VICE (2013) s02e07 Episode Script
The Pink Gang Rebellion and Genetic Passport
SHANE SMITH: This week on "Vice," women fight back against rape in India.
SMITH: Then, the horrific aftereffects of Soviet-era nuclear testing.
[Beeping.]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Move that camera, eh? [Yells command in native language.]
[Crowd cheering.]
[Chanting in foreign language.]
Uhh! What's your answer, then, to all the recent cases that have been happening against women? So this is the epicenter of a nuclear bomb.
It's what it looks like.
India's rape issue grabbed the world's attention in December 2012 when mass protests erupted in New Delhi after a 23-year-old student was savagely gang-raped and beaten to death by 5 men and a teenage boy.
Now, the Indian authorities claim to be addressing the issue, however, statistics have shown a sharp increase in rapes and many experts say that even those numbers fail to capture the accurate levels of sexual assault because of factors like intimidation, the social stigma associated with rape, and the historic distrust of the local police, which keeps many victims from seeking due process of law.
So we sent Gelareh Kiazand to Delhi to try to see what, if any, progress is being made.
KIAZAND: We arrived in Delhi as fireworks and sparklers lit up the night to celebrate one of the Hindu religion's biggest holidays: Diwali.
Aah! [Laughs.]
But in December 2012, India's streets exploded after a very different fuse was lit.
The gruesome details of the "Rape Heard Around the World" sparked a public outcry as India's rape crisis became an international issue.
Intense public pressure led to the adult perpetrators of the gang rape being sentenced to death.
KIAZAND: Since reported rapes in India have risen 900% over the past 40 years, we spoke to New Delhi's deputy police commissioner to find out what they were doing to stem the tide.
KIAZAND: There's been a lot of reports that a lot of rape cases don't get filed.
KIAZAND: The Deputy Commissioner wanted to show us how they were addressing the rape problem.
[Telephone ringing.]
How many years have you been working here? Two years.
Can I ask how old you are? Is that OK? Started when you were 20.
It's a tough job.
No? OK.
KIAZAND: The bus gang rapes spurred India's Parliament to pass a new law that expanded the definition of rape as a crime to for the first time include oral and rape by a foreign object and installed harsher punishment for perpetrators.
We wanted to know whether changing definitions and lengthening prison sentences is remotely enough, so we spoke with Vrinda Grover, a lawyer in Delhi's high court.
KIAZAND: Reports of rape in Delhi have doubled since the bus gang rape.
But, sadly, Delhi might be as good as it gets in northern India.
Because in the rural countryside, they have even less law and order.
Approximately 70% of India's population lives outside of the cities.
So we took a train to Banda in rural Uttar Pradesh to see how the police treat women there.
We're now in Uttar Pradesh, which is north central of India.
There is a rape every In a place like Uttar Pradesh, most of them don't even get reported.
The one voice out here that fights against this violence towards women is Sampat Pal.
She created the Gulabi Gang, meaning the Pink Gang, made entirely of women with the aim at empowering victims to seek justice.
The Pink Gang's strength in numbers prevent the women from being intimidated into silence, and in turn puts pressure on authorities to take action.
KIAZAND: We traveled further into the countryside to get a look at the kind of cases that Sampat and the Gulabi Gang face on a regular basis.
In the extremely poor village of Rauli Kalyanpur, we met the mother of a victim who was brutally raped by a 42-year-old neighbor.
The victim was just 12 years old.
KIAZAND: These villages are so small that many residents know not only the victims, but the rapists as well.
The crimes go unpunished and the victims are shamed into silence.
KIAZAND: Since the man accused of the crime had not been prosecuted, we wanted to meet the police who were ignoring the matter.
At the local station, we saw what the victim's family was up against.
KIAZAND: In India, it is common knowledge that many police officers are corrupt.
A survey by Transparency International found that of Indian citizens that came in contact with the police, to paying them a bribe.
What is your opinion on all the corruption that takes place? For example, the bribery that happens with the witnesses, the fact that the doctors are lying.
What is your take on all this? KIAZAND: After the police's outright refusal to even acknowledge any of our questions, we went to speak to a superior district superintendent and, while he did speak to us, the answers he gave were even more dismaying.
What's your answer, then, to all the recent cases that have been happening against women? KIAZAND: Often in these villages, the offender's family pay off the police, who in turn not only dissuade the girl's families from pursuing the case, but also offer them a small portion of their own bribe to stay quiet.
