Sex taunts haunt streets

LATE at night, a group of young Indian women walk down a dark New Dehli street wearing strappy tops and body-hugging outfits, defying the stares of onlookers in a country where a woman is raped every 29 minutes.

About two dozen women took part in the unlikely demonstration to highlight the dangers for women walking in Indian streets by heeding the organisers' instructions to wear "something they always wanted to, but could not" during their protest.

"If I was not in a group, God only knows what would have happened," said Amrita Nandy Joshi, a 31-year-old Oxford graduate as the group made its way along a dimly-lit road after 10pm, something normally done only with a male escort, if at all.

"We call this direct public intervention against street sexual harassment," said Jasmeen Patheja, a 26-year-old photographer working in the southern IT hub of Bangalore, who brought the novel protest to the capital. "I was fed up with being teased every day. One day I reached a threshold and decided to take action."

Ms Patheja formed Blank Noise, a movement that rallies for safer streets for Indian women.

Since setting up Blank Noise about three years ago, Ms Patheja has organised "night actions" in four other cities, inviting women to join in through her blog ( www.blanknoiseproject.blogspot.com .

Along the route, they spray messages on the road that describe the abuse and harassment that many young Indian women encounter daily, in the hope that they will be read the next morning by pedestrians and create awareness.

According to the latest official figures, a woman is raped every half-hour in India. Last year, there were more than 18,000 rapes in the country, and these are only the reported cases. Activists suspect that the number is much higher as many women do not report attacks to police, fearing social stigma.

"The actual figure [for rapes last year] would be around 30,000. The situation is even worse in the rural and semi-urban areas where police refuse to lodge cases," said Aparna Bhat, a lawyer running a government Rape Crisis programme.

New Delhi is one of India's most dangerous cities for women, according to the figures. Last year, more than 30 per cent of the rape cases reported in India's 35 major cities took place there.

Less violent forms of sexual harassment - verbal taunts, groping at women in anonymous crowded markets or on public transport - occur all the time.

Most of the women taking part in the protest said they had repeatedly been at the receiving end of what the Indian media often refers to as "Eve-teasing", a term the female protesters say fails to describe the trauma suffered by the female victims. "One day I was walking with a friend near my college in the evening when a man on a scooter stopped near us," said Ms Joshi.

"We turned into another street but he chased us. He finally managed to grab us and groped us all over before running away. He left us numb," she said.

Ms Patheja knows her short night walk is merely symbolic, due to poor policing in India's main cities and chauvinistic attitudes that run deep through conservative Indian society and which, some say, are reinforced by popular culture. However, she is undeterred. She said: "Slowly, things will change."

Ms Patheja is collecting the clothes worn by women on occasions when they were harassed. "Women immediately look at the clothes they wore when they are harassed, wondering if they 'asked' for it," she said.

"We are collecting 1,000 such clothes and we will exhibit them at public places with the slogan: 'I didn't ask for it'."