Hanging these criminals won’t solve India’s rape problem

The appalling crime is still seared into India’s consciousness, said DNA India (Mumbai). In 2012, six drunken men attacked a physiotherapy student on a bus, beating up her male friend and raping and violating her with a metal rod. The 23-year-old victim, Jyoti Singh, became known as Nirbhaya, or “fearless one”, because of her valiant effort to fight off her assailants; she died of her injuries two weeks after the assault. One of the attackers later died in police custody in an apparent suicide; another, a minor, was sentenced to three years in prison. The other four were sentenced to death, a rare punishment in India, and earlier this month the Supreme Court upheld their sentences. They will hang: a suitable end for the criminals who awoke “a deep, seething rage” across India.

Nirbhaya’s case “remains a touchstone of almost mythical proportions”, said Namita Bhandare on Livemint.com (New Delhi). She was “the hard-working daughter of an airport loader who had sold his land in order to educate her”, an aspirational figure “India could and did empathise with”. Massive nationwide protests after her death led to new laws mandating tougher penalties for rape, and special courts to fast-track cases. Yet in practice, not that much has changed, said Millennium Post (New Delhi). The committee charged with overhauling the rape laws “highlighted the urgent need for greater safety measures for women who use public transport”. But more than four years later, all we have is a new panic-button app for smartphones, which is of little use to the – mostly poor – women who ride buses and rickshaws, and don’t possess those sorts of phones. The nearly £365m Nirbhaya Fund, a government pot to support programmes that protect women’s safety in public spaces, remains “almost entirely unspent”. Worst of all, the number of reported rape cases has grown by nearly 40% since 2012. Some of that surge may be due to women being more willing to come forward, but with 95 rapes reported every day on average, India must do better.

To fight rape, the country needs more than just better policing and tougher penalties, said The Indian Express (New Delhi). It also needs to change its culture to end “women’s economic marginalisation” and stamp out “regressive gender imagery” in the media. The execution of Nirbhaya’s attackers will bring a deceptive sense of “closure”. We must look beyond this one appalling case to address the “endemic” problems behind it.