Narinder Nanu / AFP - Getty Images, file

Indian students holds placards as they shout-slogans during an anti-rape rally in New Delhi during a protest in December 2012.

GOA, India – “India is a very spiritual and magical place,” gushed Paris Hilton when she visited for the first time last year, expressing a widely held view. Many visitors to India believe that the people are gentle, welcoming and that it is a safe place to travel.

But their perception is wildly at odds with the grim picture portrayed in the pages of India’s national papers and on its television screens on almost a daily basis.

Last Tuesday, a 30-year-old American tourist  says she was gang raped as she hitch hiked in the early hours of the morning near Manali, a popular tourist spot in the mountainous northern state of Himachal Pradesh. The attack came just days after a 21-year-old Irish aid worker was raped in Kolkata - an attack which took place, according to the police, after she had been drugged by a local businessman.

The attacks have reignited the debate over whether India has apparently become a more dangerous place to be a woman. What has changed in the culture? Is urbanization to blame? A change in modern morals? Or lax law enforcement? 

Brutal attack
The debate over violence against women has gripped the nation since December 2012 when a 23-year old Indian medical student named Jyoti Singh was brutally gang raped.

Singh was traveling home with a male friend after an early evening visit to the movies. Tricked onto a bus by a group of young men, she was raped so savagely that her intestines were torn from her body. She died on December 29, but not before identifying the men she said attacked her and becoming a symbol for women across the country of their daily struggle against violence.

Women - and some men - poured onto the streets to protest, clashing violently with the police, who many blame for failing to take rape seriously. 

The Indian government, rattled by the ferocity of the protests, rushed through new laws making provision for tougher sentences - including the death sentence - for rapists. The trial of the defendants in the Singh case is ongoing. 

But the government is battling sweeping changes in Indian society, largely due to rapid urbanization, which is having a profound impact on the traditional family structures as men migrate to the cities in search of work, leaving behind parents, wives and children.

Urbanization fueling crime?
“Migrant workers are living together with no female influence, just a bunch of men living together. They are developing a new cult of masculinity, being driven by the pornography industry,” said Ruchira Gupta, an Indian women’s rights activist and Emmy award winning documentary maker. 

Piyal Adhikary / EPA

Officers investigate the crime scene Monday where a 20-year-old girl was dragged into a walled compound, raped by at least six persons and murdered in Barasat, India.

“India is now the third largest user of pornography in the world and the porn narrative here is one of sexual violence and domination, which is sending signals to men to associate sex with violence.  They are attacking women all over the country, whatever their age or color,” said Gupta, who also lectures at New York University’s Center of Global Affairs.

She also warned that tourists should not take their safety for granted because “there is also a backlash against Westernization, which is embodied in the white female.”

Rape has soared in India in recent years.  Recorded rapes have risen by 873 percent since independence in 1947 and there were 24,206 rape cases in 2011, according to government figures. At the same time rape convictions fell by 44.3 percent between 1973 and 2011. 

Women’s empowerment activist Kathleen Suneja also cited urbanization as a driving force behind the rising rape figures.

“Urbanization has made Manali a high crime area and women are as likely to be raped in Delhi as in Manali,” she said, referring to the mountainous tourist destination where the American woman was attacked.

She blamed lax law enforcement and called for special police units to protect women's rights and prosecute violent crimes against women.

“India needs the equivalent of the [U.S.] Violence Against Women's Act,” she said.

Some activists in India hoped that Singh’s death would prove to be a turning point in attitudes towards women, yet the rapes have continued.

In March a Swiss tourist was gang raped while camping in Madhya Pradesh state. After the alleged assailants arrest, the state’s home minister Umashankar Gupta created embarrassment over comments that seemed to blame the victim for the attack.  “The rape of the Swiss national is unfortunate, but foreign travelers should inform the police about their movement so that they can be provided with adequate protection. They often don't follow state's rules," Gupta said.

In the same month a British woman told police she jumped from her first floor hotel window in Agra - near the country’s most famous tourist site, the Taj Mahal – because she feared being sexually assaulted by the hotel manager after persistent knocking on her door at 4 a.m. The woman injured her foot in the fall, but was otherwise not badly hurt. The hotel manager denied the allegations. 

