Assistant Superintendent of Police KC Goswami

A senior police officer in Uttar Pradesh looked at a woman who said she had been raped, and said, "Why would anyone rape such an elderly woman?"The remark was filmed on Friday by local media in Deoria in Eastern Uttar Pradesh who wanted to expose the difficulty a woman was having in getting the police to register a case of rape.The police man who insulted the 35-year-old woman, greatly exacerbating the trauma of being raped and chasing policemen for two days to register her case, has been identified as Assistant Superintendent of Police KC Goswami. "Her oldest child is 14, why would anyone rape such an elderly woman?" he asked in front of a crowd.Her husband said, "She was dragged to the farms, and then she was raped. The police said that rape cannot happen to a 35-year-old." He says that on Wednesday night, she went to a farm and was raped by a villager she recognised. He allegedly strangled her and left her in the fields, assuming she was dead.Since a medical student was fatally gang-raped on a Delhi bus in December, activists and others have been highlighting the need for police officers to be trained in how to handle women who make complaints of sexual violence. The insensitivity of police men has been acknowledged as a major deterrent for survivors of sexual violence.

The Parliament this week cleared new laws to punish rape and other crimes against women, the result of the cross-country anger that followed December's attack.