SHANE SMITH: This week on "Vice,"
women fight back against rape in India.
SMITH: Then, the horrific aftereffects
of Soviet-era nuclear testing.
[Beeping]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Move that camera, eh?
[Yells command in native language]
[Crowd cheering]
[Chanting in foreign language]
Uhh!
What's your answer, then, to
all the recent cases that have been
happening against women?
So this is the epicenter of a nuclear bomb.
It's what it looks like.
Sync & corrections by honeybunny www.addic7ed.com
India's rape issue grabbed the world's attention
in December 2012 when mass protests erupted in New Delhi
after a 23-year-old student was savagely gang-raped
and beaten to death by 5 men and a teenage boy.
Now, the Indian authorities claim to be addressing the issue,
however, statistics have shown a sharp increase in rapes
and many experts say that even those numbers fail to capture
the accurate levels of sexual assault
because of factors like intimidation,
the social stigma associated with rape,
and the historic distrust of the local police,
which keeps many victims from seeking due process of law.
So we sent Gelareh Kiazand to Delhi to try to see
what, if any, progress is being made.
♪
KIAZAND: We arrived in Delhi as fireworks and sparklers
lit up the night to celebrate one of the Hindu religion's
biggest holidays: Diwali.
Aah! [Laughs]
But in December 2012, India's streets exploded
after a very different fuse was lit.
The gruesome details of the "Rape Heard Around the World"
sparked a public outcry as India's rape crisis
became an international issue.
Intense public pressure led to
the adult perpetrators of the gang rape
being sentenced to death.
KIAZAND: Since reported rapes in India
have risen 900% over the past 40 years,
we spoke to New Delhi's deputy police commissioner
to find out what they were doing to stem the tide.
KIAZAND: There's been a lot of reports that
a lot of rape cases don't get filed.
KIAZAND: The Deputy Commissioner wanted to show us
how they were addressing the rape problem.
[Telephone ringing]
How many years have you been working here?
Two years.
Can I ask how old you are? Is that OK?
22. Oh, wow.
Started when you were 20.
It's a tough job.
No? OK.
KIAZAND: The bus gang rapes spurred India's Parliament
to pass a new law that expanded the definition
of rape as a crime
to for the first time include
oral and rape by a foreign object
and installed harsher punishment for perpetrators.
We wanted to know whether
changing definitions and lengthening prison sentences
is remotely enough,
so we spoke with Vrinda Grover, a lawyer in Delhi's high court.
KIAZAND: Reports of rape in Delhi have doubled
since the bus gang rape.
But, sadly, Delhi might be
as good as it gets in northern India.
Because in the rural countryside,
they have even less law and order.
Approximately 70% of India's population
lives outside of the cities.
So we took a train to Banda in rural Uttar Pradesh
to see how the police treat women there.
We're now in Uttar Pradesh, which is
north central of India.
There is a rape every 20 minutes in this country.
In a place like Uttar Pradesh,
most of them don't even get reported.
The one voice out here that fights against
this violence towards women is Sampat Pal.
She created the Gulabi Gang, meaning the Pink Gang,
made entirely of women with the aim at
empowering victims to seek justice.
The Pink Gang's strength in numbers
prevent the women from being intimidated into silence,
and in turn puts pressure on authorities to take action.
KIAZAND: We traveled further into the countryside
to get a look at the kind of cases
that Sampat and the Gulabi Gang face on a regular basis.
In the extremely poor village of Rauli Kalyanpur,
we met the mother of a victim
who was brutally raped by a 42-year-old neighbor.
The victim was just 12 years old.
KIAZAND: These villages are so small that many residents know
not only the victims, but the rapists as well.
The crimes go unpunished and the victims are shamed into silence.
KIAZAND: Since the man accused of the crime
had not been prosecuted,
we wanted to meet the police who were ignoring the matter.
At the local station, we saw
what the victim's family was up against.
KIAZAND: In India, it is common knowledge
that many police officers are corrupt.