We spoke to a couple who suspect their daughter's in-laws of murdering her after she had given birth to a child.
Though their daughter's body is missing, the couple can't even get the local police to file a report, as they have been threatened by the accused and offered bribes by the authorities.
KIAZAND: When we tried to follow up on this crime, we were met with the seemingly standard operating procedure of the police, which is to not even say a word.
No one's following this up, but I want to know what you think of this.
He's not gonna speak.
KIAZAND: The more the police ignored us, the more we understood the decision of female victims to succumb to silence.
KIAZAND: With little protection from police, there's no other option but to form their own group to support victims and try to prevent future crimes.
KIAZAND: Sampat says there are presently over 100,000 members of the Gulabi Gang.
The rise of social movements like this has caught the attention of psychologists like Dr.
Pulkit Sharma, who is studying the issue of rape in India.
Would a movement like the Pink Sari revolution be beneficial? KIAZAND: She not only groups women together for strength in numbers, but teaches them to defend themselves.
KIAZAND: Hopefully, moving forward, groups like the Gulabi Gang will effect the change that's needed in India.
We witnessed a sign of this firsthand when the mother of the 12-year-old rape victim, who only days earlier was contemplating suicide, had now, because of the Gulabi Gang, decided to fight back.
When the first atomic weapons were used in World War II, the long-term health risks of radiation exposure were largely unknown.
Then, during the Cold War, as the U.
S.
and Soviet Union tested larger and larger warheads, they studied the aftereffects more closely.
The Soviet Union, in some cases, tested theirs over a populated region of Kazakhstan, known as the Polygon.
Today, this area of Kazakhstan is still experiencing continuing health problems traditionally associated with the exposure to radiation.
In fact, the problem is so severe that some doctors in the region have proposed the radical idea of a genetic passport to iififify the people who are affected in an effort to prevent these problems from continuing.
So we sent Thomas Morton to the Polygon to see firsthand what this health crisis looks like.
Now, we'd like to warn you that some of the footage in this piece is very, very graphic and it could be disturbing.
[Beeping.]
MORTON: Hi.
It's Thomas.
I'm in Kazakhstan at the epicenter of a Soviet nuclear explosion.
In a rowboat.
This is where the Soviets tested all their weapons.
It's called the Semipalatinsk Testing Polygon.
They chose a place that was relatively uninhabited, but relatively uninhabited, of course, by Soviet terms means who were here, and the lasting impact isn't just holes like these, but permanent modifications to our human genome.
MORTON: Dr.
Boris Gusev is a doctor at the Semipalatinsk Radiological Institute.
During the Soviet nuclear testing in the fifties, he was assigned to dispensary number 4, a secret KGB hospital studying the effects of the radiation on the Kazakh people.
MORTON: Why do you think the Soviets didn't ask these people to evacuate? Why not tell anybody that? Why didn't they do that? [Chuckles.]
Do you think that affects the genetics of the people who were exposed? MORTON: This is the heart of the Polygon, where the Soviets detonated over 450 nuclear explosions.
It is a completely desolated post-apocalyptic wasteland and still thoroughly irradiated over 40 years after the last bombs went off.
A radiation researcher from the nearby Kurchatov Institute guided us to the center of the blast site.
So this is the epicenter of a nuclear bomb.
Everything's got kind of an unhealthy hue.
[Beeping.]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
That's amazing.
So the sort of glassy-looking stuff is rocks that were basically caramelized by the atomic blast and are still extraordinarily radioactive.
MORTON: These rocks that are pushing our Geiger counter even further into the red were turned into glass by the heat of the nuclear explosions.
The amount of radiation they're emitting is the equivalent of getting 3 CAT scans an hour, every hour, all day long.
While the nuclear bombs were all set off at the semiuninhabited testing site, radioactive fallout from each of the blasts drifted into the fully inhabited villages surrounding it.
Like this one: Kainar, a town where 1/3 of the local children have diseases related to radiation exposure.
And this is the current crop of children, born 3 generations after the last nuclear tests.
Dr.
Akimbay is the local doctor in Kainar and also its former mayor, neither of which are enviable positions given the town's general state of health.
All these houses are sick houses.
Uh-huh.
MORTON: Every home we visited in Kainar housed somebody dead or dying or deformed from radiation.
There were families where every single member suffered from something horrendous like birth defects or multiple simultaneous forms of cancer.
