Five years have passed when Nirbhaya was gangraped by six brutes on a moving bus on the chilly night of December 16, 2012 but nothing has changed on the ground. The national Capital has witnessed a new trend in 2017 — women or minor children were lured and raped within the four walls of their houses and their schools.
Delving through the statistics provided by the Delhi Police on their website, in 2012, Delhi had reported 706 rape cases. Over a span of five years, the numbers have increased three fold. In 2017, from January 1 till November 30, 1,968 cases of rape have been registered by the Delhi Police, indicating that every six hours, a woman is raped in Delhi.
On the other hand, schools, which was thought to be a happy place for a child, witnessed a sharp rise in the cases of sexual assault.
In 2017, Delhi schools have witnessed sexual assault in every three months. The latest example: a five year old girl was raped by the peon of her school inside the school premises in East Delhi’s Gandhi Nagar area in September. Within a week, a 13-year-old girl was allegedly abducted and gang-raped by four persons in Shahdara’s Gandhi Nagar area.
A senior police officer said that in the Gandhi Nagar gang rape case which was reported, the heinous crime happened 300 metres away from the Gandhi Nagar police station.
Family of the 13-year-old girl claimed that when they went over to the Gandhi Nagar police station on Friday night at around 9 pm, they were asked to leave and return in the morning.
As per the written complaint of the minor girl, she was asked by her mother to go and buy groceries from a nearby shop. A student of Class 7, she lives with her family in the Gandhi Nagar area. Her father works as an electrician.
“En route to the shop, she was kidnapped by four men who took her to an isolated spot. The accused offered her food laced with sedative and she fell unconscious. Since the minor girl had fallen unconscious, she woke up to find herself bleeding from her private parts at an isolated spot. Badly injured, the girl mustered up the courage to return home on Saturday morning.
The girl returned home at 5 am on Saturday. Based on her medical examination, police registered a case under relevant sections of kidnapping, POCSO Act at the Gandhi Nagar police station.
According to a senior police officer, requesting anonymity, said, “Out of the total number of rape cases registered by us in 2017, in the total 1968 cases of rape, in 748 cases, accused were relatives or somehow known to the victims. This means that in 40 per cent cases, the victim was raped by her relative(s). On the other hand, 178 girls were sexually assaulted and 309 women had been gang raped by the accused in Delhi”.
Despite stringent laws, police and the judiciary as a whole had not been able to curb the alarming rate at which rapes are taking place in the national Capital.