WHEN a judge in the high court of the Indian state of Rajasthan recently acquitted a man of rape, he noted of the accuser, “Her hymen was ruptured and vagina admitted two fingers easily. The medical opinion is that the prosecutrix may be accustomed to sexual intercourse.” The implication was that only a virgin can really be raped.
The so-called “two-finger test”, in which a doctor examines the vagina to decide if a woman is sexually active, was banned in India in 2014, after the Supreme Court ruled that it was an invasion of privacy (as well as irrelevant). In 2016 Pakistan prohibited the test from being used in rape trials. This year Bangladesh followed suit. Yet in all three countries the test is still widely used.
Last year Human Rights Watch, an international pressure group, found that the test is still routine in Rajasthani hospitals. And this year an Indian human-rights organisation, Jan Sahas, looked at the records of 200 group-rape trials and concluded that the...Continue reading
from Asia https://ift.tt/2lFTvnh
EmoticonEmoticon