I will just post my views as an Indian.
Disclaimer : I, worldpeace, by any means don't intend to hurt any body's personal and national sentiments.
For me India has degraded a lot culturally and socially. And people credit this to the Western influence - modern dresses that expose a lot, disco, pop and all that stuff seems obscene.
My views are primarily of a conservative middle class Indian (the Islamic influence on my views are almost negligible ... remember polygamy is valid in Middle East Islamic countries and is generally disapproved in India ... Islamic value system especially with respect to women is altogether is separate topic).
As long as I was in BK the seriousness of the issues such as rape, prostitution, extra marital affairs, pre-marital sex and others really did not strike me (rather I was a teen then). Now ... I cry at the news that comes everyday in the papers ... internet and blogs ... The value systems are almost intact in the middle class Indian families (300 million - as large as USA) ... but at the bottom and top of the pyramid its worst.
I will say poor people are degraded because of the frustration of being poor and are being forced to live that way by the rich and the powerful, and most of them are idle without job and get in to bad habits at a very young age. It has now become their way of life. And for prostitution ... poverty and poverty is the only reason in 99.9% of the cases. Is this the reason in the Western world for prostitution? I guess it is more because of greed for money or just lust. For me still value systems are better in India than to the developed countries.
In the Western world, women are protected by law. In India, they are exploited by law and protected only by the respect for women. All those statistics in this thread are true ... but given the population of India, it might still compare better than actually what is projected. What people do voluntarily in the West - the openness, happens in India only because of force. So now this leads me to the question;
- Does souls take a single gender throughout the cycle or take both the genders?
How does all the crime against women - rape, prostitution, incest, child sex account for the Law of Karma?
Is not the nature/drama biased against women by making them physically weak?
If a women is forced in to prostitution by her negative karma and later she does that because she has no choice but enjoys doing that - will this be vikarma or akarma?
Applying the same logic of butcher whose job is to kill, to the prostitutes whose job is sex, will Dharamraj forgive them?
Whatever ... Given a choice I wont really be a woman .. We need to do something really about this ... Baba ... listening to me? Aren't women your children too?
BKs??
I know, I have typed out of topic ... Kindly excuse me ... its midnight here and I am really frustrated when i see the news - another women raped in Delhi in broad daylight ... darn ... one of them is a police ...