Research on Indian responses to recent rape scandals

Greetings! If you are an Indian living in the US reading this blog, some colleagues of mine are doing research on Indian responses to the Delhi Gang rape and other recent rape scandals in India. If you are interested in participating in this research, please see the below announcement forwarded from the RISA-L list serve: 

Nupur Agrawal, and I are conducting research on the recent rape scandals that have enveloped India. Nupur, a senior Religion and Psychology major, is a native of Gurjarat. She carried out surveys and interviews regarding attitudes towards rape and related issues this last summer in North India as part of a Mellon Undergraduate Summer Research grant. 

I originally conceived of the project during my visit last December-January to India, arriving in Delhi the day after Jyoti Singh Pandey (aka Nirbhaya and Braveheart, as the press initially called her) died in a Singapore hospital. I went to the protests near the Jantar Mantar and talked with a number of protesters, and like many, was deeply moved by the tragedy. 

During the spring semester, Nupur and I applied for the Mellon grant, and also created a First-Year Seminar course here at Trinity on the subject of "Rape in India, Rape in America, and Rape at Trinity." Nupur is serving as a peer tutor for the course, which we are teaching this fall. At the conclusion of the summer research, we realized we would like to obtain the views of Indians currently living in the U.S. to compare with the attitudes of those we gathered in India (about 550 responses to a SurveyMonkey survey).  

Accordingly, we slightly revised the survey, updating a few questions. For instance, we now ask two additional questions about the sentencing of the convicted rapists/murderers in the Pandey case. Most of the questions remain the same. This revised on-line survey can be found at:  

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ML2GSYV 

Participants must be 18 years or older. A participant is indicating his/her consent by completing the survey. 

If you are Indian, we would greatly appreciate your time and effort in completing this survey. We would also be most grateful if you were willing to send the link to this survey to Indian friends, colleagues, students, acquaintances, or relatives, or to post a link on appropriate web-sites or blogs.The survey takes approximately 12-15 minutes. The survey will be open for a few months. 

We guarantee your anonymity and of anyone who takes the survey. The survey is for educational and scholarly purposes only. The results of the survey, with analysis and commentary, will be utilized in a presentation at the national meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November of 2013, and eventual publication in a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal article or book. 

This study has been approved by Trinity University's Institutional Review Board (IRB). If you have any questions about the IRB approval, you may contact Trinity's IRB chair, Dr. Jane Childers, at: jchilder@trinity.edu. 

If you have any questions for the researchers, you can email us at mbrown@trinity.edu, or nagrawal@trinity.edu, or call Mackenzie Brown at 210-999-8429. 

We thank you in advance for your time. It will be greatly appreciated. 

Dr. C. Mackenzie Brown and Nupur Agrawal