Terrific Guardian piece by Emer O’Toole about the subliminal racism of much Western comment about the horrific death of an Indian rape-victim. Male violence against women is depressingly common in most societies — including our own. So, as O’Toole points out, there’s “a misplaced sense of cultural superiority” underpinning much Western media coverage of the Indian atrocity:

For example, this BBC article states, as if shocking, the statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours. That equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately four times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; in the US only 24% of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction. This is the strange kind of reportage you tend to get on the issue.