Jeans have been designed in India to specifically thwart rapists after a string of attacks that have horrified the world.
The have been designed by two young women in India’s northern Varanasi city. Diksha Pathak, 21, and Anjali Srivastava, 23, said have installed a small electronic device in the jeans which – when pressed – will send a call to the nearest police station and then help officers locate the woman who had been wearing them using a tracker.
As many as 200 police stations in the city and its vicinity have been equipped with the technology to receive the alarm from the jeans when activated.
If tests to be carried out next month are successful, lawmakers will press for the system to be expanded nationwide.
“We have been thinking of making this device for a long time,” said Pathak, a science student and daughter of a cab driver.
“My father is often making himself ill with worry each time I am coming home late.
“These terrible gang rapes of women that we have heard so much about recently shocked me and my colleague to the very core. Hopefully no other women will have to suffer if they are wearing our clothing.”
Pathak said she was assisted by her friend, a student in electronics communication. A pair of the anti-rape jeans cost less than 25p in India, and can be worn for three months before the batteries need replacing.
Indian law enforcement and justice authorities have shirked their responsibility to fight sex attacks, a UN child rights watchdog said last week amid uproar over the horrific gang-rape and lynching of two girls.
“There has been a dereliction of duty in relation to rape cases,” said Benyam Mezmur, deputy chairman of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
India has been struggling to overcome its reputation for sexual violence since the fatal gang-rape of a student in New Delhi in December 2012, which sparked mass protests and drew international condemnation of India’s treatment of women.
Public outrage was reignited last month by the deaths of two girls, aged 12 and 14, who were gang-raped and lynched in their impoverished village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
A rape occurs every 22 minutes in India, according to government figures.
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