MORTON: Is it valid to be worried about people from Kainar going to big cities and intermarrying with other people? While the effects of the Polygon in a lot of cases aren't very visible, things that lie in your blood stream and in the genetics and they come out and become very visible later on down the road.
We're going to go hang out with a local here named Berik, whose mom was exposed to a lot of nasty stuff in the Polygon and he basically bears the brunt of it on his face.
MORTON: Berik's skin deformity is untreatable in a place like Kazakhstan.
Has left him blind and forced to live off his aging mother and whatever slim handouts he can make busking with his dombra.
Did the Soviet, uh, government or army ever apologize for it or try to make any amends? So what is this? This shows that you lived in the Polygon? What does it say? MORTON: To keep track of the Polygon's victims and their health problems, the government issued this Polygon I.
D.
, which looks like a nuclear passport, but there are some in Semey who want to turn this medical I.
D.
into something closer to an actual passport, one for your DNA.
While the situation with Polygon sufferers seems kind of hopelessly bleak, there is, uh, one doctor in Semey who's offered a comprehensive solution.
His name is Dr.
Toleukhan and what he's proposed is a genetic passport, by basically, Polygon sufferers would each be assigned this card where they do their genetic screenings, they write down the results on it, and it determines whether or not they're fit to give birth.
MORTON: Dr.
Toleukhan has spent years treating the victims of the Polygon in Semey and has been fighting for his proposed genetic passport since losing his wife to a Polygon-related illness.
He himself is from a agagage in the Polygon and has suffered from both lung and blood cancers he attributes to the long-term effects of radiation.
He also lost his son at age 35, again due to the Polygon.
MORTON: Does that not scare people, that it could be misused or that it could be used to force people not to marry? MORTON: At this point, I can't help but feel that what Dr.
Toleukhan's proposing sounds suspiciously close to old eugenics theory or just plain old mad science, especially in the context of a room full of jarred fetuses.
The next place he took me, however, put the true scope of the genetic crisis in full perspective.
How many kids on average are abandoned here? MORTON: What's wrong with each of these guys? MORTON: Why did the parents give these children up? Why aren't they taking care of them themselves? What's it like for them? Are these kids in pain or are they just kind of in their own world? MORTON: These are all the aftereffects from radioactive testing If there'd been genetic passports when you met your wife, would you not still have married her?
SMITH: Then, the horrific aftereffects of Soviet-era nuclear testing.
[Beeping.]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Move that camera, eh? [Yells command in native language.]
[Crowd cheering.]
[Chanting in foreign language.]
Uhh! What's your answer, then, to all the recent cases that have been happening against women? So this is the epicenter of a nuclear bomb.
It's what it looks like.
India's rape issue grabbed the world's attention in December 2012 when mass protests erupted in New Delhi after a 23-year-old student was savagely gang-raped and beaten to death by 5 men and a teenage boy.
Now, the Indian authorities claim to be addressing the issue, however, statistics have shown a sharp increase in rapes and many experts say that even those numbers fail to capture the accurate levels of sexual assault because of factors like intimidation, the social stigma associated with rape, and the historic distrust of the local police, which keeps many victims from seeking due process of law.
So we sent Gelareh Kiazand to Delhi to try to see what, if any, progress is being made.
KIAZAND: We arrived in Delhi as fireworks and sparklers lit up the night to celebrate one of the Hindu religion's biggest holidays: Diwali.
Aah! [Laughs.]
But in December 2012, India's streets exploded after a very different fuse was lit.
The gruesome details of the "Rape Heard Around the World" sparked a public outcry as India's rape crisis became an international issue.
Intense public pressure led to the adult perpetrators of the gang rape being sentenced to death.
KIAZAND: Since reported rapes in India have risen 900% over the past 40 years, we spoke to New Delhi's deputy police commissioner to find out what they were doing to stem the tide.
KIAZAND: There's been a lot of reports that a lot of rape cases don't get filed.
KIAZAND: The Deputy Commissioner wanted to show us how they were addressing the rape problem.
[Telephone ringing.]
How many years have you been working here? Two years.
Can I ask how old you are? Is that OK? Started when you were 20.
It's a tough job.
No? OK.
KIAZAND: The bus gang rapes spurred India's Parliament to pass a new law that expanded the definition of rape as a crime to for the first time include oral and rape by a foreign object and installed harsher punishment for perpetrators.
