Over the past two months, the intensifying sexual violence in India has brought national attention to the country’s deeply-ingrained rape culture — an environment in which authority figures often blame victims for endangering themselves, many women don’t feel safe enough to leave their homes, and female tourists have stopped visiting. The ongoing outcry spurred some policymakers to action, inspiring India to strengthen its penalty for rape. But women’s health advocates, including the United Nations’ expert on issues of domestic violence, are disappointed that the country still isn’t doing enough.

Rashida Manjoo, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on violence against women, recently visited India to investigate the gender abuses occurring in the country. But at the end of her trip, she told reporters that India didn’t effectively capitalize on the “golden moment” that presented itself in recent months, and hasn’t taken the right steps to effectively address the root causes that reinforce rape culture:

India missed a golden opportunity to tackle violence against women, by enacting a law that toughens punishments against sex offenders but fails to address the root causes and consequences of gender abuse, a U.N. expert said Wednesday.

The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013, or “anti-rape law” was enacted last month, after the fatal December gang rape of a student sparked protests over the treatment of women in the largely patriarchal country. [...]

“While this legislative reform is to be commended, it is regrettable that the amendments do not fully reflect the recommendations [originally put forth by a committee],” Manjoo said.

“This development foreclosed the opportunity to establish a holistic and remedial framework which is underpinned by transformative norms and standards, including those relating to sexual and bodily integrity rights. Furthermore the approach adopted fails to address the structural and root causes of and consequences of violence against women.”

This is not the first time that the United Nations has expressed concern over India’s ongoing sexual violence. Earlier this year, a report from a UN-affiliated human rights group exposed the high rates of sexual crimes in the country, as well as the persistent issues with law enforcement that discourage women from reporting rapes. It’s estimated that two women are raped every 60 seconds in the country.

Over the past several weeks, intense protests have erupted in India after reports of several child rapes. After a 5-year-old girl was raped toward the end of April, India’s prime minister admitted that his country has “vast improvements to make” when it comes to “the safety, security and status of women in our society.” Just one week later, a 4-year-old was raped and died from the injuries she suffered during the sexual assault.

In India, it’s estimated that two women are raped every 60 seconds. The country’s sexual violence was elevated to the national stage after reports emerged about a brutal gang rape on a New Delhi bus that left a 23-year-old student dead in December. Since then, at least six foreign women have told police that they have been attacked or traumatized by men in India — leading many countries to issue travel advisory for the country.

And predictably, the number of female tourists visiting India has plummeted by a third over the past several months. Officials from India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry admit that recent high-profile rape cases have “raised concerns about the safety of female travelers to the country.” The agency reports that overall tourism has dropped by 25 percent.

Of course, the atmosphere in the country doesn’t pose a risk only for tourists. India’s deeply-ingrained rape culture — which perpetrates a stigma surrounding sexual assault, often blames the victims for endangering themselves, and ultimately dissuades people from reporting crimes to the police — is an ongoing war against the women who live there. With the constant threat of sexual assault hanging over them, Indian women often don’t feel safe enough to leave their homes.

The situation has gotten so bad that a group of engineers is working to develop “anti-rape lingerie” they hope can help lower the number of sexual assaults. The lingerie is laced with a global positioning system (GPS) and a global system for mobile communications (GSM), which can transmit messages to the owner’s family members. The underwear can also emit shock waves to deter potential assailants. The developers of the device — which they call “Society Harnessing Equipment,” or SHE — explain they hope it will give women “freedom from situations faced in public places.”

Taking steps to decrease the sexual violence in India is critical. But that goal could likely be accomplished with better tactics, like updating the country’s legal penalties for rape. Encouraging women to protect themselves with anti-rape underwear, on the other hand, simply feeds into the victim-blaming culture that already exacerbates the country’s violence. As Kavita Krishnan, the Secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, explained in a fiery speech following the high-profile Delhi rape, women in India are always given instructions for how they should keep themselves safe. “The word ‘safety’ with regard to women has been used far too much,” Krishnan argued. “It means, You behave yourself. You get back into the house. You don’t dress in a particular way. Do not live by your freedom…. A whole range of patriarchal laws and institutions tell us what to do in the guise of keeping us ‘safe’.”

Female tourists are getting much of the same advice. Indian officials frequently suggest that tourists don’t do enough to keep themselves safe from attacks, and should simply stop putting themselves in danger. But India won’t be a safe place — either for foreign visitors or for the women who live there full-time — until that attitude shifts away from encouraging women to keep themselves safe, and toward encouraging everyone to stand up to sexual violence.

On Monday, India’s Supreme Court rejected a patent application by pharmaceutical giant Novartis for Veenat, a generic version of the company’s top-selling cancer treatment drug Gleevec. As the New York Times reports, public health advocates cheered the decision as a major victory for the country’s low-income population, as continued access to the affordable generic could save millions of lives. But the underlying differences in how intellectual patents function in India versus the U.S. also reveals a major source of Americans’ inflated prescription drug costs.

India, which exports $10 billion worth of generic medications every year, didn’t pass a robust intellectual property patent law until 2005. This law allowed for patents on medications discovered after 1995. At first glance, that would appear to qualify Novartis to pursue a patent on Veenat. But as the Times explains, the Indian justices concluded that an older, patented Gleevec version was too similar to the post-1995 version to qualify the later iteration as a “new” drug — a heightened standard of scrutiny that the U.S. does not share:

In 1993, Novartis patented a version of Gleevec that it later abandoned in development, but the Indian judges ruled that the early and later versions were not different enough for the later one to merit a separate patent. [...]

