India: a Dangerous Place to be a Woman

Following the shocking gang rape of a medical student in Delhi last December, Radha Bedi, a 28-year-old British Asian woman, decides to visit India to uncover the reality of life for women there. This bleak investigation feels a little naive at first, as Bedi struggles to make the connection between ‘Eve teasing’ (being touched, or leered at by men) and more brutal attacks on women, but it finally gets to the crux of the issue when Bedi visits her relatives in the Punjab.

Her discovery that the births of girls in her own family are not celebrated in the same way that boys are, that girls are thereafter considered a burden, and that many other baby girls are abandoned at the local orphanage simply because of their sex is poignant and revealing about the value placed on Indian women’s lives: apparently very little. An admirable, if at times slightly simplistic, examination of a gross inequality and its often fatal consequences.