Nothing looks more damning than this revelation where Odisha has emerged among the most unsafe States for minor girls in the country, even toppling Delhi when it comes to sexual crimes against them.
The harsher reality in Odisha is that when it comes to cases on assault on women with the intention to outrage her modesty, the State stands number 4 in the country. And here too, almost half of them are minor girls (below 18 years of age).
With almost rapes of over two minor girls a day and a high of 16 cases of outraging modesty of women every day in 2015, Odisha with a total of 797 rape cases of minor girls and over 5,853 outraging modesty cases made into the infamous league of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.
The biggest shocking trend for Odisha is that rapes of girl child below 10 years of age constitute a whopping one-third of such heinous cases.
However, the ignominy here is the notorious Delhi looks statistically better than Odisha and all of its neighbouring States, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh, also put up a better statistical show.
Such yet-to-be-released terrifying statistics available with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) look more shocking when Odisha made it to the national headlines as very recently a popular Ollywood comic actor-cum-'expelled' politician was charged with sexual crime perpetrated on a minor girl. And the same data sheds light on the enormity of the rot that is taking viral proportions in Odisha when over one-third of such perpetrators are juveniles who have made even adult females their victims.
Sexual crimes against the fair sex have grown to an epidemic of sort in some 11 police districts in the State. But the epicentres are mines-rich, tribal and scheduled castes-dominated districts like Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Jajpur, Bargarh, Koraput, Nabarangpur, Ganjam and Baleswar.
While rape victims mostly belong to poorer strata of the society, assaulters go scot-free as victims lack in the empowerment to avenge the crimes.
The result: When the State police registered nearly 800 rapes of minor girls, the arrests stood at a mere 487.
Moreover, when only 1.4 per cent of the chargesheeted cases of outraging modesty of women saw conviction in 2014 and, more so, with the conviction rate during the last half decade hovering around a mere 3 per cent, perpetrators continue with their crimes with scant fear of law.
Even, in rape cases the conviction rate in the State during the last half decade is only around 8 per cent of the chargesheeted cases against a national average of over 16 per cent.
legal experts are of the view that the State Commission on Children (SCC) and the State Commission for Women (SCW) should carry out liaison with police in such vulnerable districts to take such true cases to their logical conclusions and the Chief Minister must take annual reviews of works done in this regard by the SCW and the SCC while taking stock of the performances of the Women & Child Development Department.