Sajjad Hussain / AFP - Getty Images, file

Indian protesters hold candles during an anti-rape rally in New Delhi on Dec.29,2012, after the death of a gang rape victim.

The following month, the crowds were back on the street to protest after a 5-year-old girl was raped over a four day period in the Gandhi Nagar neighborhood of Delhi. Anger was fueled by the revelation that came out in an official investigation that police had tried to pay off her father with $38 dollars to drop charges. 

A spokesman for the Ministry of Home Affairs defended the government’s actions Friday, saying they had "taken all necessary action" to address the issue of rape and the reporting of rape by victims, including the introduction of new legislation.  

The spokesman for the Ministry of Home Affairs said that in the aftermath of the Jyoti Singh rape case, the government had set up a commission of investigation headed by retired High Court judge Usha Mehra. The commission found that there were shortcomings in the police handling of the case, and called for reforms which included better police training to handle complaints of rape more sensitively. The spokesman also said the commission branded the response of the police to victims' complaints as "callous.” Police have responded to the criticism by introducing reforms and training officers to be more sensitive to women’s complaints  

But police aren’t the only ones who have come under fire for their response to the rape issue.

Despite the fact that the most powerful person in the country, Sonia Gandhi, is a woman; that several states are ruled by autocratic female chief ministers; and the mother figure is deeply revered in Indian culture, there is little sense of sisterhood at the top.

Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal’s chief minister, notoriously dismissed a gang rape victim’s allegations as an attempt to undermine her government and earlier this year she claimed rising rapes were a result of a growing population and a youth with modern views.

Related:

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• Lawyer: Delhi rape suspect beaten, poisoned in prison
• Defense attorney blames victim in India gang-rape
• Female tourists shun India after gang-rape, murder

This story was originally published on Fri Jun 7, 2013 2:56 PM EDT

Rungroj Yongrit / EPA

A Chinese tourist jumps as she poses for a souvenir photo at Wat Chedi Luang, an ancient Buddhist temple in northern Thailand. Tourist behavior has the country doing some soul-searching.

BEIJING -- From faking marriage certificates to get honeymoon discounts in the Maldives to letting children defecate on the floor of a Taiwan airport, Chinese tourists have recently found themselves at the center of controversy and anger.

Thanks to microblogging sites in China, accounts of tourists behaving badly spread like wildfire across the country, provoking disgust, ire and soul-searching.

While in the past such reports might have been dismissed as attacks on the good nature of Chinese travelers, people in the world's second-largest economy are starting to ask why their countrymen and women are so badly behaved.

"Objectively speaking, our tourists have relatively low-civilized characters," said Liu Simin, researcher with the Tourism Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"Overseas travel is a new luxury. Chinese who can afford it compare with each other and want to show off," Liu said. "Many Chinese tourists are just going abroad, and are often inexperienced and unfamiliar with overseas rules and norms."

When a story broke recently that a 15-year-old Chinese boy had scratched his name into a 3,500-year-old temple in Egypt's Luxor, the furor was such that questions were even asked about it at a Foreign Ministry news briefing.

"There are more and more Chinese tourists travelling to other countries in recent years," ministry spokesman Hong Lei said on Monday.

"We hope that this tourism will improve friendship with foreign countries and we also hope that Chinese tourists will abide by local laws and regulations and behave themselves."

Other incidents have attracted similar anger, including that of a mother who let her children defecate on the floor of Kaohsiung airport in Taiwan, just feet from a toilet. She put newspaper down first.

Embarrassment over the behavior of some Chinese tourists has reached the highest levels of government, which has tried to project an image of a benign and cultured emerging power whose growing wealth can only benefit the world.

This month, Vice Premier Wang Yang admonished the "uncivilized behavior" of certain Chinese tourists, in remarks widely reported by state media and reflecting concern about how the increasingly image-conscious country is seen overseas.

"They make a terrible racket in public places, scrawl their names on tourist sites, ignore red lights when crossing the road and spit everywhere. This damages our national image and has a terrible effect," Wang said.

The central government has reissued guidelines on its main website on what it considers acceptable behavior for tourists, including dressing properly, standing in line and not shouting.

Eventually, experts say, the criticism will fade.

