But Sandip Roy, a blogger who wrote about the Indian woman's rape, offered some food for thought. There were lessons to be learned, he said, by the tragedy in India. (Many of them relate to the lessons of gun violence as well.)We learned, Roy said, that "it's an exercise in futility to assign a hierarchy of rape as if one rape is more deserving of attention than the other." We learned that "it is possible to shake a country out of its apathy" and that "if enough people raise their voices a government cannot ignore them." We learned that "safety is not about what women do, wear or when they go out. It's about what men around them do."
"That girl could have been any one of us," an Indian mother cried at a candlelight vigil for Jyoti Singh Pandey. "We can only tackle this by becoming Durga," the Hindu god who slays demons, she said.
Let's hope we can discover the Durga in all our countries and cultures, and that whatever gods we pray to give us the courage to confront the scourge of rape and other violence against women. Until we do, none of us can claim to be safe, or to assume we live in a civilized world.
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