Call for better safety measures as ‘civic volunteer’ arrested after attack on female trainee doctor in Kolkata

Call for better safety measures as ‘civic volunteer’ arrested after attack on female trainee doctor in Kolkata

Doctors at government hospitals in several Indian states have gone on strike in a protest after the rape and murder of a trainee doctor in Kolkata on Friday.

The 31-year-old woman was attacked at the state-run RG Kar medical college, where she was a resident doctor, after she went to rest in a seminar room following dinner with colleagues. Her brutalised body was found with multiple injuries and an autopsy confirmed sexual assault and homicide.

On Saturday police arrested Sanjay Roy, a “civic volunteer” at the hospital, in connection with the attack. Roy’s duties were unclear but local media reports said he operated in part as a tout, helping to speed up admissions for patients in return for money.

Protests by doctors demanding justice and better workplace security that initially began in Kolkata, in West Bengal, have now spread to other parts of the country.

  • 2ugly2liveEnglish
    87•29 days ago

    I do not know how women in India are brave enough to leave the house. I feel like I just hear about them getting brutalized everywhere, every time of day, and by strangers and family alike. It’s like it’s only a matter of time over there.

    • @[email protected]English
      46•29 days ago

      There are a lot of people in India, and you only hear about the exceptions. Most Indians probably don’t know about this happening to anyone they know personally.

      But then again, they say in the US that something like 25% of women are sexually assaulted by age 22. So it’s not necessarily just an India problem.

      • 2ugly2liveEnglish
        13•29 days ago

        I don’t think violence against women is India specific, but it’s kind of like saying, “Well, it’s crowded in New York, but it’s crowed everywhere these days.” Like, yes, this problem isn’t country specific, but one seems to be way more extreme than the other.

        • @[email protected]English
          6•29 days ago

          Their point is that India has four times the population than the USA, so if you read four times as many headlines about rape it’d be about the same per capita

      • FubarberryEnglish
        12•29 days ago

        I think the main thing concerning about it is the stories where someone was gangraped on a public bus, or things like that. It’s hard to imagine something like that happening at all, the fact that it could be happing and people there joined in instead of stopping it is what makes it so horrifying. There are also that recent case where a woman was gang raped, went to the hospital for it, and got raped again by a doctor. It’s easy to discount individual cases of a bad individual doing something as bad individuals in a large society. However when one person gets raped multiple times by different people suddenly it feels like it’s not isolated bad incidents and is instead a wider cultural problem.

    • @[email protected]English
      15•29 days ago

      It’s probably like mass shootings in the US. There are so many, yet people still go outside.

      I as a foreigner wouldn’t get anywhere near either shithole country.

      • FubarberryEnglish
        17•29 days ago

        Makes me curious about how common these incidents actually are. It’s pretty easy to think somethings a widespread epidemic from sensational reporting on it, but have it actually not be common at all, at least when compared to the population or other causes of death.

        According to wikipedia, there were 1,358 people who died in the US from mass shootings between 2006 and 2017, so about 113 people per year. For comparison, the US had 430,934 deaths from car wrecks over that same period, so about 35,911 deaths per year. So you’re over 300 times more likely to die from a car wreck than a mass shooting (which would bring up the question of if you would be willing to visit a country with cars if you’re unwilling to visit the US due to mass shooting fears).

        With india, I’m curious if it’s the same thing, where just the scope and size of the country makes it easy to paint a bad narrative when in reality things aren’t so bad. On the other hand, a lot of the really bad rape stories to come out of india involve multiple rapes happening to the same person (like that recent story where a woman was gang raped, went to the hospital, and got raped by a doctor at the hospital). When it happens multiple times to one person like that from different sources, it feels a lot more like a widespread issue than just random cases of bad individuals doing bad things.

        • @ohwhatfollyismanEnglish
          13•29 days ago

          the data from india is incomplete and not fit for the analysis you’re attempting. the actual problem lies in misogyny; rape is more of a symptom of that than a series of unrelated incidents.

          misogyny, also, is a symptom by itself of indians making categories and preference tables for virtually every fucking thing. we discriminate on gender, skin colour (it’s legal to advertise and sell “skin whitening creams” here!), religion, caste, sect, language (we have about 530 active dialects), state, height, weight, food preferences (india has the highest percentage and, therefore, the highest population of native vegetarians), occupations, the list is endless.

          heck, cows live a better life than most women in this country. unless we start seeing each other as fellow human beings, the situation here is simply not going to improve. ever.

          • FubarberryEnglish
            3•29 days ago

            the data from india is incomplete and not fit for the analysis you’re attempting.

            Yeah, that’s the main reason I didn’t include it. I couldn’t find anything representing good numbers, at least not without more time researching it than I actually have available at the moment.

          • @[email protected]English
            2•29 days ago

            The American data is also not fit. A part of a reduction in firearm deaths is advancements in medical treatment for bullet injuries. The actual statistic that should be tracked is bullet injuries, which is also quite incomplete due to many PDs classifying a survived bullet injury as an assault, limiting the ability to get accurate numbers on how many bullet injuries there actually are.

        • @NOT_RICKEnglish
          7•29 days ago

          Thanks for trying to actually examine the data. Sometimes I think Europeans think every day in America looks like the purge, lol. Yes gun violence is a problem, no you’re not likely to have anything bad happen to you day to day.

      • @[email protected]English
        14•29 days ago

        Quick thought, how about we stop calling places where people are trying to live their lives “shithole countries?”

        Went to India for a month tour, no gang rapes in sight, lots of good food eaten, lots of beautiful architecture seen. Went to Germany, had to stop three German men from harassing and pulling a tiny woman into a car she clearly didn’t want to get into.

        Maybe I should have written an international news article about it. 🤔

      • @ZK686English
        -1•29 days ago

        Oh brother…

  • @[email protected]English
    23•29 days ago

    I wrote this on another post about this topic, but i think it’s worth repeating.

    The women of India formed the Gulabi Gang because this problem has gotten that bad.

    If you read interviews with their founder it’s really upsetting just how common rape and domestic violence are in India and how little law enforcement cares.

    I think it’s more helpful to listen to women who live in India who have experienced this sort of violence. I think it’s better to be informed on their reality rather than speculating on the situation as foreigners.

  • mommykinkEnglish
    5•29 days ago

    Doctors strike in India after rape and murder of trainee medic at hospital

    Or as they call it in India… “Tuesday.”