Vidiot: There is awareness now like never before, and it is making a difference.
"God" bless the Information Age.
It will hopefully make a difference in the future, Vidiot, but on current trends it will be a long time.
The sad fact is that India has not progressed, as it could have done. Illiteracy, a prerequisite for internet usage is still a problem. Further, since basic education will be in local languages and/or Hindi (unlikely to be in English) and web information and/or TV availability in rural areas may not feature the same information that you could find in the large cities catering for the well-off middle classes, information may filter slowly.
The great majority of rapes occur in the 600,000+ rural villages and likely involve upper caste young men, whose families have influence and authority in their locality, they choose to humiliate and assault young women from a lower or lowest cast (dalits). There's a great deal of hypocrisy in this, they wont touch a a low caste person (they become ritually unclean) but they are prepared to f**k them. That's a rotten attitude! Until India can get rid of caste superstition, there may be little chance of real progress in this issue.
The internet hardly reaches these villages. To start with, the villages people are usually poor, and internet access may not be available anyway. A 2013 report on Quartz was headed, "Why only 3% of India has home internet access."
The article commenced with a quote: "Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt doesn’t think much of India’s internet strategy, telling a television channel that the country “is well behind in the web services model that the rest of the world is adopting.”
Quartz continued, " But it’s still notable that only 150 million Indians have internet access in a country of 1.2 billion. That’s significantly lower than other emerging markets. Consider this Gallup survey from January, which polled citizens around the globe about whether they have home internet access: While only 3% of Indians answered “yes,” in China, 34% confirmed home internet access, with 51% penetration in Russia and 40% in Brazil."
I alluded to low literacy rates, here's a graphic map to demonstrate the problem. Its based on the official 2011 census:
And guess what? Who is less likely to go to school? No prizes if you guessed girls.
To exacerbate the problem, families are well aware of the rape problem, and one protective action they take, is to keep their daughters at home.
More, since the upper caste young men tend to be the worst perpetrators, and its their parents that dominate the villages, the police in rural areas tend to take NO action. And, the upper caste families are often quite prepared to take violent action against any low caste family that dares to protest.
Its sad!
