2004200920102011201220132014
5,000
0
10,000
15,000
20,000
25,000
30,000
35,000
sex Ual violenCe in inDia
Number of
alleged rapes
reported to
policeSource: http://www.bbc.comCreated in 2006, the Gulabi
Gang with about 400,000
women members has become
a terror of rapists, abusers and
corrupt policemenThe Only Way to See Change
Every day, Pal gets several cases like Janki’s, and with
most of them she is unable to contain her anger. After
all, she knows well what the pain suffered by these
women feels like. Pal herself was the daughter of poor
peasants, and she was forced to marry a 25-year-old man
soon after her first period.
“I was taken out of school when I didn’t yet know
how to read and write, and I became a slave in the
house of my in-laws”, she recalls. Three years later,
at the age of 15, she gave birth to the first of her five
children, who she delivered in a row, “one every year”.
But her strong character trumped the difficulty of
the situation and she made her in-laws respect her.
Soon, she found out what she really
wanted to do in life.to threaten and, if necessary, to beat up the abusers,”
says Pal. The latter is true, for in 2002 Pal found a man
beating a woman in the street and decided to intervene.
But she was quickly abused, too, so the following day,
she managed to convince five other women from her
village to beat him back. Her strategy yielded good
results then and hasn’t changed much since.
cover story