We wanted to know whether changing definitions and lengthening prison sentences is remotely enough, so we spoke with Vrinda Grover, a lawyer in Delhi's high court.
KIAZAND: Reports of rape in Delhi have doubled since the bus gang rape.
But, sadly, Delhi might be as good as it gets in northern India.
Because in the rural countryside, they have even less law and order.
Approximately 70% of India's population lives outside of the cities.
So we took a train to Banda in rural Uttar Pradesh to see how the police treat women there.
We're now in Uttar Pradesh, which is north central of India.
There is a rape every In a place like Uttar Pradesh, most of them don't even get reported.
The one voice out here that fights against this violence towards women is Sampat Pal.
She created the Gulabi Gang, meaning the Pink Gang, made entirely of women with the aim at empowering victims to seek justice.
The Pink Gang's strength in numbers prevent the women from being intimidated into silence, and in turn puts pressure on authorities to take action.
KIAZAND: We traveled further into the countryside to get a look at the kind of cases that Sampat and the Gulabi Gang face on a regular basis.
In the extremely poor village of Rauli Kalyanpur, we met the mother of a victim who was brutally raped by a 42-year-old neighbor.
The victim was just 12 years old.
KIAZAND: These villages are so small that many residents know not only the victims, but the rapists as well.
The crimes go unpunished and the victims are shamed into silence.
KIAZAND: Since the man accused of the crime had not been prosecuted, we wanted to meet the police who were ignoring the matter.
At the local station, we saw what the victim's family was up against.
KIAZAND: In India, it is common knowledge that many police officers are corrupt.
A survey by Transparency International found that of Indian citizens that came in contact with the police, to paying them a bribe.
What is your opinion on all the corruption that takes place? For example, the bribery that happens with the witnesses, the fact that the doctors are lying.
What is your take on all this? KIAZAND: After the police's outright refusal to even acknowledge any of our questions, we went to speak to a superior district superintendent and, while he did speak to us, the answers he gave were even more dismaying.
What's your answer, then, to all the recent cases that have been happening against women? KIAZAND: Often in these villages, the offender's family pay off the police, who in turn not only dissuade the girl's families from pursuing the case, but also offer them a small portion of their own bribe to stay quiet.
We spoke to a couple who suspect their daughter's in-laws of murdering her after she had given birth to a child.
Though their daughter's body is missing, the couple can't even get the local police to file a report, as they have been threatened by the accused and offered bribes by the authorities.
KIAZAND: When we tried to follow up on this crime, we were met with the seemingly standard operating procedure of the police, which is to not even say a word.
No one's following this up, but I want to know what you think of this.
He's not gonna speak.
KIAZAND: The more the police ignored us, the more we understood the decision of female victims to succumb to silence.
KIAZAND: With little protection from police, there's no other option but to form their own group to support victims and try to prevent future crimes.
KIAZAND: Sampat says there are presently over 100,000 members of the Gulabi Gang.
The rise of social movements like this has caught the attention of psychologists like Dr.
Pulkit Sharma, who is studying the issue of rape in India.
Would a movement like the Pink Sari revolution be beneficial? KIAZAND: She not only groups women together for strength in numbers, but teaches them to defend themselves.
KIAZAND: Hopefully, moving forward, groups like the Gulabi Gang will effect the change that's needed in India.
We witnessed a sign of this firsthand when the mother of the 12-year-old rape victim, who only days earlier was contemplating suicide, had now, because of the Gulabi Gang, decided to fight back.
When the first atomic weapons were used in World War II, the long-term health risks of radiation exposure were largely unknown.
Then, during the Cold War, as the U.
S.
and Soviet Union tested larger and larger warheads, they studied the aftereffects more closely.
The Soviet Union, in some cases, tested theirs over a populated region of Kazakhstan, known as the Polygon.
Today, this area of Kazakhstan is still experiencing continuing health problems traditionally associated with the exposure to radiation.
In fact, the problem is so severe that some doctors in the region have proposed the radical idea of a genetic passport to iififify the people who are affected in an effort to prevent these problems from continuing.
So we sent Thomas Morton to the Polygon to see firsthand what this health crisis looks like.
Now, we'd like to warn you that some of the footage in this piece is very, very graphic and it could be disturbing.
[Beeping.]
MORTON: Hi.
It's Thomas.
I'm in Kazakhstan at the epicenter of a Soviet nuclear explosion.
In a rowboat.
This is where the Soviets tested all their weapons.
It's called the Semipalatinsk Testing Polygon.