"Travelling is a learning experience for tourists," said Wang Wanfei, a tourism professor at Zhejiang University. "They learn how to absorb local culture in the process and get rid of their bad tourist behavior."

Related:

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• Behind the Wall: NBC reports from China
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Civil Police via AFP / Getty Images

Mugshots released by Brazil's Civil Police showing Jonathan Froudakis de Souza, 20, left, and Wallace Aparecido Silva, 22, who allegedly raped an American tourist in a minibus in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday.

An American woman was gang raped and beaten aboard a public transport van while her French boyfriend was shackled, hit with a crowbar and forced to watch the attacks after the pair boarded the vehicle in Rio de Janeiro's showcase Copacabana beach neighborhood, police said.

A third man, aged 21, was arrested for the attacks, which took place over six hours starting shortly after midnight on Saturday, police said in a Tuesday statement. Two men aged 20 and 22 had already been taken into custody for the attacks, police said, and a young Brazilian woman has come forward to say that she, too, was raped by the same men in the van on March 23.

"The victims described everything in great detail, mostly the sexual violence," police officer Rodrigo Brant told the Globo TV network. "Just how they described the facts was shocking — the violence and brutality. It surprised even us, who work in security and are used to hearing such things. Their report shocked us."

The incidents raise new questions about security in Rio, which has cracked down on once-endemic drug violence in preparation for hosting next year's football World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic games. The city will also be playing host to World Youth Day, a Roman Catholic pilgrimage that will be attended by Pope Francis and is expected to draw some 2 million people in late July.

Officials from the local Olympic and World Cup organizing committees didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The attack also drew comparisons with the fatal December beating and gang rape of a young woman on a New Delhi bus. Six men beset a 23-year-old university student and male friend after they boarded a private bus, touching off a wave of protests across India demanding stronger protection for women. Officials there say tourism has dropped in the country following the attacks.

In the Brazil case, a police statement said the suspects forced other passengers to get out of the van and then raped the female tourist inside the vehicle, which was one of a fleet of vans that serve bus routes and seat about a dozen people.

Such van services are often linked to organized crime in Rio, particularly the militias largely composed of former police and firemen that control large swaths of the city's slums and run clandestine services such as transportation and sell cooking fuel and illegal cable TV hookups. In general, tourists avoid the vans and opt for regular buses or taxis.

Sexual assaults on tourists are not common in Rio, with muggings and petty crime reported more frequently.

During the assault, the two foreigners were driven to the poor neighborhood of Sao Goncalo, where the two suspects were apprehended, a police statement said.

Reports said the two foreigners had been studying Portuguese in Rio for about a month and both left Brazil following the attack.

The police statement said that one victim's cellphone was found in the suspects' possession. The suspects had also used a debit card belonging to one of the victims at two gas stations, it said.

The Globo television network broadcast surveillance camera images of two men filling up the white van and showed police images of a crowbar the suspects used to beat and intimidate the victims. The victims positively identified the two suspects.

In an interview with Globo television, commanding officer Alexandre Braga, who heads the Rio police unit specializing in crimes against tourists, said the suspects had gone on a sex crime spree.

"The characteristics of both crimes, both the Brazilian case and the one with the foreigners, lead us to believe that they [the suspects] wanted to have a 'party of evil,' in quotes," Braga said. "The principal motive appears to have been the satisfaction of their lust."

He added that the robbery and other crimes appear to have been "secondary."

Multiple calls to police seeking further details on Tuesday were not immediately returned.

In Brazil, more than 5,300 cases of sexual assault were reported between January and June 2012, according to the country's Health Ministry.

Related:

Female tourists shun India after gang-rape, murder

Six arrested in India for gang-rape of Swiss tourist

This story was originally published on Mon Apr 1, 2013 5:26 PM EDT

A hot air balloon carrying foreign tourists caught on fire while it was in the air near Egypt's ancient city of Luxor, killing 19 people, officials said Tuesday.

The blazing balloon crashed to the ground early Tuesday morning, Gen. Mamdough Khaled, director of security for Luxor Governorate said, according to initial reports.

Khaled said that Luxor International Hospital had received 19 badly burned bodies. Health officials initially said 18 people died, but later said one injured person had succumbed to their injuries.