Anand Grover, a lawyer who argued the case on behalf of Cancer Patients Aid Association in India, said the ruling had a sweeping effect since it confirmed that India has a very high bar for approving patents on medicines.

“What is happening in the United States is that a lot of money is being wasted on new forms of old drugs,” Mr. Grover said. Because of Monday’s ruling, “that will not happen in India.”

Indeed, the vast majority of drug patents given in the United States are for tiny changes that often provide patients few meaningful benefits but allow drug companies to continue charging high prices for years beyond the original patent life.

In a classic example, AstraZeneca extended for years its franchise around the huge-selling heartburn pill, Prilosec, by performing a bit of chemical wizardry and renaming the medicine Nexium. Amgen has won so many patents on its hugely expensive erythropoietin-stimulating drugs that the company has maintained exclusive sales rights for 24 years, double the usual period.

This culture of Big Pharma companies reauthorizing U.S. drug patents by instituting negligible changes to the “inactive ingredients” in their products perpetuates high costs for both the American people and public insurance plans that must subsidize the price of expensive, brand name drugs. Pharmaceutical companies’ ability to extend their intellectual property protection (IPP) is a consequence of a series of laws that were passed beginning in the 1980s. While these laws were meant to encourage drug innovation, they have also had the adverse effect of extending patents on certain drugs’ active ingredients to as many as 20 years, as this data compiled in a National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation report shows:

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A new law strengthening the penalty for rape passed the lower house of India’s Parliament recently, a bright point in India’s still troubled relationship with sexual assault and violence.

Should the legislation pass India’s upper house, it would provide an increase of the minimum prison sentence for gang-rape to twenty years, that can be extended to life in jail. It also adds the opportunity for prosecutors to seek the death penalty in cases of rape that result in death or leave the victim in a coma. Most promising of all, the revised law would make other sex-based crimes such voyeurism, stalking, acid attacks and the trafficking of women punishable under criminal law. “This is just a first step in a journey of 1,000 miles,” MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal, a woman MP a regional party, said before the vote.

The revised law originally was developed in response to the brutal gang rape of a young Indian woman — identified as Jyoti Signh Pandi — in December, which sparked mass protests throughout the country. Pandi later died from the massive injuries obtained, leading to her alleged assailants being charged with murder, rape, and kidnapping.

Recent actions taken to strengthen the punishment of these crimes does not lessen the long way that India still has to go when it comes to combating sexual violence. According to a recent report from a United Nations panel, in India “every 60 minutes two women are raped, and every six hours a young married woman is found beaten to death, burnt or driven to suicide.” The stigma that surrounds these crimes, however, leads to a severe underreporting of rape, particularly in the case of women in lower castes.

Tourists are also becoming more frequent targets of attacks, as evidenced in the case of a British woman on the same day the new rape law moved forward in Parliament. The woman was forced to leap through an open window in her hotel room to escape the advances of the hotel owner, fracturing both of her legs:

Police arrested the hotel owner in connection with the incident in Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, one of India’s most cherished tourist attractions, [police officer Sushaunt] Gaur said. No charges have been filed.

The woman told the police that the hotel owner kept knocking on her door persistently and even tried to unlock the door after she refused his offer of a free massage.

A Swiss tourist was the vicitim of gang-rape just weeks ago in the Indian state Madhya Pradur while cycling with her husband. In that instance, the state’s Home Minister suggested that the tourist herself was at fault for not alerting the police of her travel plans. Another incident of gang rape was reported in the same state on Tuesday, in which two minors were assaulted at gunpoint in their family’s home.

After months of pressure, the government of Ireland has decided to introduce draft legislation in the Irish Parliament that would, along with new regulations, potentially loosen the country’s sharp restrictions on abortion.

The decision has the potential to be extremely controversial in a land where an effective ban remains in place despite a 1992 ruling by the Irish Supreme Court that abortion is legal in some circumstances. It’s the controversy surrounding what those circumstances entail that will finally be clarified by the government:

In a statement this afternoon, [Irish Health Minister Dr. James] Reilly said he was very conscious of the sensitivities around the issue of abortion. “I know that most people have personal views on this matter. However, the Government is committed to ensuring that the safety of pregnant women in Ireland is maintained and strengthened. We must fulfill our duty of care towards them.

“For that purpose, we will clarify in legislation and regulation what is available by way of treatment to a woman when a pregnancy gives rise to a threat to a woman’s life. We will also clarify what is legal for the professionals who must provide that care while at all times taking full account of the equal right to life of the unborn child.”

Ireland still has a lengthy debate ahead of it in Parliament, where several members of the Prime Minister’s party have already threatened to “vote against any law that liberalises abortion.” Currently Irish law still criminalizes most forms of abortion and does not provide for the procedure to be carried out in cases of rape and incest.

The pressure on the Irish government to act comes from two sources. In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland was in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in their handling of abortion; the government believes that their new action will bring them in line with the Convention’s provisions. More recently, the death of an Indian woman living in Ireland, Savita Halappanavar, in October catalyzed thousands of protesters to take to the streets of Dublin to call for reform. Savita died of blood poisoning following the refusal of a hospital to perform an abortion, citing the unclear amounts of discretion Ireland affords hospitals to make that determination.