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Sexual violence in focus in capital's maiden 'slut walk'
Agence France Presse - June 9, 2011
Skimpily dressed women will take to the streets of New Delhi later this month for India's first "Slut Walk," a global movement to protest sexual violence.
The capital is India's most dangerous city for women, where leering and harassment are a daily menace and a woman is raped every 18 hours or molested every 14 hours, according to the latest police figures. A government-backed United Nations survey last year said about 85 percent of Delhi's women are perpetually scared of being sexually harassed.
"The purpose of a slut walk is to bring to the attention of society that the problem is not what we do, but what is done to us," Umang Sabarwal, a Delhi University student and the organizer of the June 25 protest, wrote on her Facebook page.
A Slut Walk was first held in Toronto this year after a police officer caused outrage by stating that "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized" during a speech to York University students.
The protest soon spread to more than 60 cities as women joined in huge numbers to challenge the mind-set that victims of sexual assault should be blamed for the crime against them on the grounds that they were "asking for it."
The event has already generated interest in the Indian media and on social networking Web sites, where some have called it a "walk for liberation" and others derided it for being silly and provocative.
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