A survey by Transparency International found that
of Indian citizens that came in contact with the police,
62% admitted to paying them a bribe.
What is your opinion on
all the corruption that takes place?
For example, the bribery
that happens with the witnesses,
the fact that the doctors are lying.
What is your take on all this?
KIAZAND: After the police's outright refusal
to even acknowledge any of our questions,
we went to speak to a superior district superintendent
and, while he did speak to us,
the answers he gave were even more dismaying.
What's your answer, then, to
all the recent cases that have been
happening against women?
KIAZAND: Often in these villages, the offender's family
pay off the police, who in turn
not only dissuade the girl's families from pursuing the case,
but also offer them a small portion of their own bribe
to stay quiet.
We spoke to a couple who suspect their daughter's in-laws
of murdering her after she had given birth to a child.
Though their daughter's body is missing,
the couple can't even get the local police to file a report,
as they have been threatened by the accused
and offered bribes by the authorities.
KIAZAND: When we tried to follow up on this crime,
we were met with the seemingly standard operating procedure
of the police, which is to not even say a word.
No one's following this up,
but I want to know what you think of this.
He's not gonna speak.
KIAZAND: The more the police ignored us,
the more we understood the decision of female victims
to succumb to silence.
KIAZAND: With little protection from police,
there's no other option but to form their own group
to support victims and try to prevent future crimes.
KIAZAND: Sampat says there are presently over 100,000 members
of the Gulabi Gang.
The rise of social movements like this
has caught the attention of psychologists
like Dr. Pulkit Sharma,
who is studying the issue of rape in India.
Would a movement like the Pink Sari revolution
be beneficial?
KIAZAND: She not only groups women together
for strength in numbers,
but teaches them to defend themselves.
KIAZAND: Hopefully, moving forward,
groups like the Gulabi Gang
will effect the change that's needed in India.
We witnessed a sign of this firsthand
when the mother of the 12-year-old rape victim,
who only days earlier was contemplating suicide,
had now, because of the Gulabi Gang, decided to fight back.
♪
When the first atomic weapons were used in World War II,
the long-term health risks of radiation exposure
were largely unknown.
Then, during the Cold War,
as the U.S. and Soviet Union
tested larger and larger warheads,
they studied the aftereffects more closely.
The Soviet Union, in some cases,
tested theirs over a populated region of Kazakhstan,
known as the Polygon.
Today, this area of Kazakhstan
is still experiencing continuing health problems
traditionally associated with the exposure to radiation.
In fact, the problem is so severe
that some doctors in the region have proposed the radical idea
of a genetic passport to iififify
the people who are affected in an effort to prevent
these problems from continuing.
So we sent Thomas Morton to the Polygon
to see firsthand what this health crisis looks like.
Now, we'd like to warn you that
some of the footage in this piece is very, very graphic
and it could be disturbing.
♪
[Beeping]
♪
MORTON: Hi. It's Thomas. I'm in Kazakhstan
at the epicenter of a Soviet nuclear explosion.
In a rowboat.
This is where the Soviets tested all their weapons.
It's called the Semipalatinsk Testing Polygon.
They chose a place that was relatively uninhabited,
but relatively uninhabited, of course, by Soviet terms means
1.6 million Kazakhs who were here,
and the lasting impact isn't just holes like these,
but permanent modifications to our human genome.
♪
MORTON: Dr. Boris Gusev is a doctor
at the Semipalatinsk Radiological Institute.
During the Soviet nuclear testing in the fifties,
he was assigned to dispensary number 4,
a secret KGB hospital studying the effects of the radiation
on the Kazakh people.
MORTON: Why do you think the Soviets
didn't ask these people to evacuate?
Why not tell anybody that?
Why didn't they do that?
[Chuckles]
Do you think that affects the genetics
of the people who were exposed?
MORTON: This is the heart of the Polygon,
where the Soviets detonated over 450 nuclear explosions.
