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雅思閱讀精選：印度輪奸案受害者姓名應"被匿名"嗎?(From：TIME)
Should the Indian Gang-Rape Victim Remain Anonymous?
As the ashes of the young New Delhi rape victim were scattered in the Ganges this week, a new debate started to take shape about the chilling attack that has sent India into a period of deep introspection. For weeks, protesters and newspapers have used a series of symbolic names to refer to the 23-year-old physiotherapy student who died Dec. 29 from the injuries inflicted on her during a brutal gang rape earlier in the month. One network calls her “the Braveheart”; another calls her “Amanat,” or treasure. That’s because Indian law prohibits making public the names of victims of rape. The Indian press, which has reported extensively on the victim’s family, friends and hometown, has taken great care to obscure any details that may identify her.
Now some are questioning why. This week, Minister of Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor wondered aloud on his popular Twitter feed what, exactly, the purpose was of keeping the victim’s name shrouded in secrecy. “Why not name&honour her as a real person w/own identity?” he wrote on Jan. 1. “Unless her parents object, she should be honoured & the revised anti-rape law named after her. She was a human being w/a name, not just a symbol.”
Protecting the anonymity of rape victims in court and the media is a widely practiced way to give them the space to recover and to protect them from further harm. It is part of the Indian penal code and has been supported in amendments to the country’s anti-rape legislation. In 1983, that law went through several changes after another egregious sexual assault mobilized women’s groups to fight for improvements to the law. In recent weeks, the government has again promised several revisions that would toughen it further, one of several measures the government has taken to improve the safety of women in India since the Dec. 16 attack. “Confidentiality is a human right when it comes to the victim,” says Anne Stenhammer, the regional program director for UN Women South Asia. “If the family of the victim wants to reveal the name, that is a different case.”
Evidently, at least some of the family does. Support for Tharoor’s idea has come from protesters, activists and more recently the victim’s father. He said naming the revised anti-rape law after his daughter would be “a step in the right direction” in a recent interview with news network CNN-IBN. “A law named after an individual, for whom the entire country came together, will obviously be much more effective,” he said. “This will also ensure that she will be immortalized forever.”
