maid to sleep in the kitchen, have one day off a fortnight because they're not real people, they don't deserve time off or privacy.

Perhaps I'm looking at my country with rose-tinted glasses when I see what happened in Rotherham as people being misguided in what was going on and what could be questioned, what their role was in protecting these girls, and how they could make the difference. Perhaps they really did feel as these Indian men did, that the girls in Rotherham were worthless. I don't know.

It's at a different level but the same attitude just further down the spectrum. More tempered here and on a lesser level but is there alright as suzanne Moore brilliantly points out.

Hmmm, pondering more, you are right. I'm thinking about what I just heard on the radio, that child benefit might be restricted to 3 children (because the 4th doesn't matter presumably), about the benefit cap, about all the people who get left high and dry because they're not the worthy poor.

It's the same, we're just in a different place on the spectrum.

Our lawyers don't say they'd take a female relative and burn her to death, but they do say that drunk women deserve to be raped.

It all feels like such a huge mountain to climb.

"I think it's at a different level - perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps a large number of people in this country think that some people are intrinsically worthless and you can do anything you want to them, but it's not an attitude I've encountered myself."

It's there all right. It's very noticeable in the rhetoric thrown at the poor (scroungers, shirkers etc), the working classes (who have only themselves to blame for not being accountants, lawyers and middle class rich - ha!) and in the realm of benefit sanctions, where many of the major sufferers are disabled. Also think of the anti-immigrant prejudice.

I'd argue that it is at the root of all male sexual entitlement towards women too - think of that thread about "what is the motive for this behaviour". Or any of the other threads about harassment. And the fact that they crop up regularly.

What you may be noticing is that the phenomena in India is a) more entrenched, whereas it has been questioned here for a century or more; b) more widely accepted; and c) (cricially) acted upon with greater impunity. What is really sad and depressing is that over a century of so many people questioning it here has not got rid of it entirely within our own geographic borders, let alone without. We seem to need to justify our own actions in this way as a social group, or social groups. It's an excuse.

Its shocking but still many people still hold onto those crazy victim blaming ideas here in the UK, women dressing inappropriately, drinking!

Yep. The Norman Awards did a notnorman where they pointed out that Western people get all "oh these savages from far away places, look at the way they treat their women, not like us" when in fact they have exactly the same ownership/ entitlement attitudes to women and rape.

here it is