Ahmed Aboud, who runs another balloon company and acts as a spokesman for balloon operators in the area, and Khaled said two people survived. Khaled said both were in critical condition.

There were conflicting accounts of the accident itself.

Aboud said that gas tanks caught fire and ignited the balloon at about 1,000 feet.

But an eyewitness, who did not want to be identified, said the balloon was about 12 feet off the ground when a landing rope was thrown to people on the ground. As they grabbed it, the rope wrapped around a gas container, which broke and a fire then started, the witness said.

People 'like balls of fire'
The witness estimated the balloon then “shot up 500 meters" (1,640 feet) and the pilot "jumped out as it was going up.”

“Eight people jumped and they were like balls of fire, some were alive when they landed, but then died on the ground, then the balloon went up and down again and swept along, then a second explosion occurred when another gas canister exploded,” he added.

Another eyewitness told al-Jazeera television that the balloon was “like a fireball when it went up.”

One Egyptian was killed, Health Minister Mohamed Mostafa Hamed told Reuters, listing the other victims as tourists from Japan, China, France, Britain and Hungary. Earlier, officials had said all the dead were foreigners. 

A U.S. Embassy spokesperson said that no Americans were among the victims, citing information from local police.  

Thomas Cook Group, a major British travel company, said four of its customers on a seven-day holiday had opted to go on the balloon ride and three had died. A fourth remained in a hospital Tuesday.

"We recommend a number of suppliers" after vetting them, Thomas Cook spokeswoman Emma Staples said. "This one [the balloon company] would have been deemed a reputable supplier."

Peter Fankhauser, Thomas Cook's chief executive, called the accident "a terrible tragedy" and said in a statement that the company was sending counseling teams to Luxor. It has stopped promoting and selling balloon flights there while an investigation is conducted, he added. 

Konny Matthews, assistant manager of Luxor's Al Moudira hotel, told Reuters by phone that she heard a boom around 7 a.m. (12 a.m. ET).

Courtesy Christopher Michel

Hot air balloons take off near the ancient city of Luxor on Tuesday before the tragedy occurred.

"It was a huge bang. It was a frightening bang, even though it was several kilometers away from the hotel," she added. "Some of my employees said that their homes were shaking." 

A team of investigators was sent to Luxor, authorities said, and a moratorium was imposed on balloon flights. 

The site of the accident has seen past crashes. In 2009, 16 tourists were injured when their balloon struck a cellphone transmission tower. A year earlier, seven tourists were injured in a similar crash.

Egypt's tourism industry has been decimated since the 18-day uprising in 2011 against autocrat leader Hosni Mubarak and the political turmoil that followed and continues to this day.

Luxor's hotels are currently about 25 percent full in what is supposed to be the peak of the winter season.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related:

PhotoBlog: Hot air balloon crash kills 19 in Egypt

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 26, 2013 2:22 AM EST

Vatican Museums via EPA

Experts claim that Michelangelo's famous frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are under threat from hordes of tourists.

VATICAN CITY -- A "drunken herd" of "unruly" tourists is damaging Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel paintings, one of Italy's leading arts figures claimed as the pope prepared to mark the 500th anniversary of the iconic frescoes’ creation.

Some 5 million people visit the chapel every year – sometimes as many as 20,000 in a single day -- and an increasing number of experts are now arguing that mass tourism is damaging the paintings.

Despite a major, 14-year-long restoration project in the 1990s, they claim that the breath, sweat, dust and pollution brought in by visitors dramatically changes the Chapel’s humidity and temperature – factors to which frescoes are particularly sensitive.

On Wednesday night, Pope Benedict XVI will recite the vespers in the Sistine Chapel, just as his predecessor Julius II did 500 years ago to the day.

Julius commissioned the paintings and, along with 17 cardinals, first admired the completed works, such as the Last Judgment and the Creation of Adam, as they celebrated vespers on Oct. 31, 1512.

'Unimaginable disaster'
In an article recently published by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera (in Italian), Pietro Citati, one of Italy’s leading arts and literary critics, called the conditions in the chapel an "unimaginable disaster."

He described the "unruly" tourists as a "drunken herd" who take forbidden pictures and speak loudly despite the guards’ reprimands. 

