Stirred by recent events, a British writer has come out with a frank and harrowing account of how she was gangraped in India - nearly 40 years after the brutal attack.
Caroline Oulton, author of Dumped! A Single Mother Shoots From The Hip and Unsafe Attachments, said she was a 19-year-old virgin when she was raped by three men in Amritsar.
Her male friend was beaten with rocks and bottles and she was flung off the roof of a shed where they had been taken by one of the men on the pretext of a dinner invitation to his parent's house.
"The three of them, queuing impatiently at my feet, took it in turns to rape me through the night. They had acquired a gun and the youngest… came close to strangling me, his hands tight round my throat as he banged my head repeatedly against a stone," Oulton, who is now based in the US, wrote in The Times.
She said the attack on her was "emphatically not in the same league" as the "unutterably brutal" gang rape and subsequent death of a 23-year-old woman in a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. But "now, almost 40 years after I was raped, the news of these gang rapes preoccupy me with anxieties that I thought I had banished long ago."
{{/usCountry}}She said the attack on her was "emphatically not in the same league" as the "unutterably brutal" gang rape and subsequent death of a 23-year-old woman in a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. But "now, almost 40 years after I was raped, the news of these gang rapes preoccupy me with anxieties that I thought I had banished long ago."
{{/usCountry}}"Instead of being shot or strangled, I was loaded into a trailer attached to a tractor and, in exchange for performing oral sex on the boys who weren't driving, was taken to a youth hostel on the outskirts of the city at dawn where, unceremoniously, I was decanted.
"Unhinged," in pain and unable to spot her rapists at an identity parade, Oulton was jeered at by the local magistrate.