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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.