About the Elephant Journals

     I just read Elephant Journals, stories about Americans in India.  A young American woman is raped by an Indian guy.  She is at an ashram, but no one there is supportive and no one in the law enforcement or legal burocratic system will help.  They only want her to sign papers saying she will not pursue this, but she refuses.  Finally the ashram asks her to leave.  Even the guru is no help at all.  
      So in the end she lures her rapist to his death by her only friend, an elephant in captivity, and lets go the chain.  Then she leaves on a train.  
     I suppose it is definitely about revenge and justice, but it was also a statement about a male dominant, women do not matter society, even among spiritual communities.  Why is it that everywhere on earth women are treated second class, whether it be Islamic countries, Orthodox Jews, Chinese, Japanese, East Indian, etc.?  I wonder why this is.