"The church needs money for its various activities," Citati wrote, "but these monstrous conditions are unacceptable."

Marco Nocca, a professor at the Art Academy in Rome, agreed.

"I understand that 5 million paying visitors per year is good business for the Vatican, but something needs to be done to limit the damage," he said.

"If they can’t restrict the number of people who visit the chapel, then maybe they should time the visits so that there are only a limited number of people in the chapel at any given time," Nocca added.

How religious pilgrimages support a multi-billion dollar industry

NBC News visited the chapel one early October morning, before the gates opened to the public.

Emptied of the usual hordes of tourists, the chapel looked for once like it used to, before it became an unofficial art gallery: a place for religious worship.

The sore neck is worth it
The frescoes on the 12,000-square-foot ceiling, which contain some 300 figures, seemed like a massive biblical cartoon strip, and the silence was only broken by the thumps produced by our steps on the polished marble floors.

Never has a sore neck been more worth it, as we tilted our heads backwards for minutes to admire the ceiling.

Vatican reports it's nearly $19 million in the red

And this was small discomfort compared to the spasms, cramps and headaches Michelangelo suffered during the four years it took him to paint this most magnificent work of art, on scaffoldings and platforms he designed to literally rise to the occasion.

Aside from being the most famous chapel in the the pope's official residence, the Sistine Chapel is also the place where pontiffs are elected -- a rare occasion when the chapel closes its doors to the public to make way for hundreds of electing cardinals.

Botched restoration turns Spanish church into tourist attraction

The director of the Vatican Museums, Antonio Paolucci, told NBC News that a new air conditioning system would introduced early next year.

But forbidding tourists was not an option, he stressed.

"This is not only an art sanctuary, it is also a religious sanctuary, a symbol of the Catholic Church. We can't prevent people from visiting a holy place," Paolucci said.

Hours after Benedict recites vespers late Wednesday, thousands of tourists will return to pack the chapel, unfazed by the criticism. 

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KATMANDU, Nepal -- A plane carrying trekkers to the Everest region crashed and caught fire just after takeoff Friday in Nepal's capital, killing 19 people.

The victims included British, Chinese and Nepali passengers, authorities said.

The pilot of the domestic Sita Air flight reported trouble two minutes after takeoff, and Katmandu airport official Ratish Chandra Suman said the pilot appeared to have been trying to turn back. 

The crash site is only 547 yards from the airport, and the wrecked plane was pointing toward the airport area.

Reuters said it was a twin-engine, propeller-driven Dornier aircraft.

Investigators were trying to determine the cause of the crash and identify the bodies. Suman said he could not confirm if the plane was already on fire before it crashed.

Villagers forced back by flames
Cellphone video shot by locals showed the front section of the plane was on fire when it first hit the ground and it appeared the pilot had attempted to land the plane on open ground beside a river.

The fire quickly spread to the rear, but the tail was still in one piece at the scene near the Manohara River on the southwest edge of Katmandu.

PhotoBlog: More images from the crash site 

Villagers were unable to approach the plane because of the fire and it took some time for firefighters to reach the area and bring the fire under control.

Nepal officials: 6 survive, 15 killed as plane hits mountain in Himalayas

Soldiers and police shifted through the crash wreckage looking for bodies and documents to help identify the victims.

Seven passengers were British and five were Chinese; the other four passengers and the three crew members were from Nepal, authorities said.

Large numbers of local people and security forces gathered at the crash site. The charred bodies were taken by vans to the hospital morgue.

Gateway to Everest
The weather in Katmandu and surrounding areas was clear on Friday morning, and it was one of the first flights to take off from Katmandu's Tribhuwan International Airport. Other flights reported no problems, and the airport operated normally.

The plane was heading for Lukla, the gateway to Mount Everest. Thousands of Westerners make treks in the region around the world's highest peak each year. Autumn is considered the best time to trek the foothills of the Himalayan peaks.

More international coverage from NBC News 

In May, 15 people were killed when their plane crashed into a hill in northwest Nepal.

Autumn is the peak tourism season in Nepal, which has eight of the world's 14 highest mountains, including Mount Everest. At least 11 people were killed in an avalanche in northwest Nepal on Sunday.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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