They chose a place that was relatively uninhabited, but relatively uninhabited, of course, by Soviet terms means who were here, and the lasting impact isn't just holes like these, but permanent modifications to our human genome.
MORTON: Dr.
Boris Gusev is a doctor at the Semipalatinsk Radiological Institute.
During the Soviet nuclear testing in the fifties, he was assigned to dispensary number 4, a secret KGB hospital studying the effects of the radiation on the Kazakh people.
MORTON: Why do you think the Soviets didn't ask these people to evacuate? Why not tell anybody that? Why didn't they do that? [Chuckles.]
Do you think that affects the genetics of the people who were exposed? MORTON: This is the heart of the Polygon, where the Soviets detonated over 450 nuclear explosions.
It is a completely desolated post-apocalyptic wasteland and still thoroughly irradiated over 40 years after the last bombs went off.
A radiation researcher from the nearby Kurchatov Institute guided us to the center of the blast site.
So this is the epicenter of a nuclear bomb.
Everything's got kind of an unhealthy hue.
[Beeping.]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
That's amazing.
So the sort of glassy-looking stuff is rocks that were basically caramelized by the atomic blast and are still extraordinarily radioactive.
MORTON: These rocks that are pushing our Geiger counter even further into the red were turned into glass by the heat of the nuclear explosions.
The amount of radiation they're emitting is the equivalent of getting 3 CAT scans an hour, every hour, all day long.
While the nuclear bombs were all set off at the semiuninhabited testing site, radioactive fallout from each of the blasts drifted into the fully inhabited villages surrounding it.
Like this one: Kainar, a town where 1/3 of the local children have diseases related to radiation exposure.
And this is the current crop of children, born 3 generations after the last nuclear tests.
Dr.
Akimbay is the local doctor in Kainar and also its former mayor, neither of which are enviable positions given the town's general state of health.
All these houses are sick houses.
Uh-huh.
MORTON: Every home we visited in Kainar housed somebody dead or dying or deformed from radiation.
There were families where every single member suffered from something horrendous like birth defects or multiple simultaneous forms of cancer.
MORTON: Is it valid to be worried about people from Kainar going to big cities and intermarrying with other people? While the effects of the Polygon in a lot of cases aren't very visible, things that lie in your blood stream and in the genetics and they come out and become very visible later on down the road.
We're going to go hang out with a local here named Berik, whose mom was exposed to a lot of nasty stuff in the Polygon and he basically bears the brunt of it on his face.
MORTON: Berik's skin deformity is untreatable in a place like Kazakhstan.
Has left him blind and forced to live off his aging mother and whatever slim handouts he can make busking with his dombra.
Did the Soviet, uh, government or army ever apologize for it or try to make any amends? So what is this? This shows that you lived in the Polygon? What does it say? MORTON: To keep track of the Polygon's victims and their health problems, the government issued this Polygon I.
D.
, which looks like a nuclear passport, but there are some in Semey who want to turn this medical I.
D.
into something closer to an actual passport, one for your DNA.
While the situation with Polygon sufferers seems kind of hopelessly bleak, there is, uh, one doctor in Semey who's offered a comprehensive solution.
His name is Dr.
Toleukhan and what he's proposed is a genetic passport, by basically, Polygon sufferers would each be assigned this card where they do their genetic screenings, they write down the results on it, and it determines whether or not they're fit to give birth.
MORTON: Dr.
Toleukhan has spent years treating the victims of the Polygon in Semey and has been fighting for his proposed genetic passport since losing his wife to a Polygon-related illness.
He himself is from a agagage in the Polygon and has suffered from both lung and blood cancers he attributes to the long-term effects of radiation.
He also lost his son at age 35, again due to the Polygon.
MORTON: Does that not scare people, that it could be misused or that it could be used to force people not to marry? MORTON: At this point, I can't help but feel that what Dr.
Toleukhan's proposing sounds suspiciously close to old eugenics theory or just plain old mad science, especially in the context of a room full of jarred fetuses.
The next place he took me, however, put the true scope of the genetic crisis in full perspective.
How many kids on average are abandoned here? MORTON: What's wrong with each of these guys? MORTON: Why did the parents give these children up? Why aren't they taking care of them themselves? What's it like for them? Are these kids in pain or are they just kind of in their own world? MORTON: These are all the aftereffects from radioactive testing If there'd been genetic passports when you met your wife, would you not still have married her?