Given that the WaPo article says that many of them had only a third or fourth grade education, this strikes me as possibly just making fun of people with disabilities.
When the topic is rape, you always go into these comments expecting some kind of reflexive criticism or minimisation but this is honestly one of the most bizarre manifestations of that yet.
I'm not familiar with the demographics of prisoners in India, so I'm just going off my knowledge of how the criminal justice system works in the US.
Do you remember some other excuses he suggested in the past?
From my perspective I have to assume alienation from society allows these men to commit the crimes they do and remain remorseless. If you've lived a tough or unforgiving life in a society that doesn't care if you live or die, you won't necessarily show the same courtesy to anyone else. Why respect the social norms of a society that shows you no respect?
I'm not excusing their behavior either. This alienation is also what I think drives US mass shootings, drug abuse, and other social crimes. That's just my opinion though, I've little other than intuition to back up my stance.
What about this is "making fun"? Did you mean to say that, by mentioning the education level, they're stigmatizing people with disabilities? Because there are millions of people around the world with no cognitive impairment who don't finish elementary school...
> Pandey had a burning need to know what these rapists were thinking. She decided to ask the rapists themselves.
> Their utter lack of remorse came as a surprise to her.
> She saw a pattern of "cognitive distortion" — they had created their own version of the crime that allowed them to justify their actions.
Statements like that imply a certain level of cognitive capacity and agency, which maybe these inmates have, but if so that isn't demonstrated anywhere in the article. All I'm saying is that the implications of the research are very different depending on whether these folks are upper middle class, college educated with normal IQ, EQ, etc., versus if half of them have severe lead poisoning or TBIs or whatever.