One of the men involved in the 2012 Delhi gang-rape has sparked outrage after claiming that the victim was to blame for being sexually assaulted.
“A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” Mukesh Singh said in an interview from jail, according to The Telegraph.
The 23-year-old was raped on a moving bus in Delhi and protests from women in India sought protection.
Singh claimed that women who went out at night were to be blamed if they got the attention of molesters.
“You can’t clap with one hand – it takes two hands,” he said, in an interview for a BBC documentary.
Not even slightly ashamed of his action, Singh stated,”“A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 per cent of girls are good.”
Singh described the killing as an accident and said that when a woman’s being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. “she should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after ‘doing her’, and only hit the boy.”
He added that if Jyoti and her male friend had not resisted the rape then the gang members would not have beaten her up to death.
Singh, a slum-dweller who was 26 at the time of the attack, was driving the bus when the abduction occurred and denied involvement in the attack itself. However, the court rejected his claims adding there was strong DNA evidence against him and he could have stopped the act.
With his death sentence currently on appeal, Singh said the executions will only further put lives of future rape victims at risk.
“The death penalty will make things even more dangerous for girls,” he says. “Before, they would rape and say, ‘Leave her, she won’t tell anyone.’ Now when they rape, especially the criminal types, they will just kill the girl. Death,” he said.