Blog 010220 – Her name was Jyoti Singh

Two nights ago, 30 January, I watched a news article on ABC about the rapists who violently abused Jyoti Singh in December 2012 who are to be hanged, 1 February 2020. Because they reported from India, ABC said that they couldn’t use the name of the woman who was raped. I know who she was – and so does every other global newspaper and media I have read since December 2012. I will continue to use her name.

Earlier in 2012 I had started the Whacksworks blog. On 1 December 2012 I went to the inauguration TEDxSouthBankWomen in Brisbane, but I didn’t write about what caused me to cry for a long time after this excellent TEDx event. I was supported very well, there. Jyoti was raped only two weeks after my breakdown.

On 16 December 2012, in Munirka, South Delhi, India, Jyoti and her partner got onto a bus to go home from the movies, not knowing it was a private bus with 6 violent men on it. Those men beat Jyoti and her boyfriend, Awindra Pratap Pandey, with iron bars, viciously raped Jyoti, stuck their iron bars inside her vagina, then threw Jyoti and Awindra off the bus.

Jyoti died on 29 December 2012 - less than two weeks after she had been found and taken to hospital. At the beginning of 2013 I started my website, It’s Okay to be Angry. It was dedicated to Jyoti Singh.

I was so angry and that word doesn’t even describe how I felt. I published my IOTBA website with a memorial to Jyoti. She was the link from me to my website – and from me to her. In the 1970s I had been violently gang raped by 5 men who used a bayonet on me. I blocked that out of my mind, but 20 years later, when I found out about another person who had been raped in the same town in a similar way, that memory came back into my mind and set itself up. I remember this every day.

Jyoti’s disgusting, violent, abusive rapists have been alive for 7 years since they caused Jyoti’s death. Finally the last breath. If that could have happened to the 5 men who had raped me in New Zealand in the 1970s, I might feel better now. Reminders of Jyoti return me to anguish.

My IOTBA website was closed last year, 2019, because I can’t afford it any more. I wrote that website: it was and is copyright to me. My other website, Reibus, opened in January 2013, was also closed down in November 2019, after nearly 7 years. That website also had a link to my IOTBA site. For me, my links are joined together. There is still a blogpost for IOTBA, http://itsokaytobeangry.blogspot.com/. I have occasionally added articles there. Perhaps I still will.

I wish I was truly recovered, but I know that, 47 years later, I am not.


IOTBA website dedication for Jyoti:

Dedication: After I had started writing this site news reports hit the world headlines of a young woman gang-raped on a bus in India, sexually abused with an iron bar, thrown off to die, and who subsequently did die. No-one should ever have to contend with that sort of violence against them. This site is dedicated to her memory.