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.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    515·
    5 months 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.

    • 2ugly2live@lemmy.worldEnglish
      152·
      5 months 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.

      • Zwiebel@feddit.orgEnglish
        71·
        5 months 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

    • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      12·
      5 months 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.