The maid who comes to clean our home today told me that men find it okay to rape in slums because sexual violence is all they have seen with their mothers in tiny quarters and its their first instinct to prove dominance as a male. Thoughts?

I feel the root cause is that, some time in the history of India, probably an effect of the multiple aggression and the life & time with the aggressors, the mental mind set of looking at a lady as an object of sex, rather than as a mother, sister, daughter or even just as a friend, especially so  if she was seen to be unescorted & alone, got some how highlighted. And it is this facet of human behaviour which comes to the fore & blurs the intelligence of the male mind and provokes him to commit sexual crimes. It would be most revealing to know about the incidence of sexual crimes against women in countries which never had any aggression & it's people were never ruled by foreigners.

I think voices like these need to be brought into the conversation surrounding sexual violence today. A lot of rapes (including the unreported ones) happen in these communities. The culprits in the Dec '12 case were from the slums. Besides punishing those boys, it is time to also understand where the kind of mentality takes root, where young men and boys think a woman on the street is fair game to vent their violent fantasies.