India has one of the worlds worst annual rate of rape cases and very few of the men are ever brought before the courts. The one’s that are usually get of on technicalities.
Campaigners in India are calling for tougher penalties for sex offenders after a massive rise in the number of rapes.
According to the latest government figures, a woman is now raped in India every 20 minutes.
But despite the increase in sex attacks the number of convictions is falling.
In the last 12 months, there have been a number of high profile cases which have caused outrage across the nation.
The latest case is a student and her friend who was gang raped by six men on a bus she also had an iron bar used on her, the woman, a physiotherapy student, was last night fighting for her life in hospital.
She had been travelling home from watching a film at a shopping mall in the south of Delhi when she and a male friend were attacked by a group of drunk men on a largely empty bus.
Police say six men attacked the couple and took turns to rape the woman as the bus toured the city’s streets on Sunday.
Tinted windows and curtains kept them hidden and prolonged the woman’s suffering as the rapists attacked her and her friend with an iron bar before throwing them out of the bus unconscious on a city flyover.
Sadly this young woman died today in hospital 29/12/2012
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According to official statistics, 572 rapes were reported in Delhi last year. Police say they have registered 635 rape cases this year.
Shabnam, 16, was gang raped by eight men from her village. Her attackers filmed the assault on their mobile telephones.
When her father became aware that the images were being shared around the village, he committed suicide out of shame.
Haryana is a tight-knit, mainly agrarian community where family honour and the avoidance of shame are a matter of life and death for many.
But the brave schoolgirl wants the world to know what happened because she says too many victims are either too afraid or too ashamed to speak out.