On the night of December 16, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in Delhi, India was walking home from watching Life of Pi with a male friend. They paid 36 cents to board one of the private buses that serves as public transportation in India's capital.
The crew and passengers, six in all, were all men, residents of a local slum who had been drinking and circling the city in search of entertainment. They spent the next hour beating the friend and brutally gang-raping the woman, finishing off with a metal rod before dumping them half-naked and unconscious onto the street. Doctors later removed the woman's badly damaged intestines in a futile attempt to save her life.
The incident has sparked outrage both in India and abroad and prompted calls for a reassessment of India's male-dominated culture, which often treats women as second-class citizens and trivializes their abuse, sexual and otherwise. There are a lot of difficult questions to be asked.
