The young girls always traveled in pairs when walking to the wheat fields near their northern Indian village at night to relieve themselves before bed. That precaution wasn’t enough to prevent them from being raped and killed last week.
Women in Katra village, where the murders took place, describe the act of open defecation as one of fear and indecency, where the threat of attack and harassment is unavoidable. Three men are accused by police of abducting the girls, 12 and 14, before gang raping them, and then hanging them from a mango tree by their head scarves.
“We’re scared when we go into the fields because we have exposed ourselves and there’s no protection,” said Sridevi, the mother of one of the victims, sitting in a shady corner of her home under police protection. Her last name is being withheld under a law that grants victims anonymity. “The world doesn’t offer us the decency to let us defecate in private.”
Typically considered a private moment, relieving oneself may now become one of India’s most public issues in the aftermath of the killings. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who won the largest electoral mandate in 30 years last month, vowed to build a toilet in every home in a nation where half of India’s 1.2 billion people currently defecate in the open, the highest number in the world…
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