Village life in India: if you pursue a relationship with the "wrong" man, your village elders will have you gang-raped and call it "justice":
A 20-year-old woman has been raped in public by as many as 12 men on the orders of tribal elders in a village in eastern India, according to local police.
The attack, in Birbhum district about 120 miles from Kolkata, was a punishment for an “unauthorised” relationship with a man from another village and the woman's subsequent failure to pay a 50,000 rupee (£490) fine, local media reports said.
“According to the woman, the [village head] summoned her and her [lover] on Monday and detained them through the day and night. After her family said they could not pay the fine, the [head] allegedly ordered the mass rape on Tuesday,” police superintendant C Sudhakar told The Hindustan Times newspaper.
For once, I have no words. Actually, no, I have a few: this misogynistic, semi-feudal rural culture which treats women as property, seeks to dictate intensely personal matters to them, and enforces its will with barbaric punishments is fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights and freedoms. It needs to be destroyed.
