It has been eleven years since the brutal Nirbhaya rape and murder, where India united in fire and fury and the Media pledged to expose rape until it disappeared.
One felt, after the fiery protests all over the nation against the barbaric gang-rape of the 23-year-old student on a public bus, on the fateful night of 16 December 2012, that rape in India would be annihilated. The horrible truth came out months later when the rapes continued, and some of them were accompanied by gory murders to silence the victims.
Toddlers are constantly raped and many children are murdered. The most recent rape and murder in 2022 was on an 8-year-old girl, who was gang-raped, eyes scooped out, and sand stuffed in her mouth to silence her, murdered in Bihar. There was no main media coverage on this.
In 2022, another horrendous rape surfaced of a 7-year-old girl in Ayodhya where the perpetrator after raping her slit her throat and stuffed her mouth with mud with intent to murder her but she survived and is recuperating, in a very serious condition in a hospital. The father, while speaking with journalists later was in a state of shock and nearly collapsed as he kept pleading for justice for his daughter.
Rape and Crime Against Women is Rising
Rape is the fourth most common crime against women in India and in the 2019 annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 32033 rape cases were registered across the country, or an average of 88 cases daily. Of these, 30,165 rapes were committed by perpetrators known to the victim (94.2% of cases).
Rapes by juveniles were high in India with 3 minors being arrested for rape, assault, and attempted violence on women and girls each day in 2019.
India has been depicted as one of the “countries with the lowest per capita rates of rape”.The government also classifies consensual sex committed on the false promise of marriage as rape. The readiness to report rapes has grown in recent years after several incidents received widespread media attention and triggered local and nationwide public protests. This directed the government to improve its penal code for crimes of rape and sexual assault.
In the metropolitan cities, the national capital of Delhi continued to have the highest incidence of rape at 1253 cases in 2019.
On 14 September 2020, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped in Hathras district, Uttar Pradesh, India, by four upper-caste men. She died two weeks later in a Delhi hospital.
Initially, it was reported that one accused had tried to kill her, though later in her statement to the magistrate, the victim named four accused as having raped her. The victim’s brother claimed that no arrests were made in the first 10 days after the incident took place. After her death, the victim was forcibly cremated by the police without the consent of her family, a claim denied by the police.
Frighteningly, India has the largest number of child sexual abuse cases in the world. India has become an online hosting hub for child sex material. It is discovered that for every 155th minute a child, less than 16 years, is raped, for every 13th hour a child under 10. It can be three months to ten years; there is no barrier for degenerates to choose from.
Many children got lured by tempting offers and thrills without understanding the dangers they were in. According to Interpol, an estimated 2.4 million instances of online child sexual abuse were reported in India from 2017 to 2020.
It is time to sensitize the nation making them aware that every child, girl, or woman has free will. It is time through social media, discussion forums, candlelight marches, to do whatever it takes, but rise up and sensitize our communities against these atrocities.
Public, Media, Police, Judges, and Laws
Public and Media:
Unless there is an outcry among citizens, the Media refuses to touch on topics of some of the most heinous rapes. Nirbhaya got a cry from the public perhaps garnering the cries of millions of silent women over decades. She became an iconic symbol for raped, abused, and murdered women, but after a couple of years slipped by, the outrage of the incident slipped from everyone’s memories and no one even thinks twice if a child of eight is raped and brutally murdered. The problem starts with the public because unless they speak up, nothing moves, and the Media selectively picks what they think will run high TRPs. The Indian public wants to muffle out the realities of rape and concentrate on happier things.
Police:
For some reason, the police are very reluctant to register complaints about rape as the cases are humongous and it makes unnecessary work for them. Their refusal to register cases is also humiliating for the woman. The police look down on her for being raped, becoming a shame factor for the woman, where she is made to feel it is her fault she is raped, while the rapist gets away scot-free. Over time, women feel it futile to go to the police, they might go to Women’s Rights groups that would raise a bigger voice for them, but after a traumatic rape, it can be frightening for a woman to go through different organizations and she would end up in walled silence for the rest of her life, living in petrified fear.
Once again, if a prominent person or a politically connected person has committed rape, it is less likely that the police will write down that report. Basically, a rape victim in India relies on the voice of the public and media and if they are weak, she is finished.
Judges and Laws
Quint reported that on 8 February 2017, a lady judge of the Bombay High Court granted bail to a man facing charges of raping his minor daughter. The judge questioned the truthfulness of the girl’s complaint and depended upon incriminatory pieces contained in the charge sheet to justify the bail under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
“The statement of the victim on the basis of which the crime is registered does not appear to be truthful and, therefore, does not inspire the confidence of this court,” she ruled.
The judge then proceeded to state that the girl had inherently abnormal behavior and sexual instincts from her childhood.
The girl was just 6-years-old, her mother died of AIDS. She was subsequently adopted and the sexual abuse by her adoptive father started soon thereafter. The child suffered from threats, sexual abuse for eight long years. She probably did not know where to go and when the frequency of the attacks advanced, she called Childline for help.
Majlis, a legal support organization reached out to the girl soon after the case was registered to help her to reintegrate and she is pursuing her higher education. The legal procedure was also followed up diligently to ensure that the charge sheet was filed on time and the bail was rejected.
The judge did not even care to find out that the victim was no longer in the shelter home and had moved to another home.
When some members of the judiciary look at children and women raped as if it is their fault, they are showing a serious lack of insight, judgment, and perception. This in turn is empowering rapists, murders, and perpetrators.
POCSO
The POCSO Act, 2012 ( Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) came into force with effect on November 14, 2012, along with the Rules framed thereafter. The Act is a sweeping law enacted with the purpose of protecting children from a barrage of sexual offenses like sexual assault, sexual harassment, and pornography while safeguarding the interests of the child at every stage of the judicial process by introducing a child-friendly means for reporting, recording of evidence, investigation and speedy trial of offenses through special courts. This law defines a child as any person below the age of 18 years
The POCSO Bill aims to impinge strong punishment in cases of drugs being administered to children to bring about early sexual maturity. There is a jail term of 20 years or for the entire life and the death penalty in rare cases according to the courts’ discretion.
There are 99% POCSO cases in courts pending trial in 2020: Praja report. After Nirbhaya’s brutal rape and murder, the BJP, which was the Opposition party demanded immediate action. The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, insisted that “the rapists should be hanged”. The rapists were hanged seven years later.
Yet, rapes and murders keep increasing amid a relaxed public, silent main media, and complacent judges, while POSCO cases keep piling up and in the air of indifference, rapists cum murderers are rising day by day. Action should be swift, but nothing happens and cases keep dragging. It does not matter to anyone if these are little girls being raped and murdered. Nothing seems to matter.
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