Compare India's metro cities to other world cities like Los Angeles and it seems Indian women are a lot safer in Indian cities with their lax policing and salivating men. Los Angeles, with the fabled LAPD and progressive movie industry, witnessed 27.3 rapes per 1,00,000 people in 2006.
According to the British Crime Record Survey in 2010 carried out by the home office, 4.2 per cent of British women above the age of 16 would suffer rape or attempted rape at least once in their lifetime.
By the 2008 figures, even countries like Belgium (29.5 per 1,00,000) and France (16.4 per 1,00,000) had higher figures than Delhi, the most unsafe place in India for women.
The twin incidents of gangrapes, one in Kolkata of a 37-year-old mother of two and the other one in Noida of a 17-year-old schoolgirl, have hit our sensibilities hard but one should not get carried away. Crimes against women and specially those related to rape and sexual assault are a big problem for every city and every society.
The Indian media also covers these incidents like they have become the order of the day. In this regard, Dave Prager, the American author of 'Delirious Delhi' who lived in Delhi with his wife, writes the following.
"It's clear even from the newspapers that Delhi's day-to-day dangers are nowhere near the level of even the safest American cities. The papers report every crime as if it heralds the end of days, but the fact that simple robberies make the news as often as they do suggests that bigger crimes are not occurring at a comparable rate. "Rs 1 lakh stolen from Punjab trader on bus," shouts one headline for a seven-paragraph article — a petty crime that, while unfortunate for the victim, wouldn't garner even a sentence in an American paper because so many bigger crimes would elbow it out of the way.
We just can't understand why Delhi's so safe. Not only do we not understand why angry young men haven't taken full control of the city, we can't even understand what keeps the grizzled old parking attendants from stealing the cars to which they're entrusted. In places like Defense Colony Market, rich businessmen routinely hand the keys to their million-rupee cars to a parking attendant with the accompanying promise of a ten-rupee tip. How could these poor men, when faced with such a quick ticket to easy street, not take advantage of it?
Never mind what Delhi's apocalyptic news media says. The real question is this: what's keeping a city of poor, jealous, sexually-frustrated young men from unleashing their aggressions and turning Delhi into Gotham City?"
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