It is a completely desolated post-apocalyptic wasteland
and still thoroughly irradiated over 40 years after
the last bombs went off.
A radiation researcher from the nearby Kurchatov Institute
guided us to the center of the blast site.
So this is the epicenter of a nuclear bomb.
Everything's got kind of an unhealthy hue.
[Beeping]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
That's amazing.
So the sort of glassy-looking stuff
is rocks that were basically
caramelized by the atomic blast
and are still extraordinarily radioactive.
MORTON: These rocks that are pushing our Geiger counter
even further into the red
were turned into glass by the heat of the nuclear explosions.
The amount of radiation they're emitting is the equivalent of
getting 3 CAT scans an hour, every hour, all day long.
♪
While the nuclear bombs were all set off
at the semiuninhabited testing site,
radioactive fallout from each of the blasts
drifted into the fully inhabited villages surrounding it.
Like this one: Kainar, a town where 1/3 of the local children
have diseases related to radiation exposure.
And this is the current crop of children,
born 3 generations after the last nuclear tests.
Dr. Akimbay is the local doctor in Kainar
and also its former mayor,
neither of which are enviable positions
given the town's general state of health.
All these houses are sick houses.
Uh-huh.
MORTON: Every home we visited in Kainar
housed somebody dead or dying or deformed from radiation.
There were families where every single member
suffered from something horrendous like birth defects
or multiple simultaneous forms of cancer.
MORTON: Is it valid to be worried about
people from Kainar going to big cities
and intermarrying with other people?
♪
While the effects of the Polygon in a lot of cases
aren't very visible,
things that lie in your blood stream and in the genetics
and they come out and become very visible
later on down the road.
We're going to go hang out with a local here named Berik,
whose mom was exposed to a lot of nasty stuff in the Polygon
and he basically bears the brunt of it on his face.
MORTON: Berik's skin deformity is untreatable
in a place like Kazakhstan.
Has left him blind and forced to live off his aging mother
and whatever slim handouts he can make
busking with his dombra.
Did the Soviet, uh, government or army
ever apologize for it or try to make any amends?
So what is this? This shows
that you lived in the Polygon?
What does it say?
MORTON: To keep track of the Polygon's victims
and their health problems,
the government issued this Polygon I.D.,
which looks like a nuclear passport,
but there are some in Semey who want to turn this medical I.D.
into something closer to an actual passport,
one for your DNA.
♪
While the situation with Polygon sufferers seems
kind of hopelessly bleak, there is, uh,
one doctor in Semey
who's offered a comprehensive solution.
His name is Dr. Toleukhan and what he's proposed
is a genetic passport, by basically,
Polygon sufferers would each be assigned this card
where they do their genetic screenings,
they write down the results on it,
and it determines whether or not they're fit to give birth.
MORTON: Dr. Toleukhan has spent years
treating the victims of the Polygon in Semey
and has been fighting for his proposed genetic passport
since losing his wife to a Polygon-related illness.
He himself is from a agagage in the Polygon
and has suffered from both lung and blood cancers he attributes
to the long-term effects of radiation.
He also lost his son at age 35, again due to the Polygon.
♪
MORTON: Does that not scare people,
that it could be misused
or that it could be used to force people not to marry?
MORTON: At this point, I can't help but feel
that what Dr. Toleukhan's proposing
sounds suspiciously close to old eugenics theory
or just plain old mad science,
especially in the context of a room full of jarred fetuses.
The next place he took me, however,
put the true scope of the genetic crisis
in full perspective.
How many kids on average are abandoned here?
MORTON: What's wrong with each of these guys?
♪
MORTON: Why did the parents give these children up?
Why aren't they taking care of them themselves?
What's it like for them? Are these kids in pain
or are they just kind of in their own world?
MORTON: These are all the aftereffects from
radioactive testing 60 years ago?
♪
If there'd been genetic passports
when you met your wife,
would you not still have married her?
♪
Sync & corrections by honeybunny www.addic7ed.com