Son raping own mother, father violating daughter, mother selling daughter to flesh trade racket, daughter being sold by father to rapists for a bottle of booze … The list of heinous crimes reported from a tiny state reputed for its high social values and literacy rate may look a bit repulsive but this is the brutal reality in which women and girls in Kerala live.
Statistics available with the Kerala Police show that crimes against women and children have been going up for the past five years: As many as 4,909 women were raped in Kerala since 2009 while the number of children raped in the same period was 2,142. In the first three months of the current year, 335 women and 184 children were raped in Kerala.
“The situation is very bad and it seems that it is getting worse by each passing day as we come across more and more heinous crimes against women and girls,” says a top police official from Thiruvananthapuram. "What our department has is the data of reported crimes against women and children and God alone knows how many are going unreported," he adds.
The number of women subjected to one or the other kind of persecution in the past five years was 31,432. Among them, 284 were against children below the age of ten years while 1,383 belonged to the 10-to-15 age group. Even elderly women have not been spared: The number of women above 65 years of age subjected to some kind of atrocity was 463.
Incidence of rape cases seem to be growing in Kerala at a level that threatens the citizens' trust in society: The number of rape cases grew from 568 in 2009 to 634 the following year but it leaped to 1,132 in 2011. Though there was a slight decrease in 2011 it again rose to 1321 last year. As many as 335 rapes were reported in the State till March this year!
The trend is not very different in the case of rapes of children: The police had registered 208 cases of child rape in 2010, which more than doubled in 2011 to 423. In 2012, as many as 455 children were raped but the number rose threateningly to 637 in 2013. According to the State Crime Records Bureau, 184 such cases occurred in the first three months of the current year.
The pattern of crimes being committed against women and children suggests that there is no place - home, educational institution, work place or even streets - where they can feel safe when the very men who are supposed to protect them become their tormentors, which according to sociologists is a new trend seen in Kerala.
"The situation is shameful for a state like Kerala," psychologist BS Panicker points out. "The Kerala newspapers would make the rapes happening in UP and Haryana their front page news but rapes of even worse kinds taking place in the State itself would be buried in the inner pages. One gets a feeling that such incidents have become ordinary occurrences news-wise," he says.
"One of the reasons for the spurt in such violence, especially at places where the victims should feel safe, could be the sexual insecurity and libidinal frailty that have crept into a large section of males during the process of an inconsistent social transformation. Kerala has developed a lot economically in the past 25 years but a healthy social growth has not followed it," he says.