Nothing could be more disgusting than this for the fair sex. The State is rapidly moving to score a ‘dubious’ ton in cases of gang rapes this year.
Odisha witnessed around four gang rapes in every fortnight in 2015. Even, during the first three months of 2016, the State has recorded over a dozen of gang rapes. On the Holi day, the State recorded two such cases.
Gang rapes in Odisha in 2015 are just half-a-dozen short of the hundred-mark as the number keeps mounting up over the years from just 67 in 2012. The State was at dubious seventh nationally for the two consecutive years of 2014 and 2015.
According to NCRB report, Odisha was second after West Bengal in gang rapes in 2014 and 2015 in the entire eastern region that constitutes other States like Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam.
What looks challenging for the State police is when rapes as a whole in the State have risen by around 14 per cent in 2015, rapes of girl child below 10-year of age constitute a whopping one-third of such heinous incidents. And, more harsh fact is over one-third of the perpetrators are juveniles who have made even adult females their target.
“This is both a social and law and order problem,” explained a senior police official in State Crime cell and he further elaborated so with the fact that in many cases the predators were known persons to the victims and they skilfully accost the victim to carry out their design. But it turns an affront to law and order when in some cases anti-socials kidnap lone female labourers from bus stops or railway stations to enforce the ghastly act,” he indicated.
When the surmounting problem is scaring the State, visible actions to ebb the rising tide looks completely missing. Sociologists and feminists observe that the State Women Commission (SWC) has virtually remained a sign-board entity limited to Capital city only. “As this social distortion is creeping fast to even villages, there has been no sensitisation programme undertaken by the SWC in the so-called rape districts of the State,” observed a former SWC Chairperson. Sources revealed that SWC is yet to identify the problematic blocks and tehsils in such districts.
Moreover, on the law and order front, it was seen that some eleven police districts record majority of such cases. However, police visibility or patrolling is simply non-existent or just skeletal at rape hot-spots in such districts. Sources in the State Crime Cell reveal that no rape-mapping has been carried out precisely in the rape-prone police districts as yet.
Significantly, feminists here wonder at the lack of any regular high-level monitoring at the level of Home Secretary on the issue last year and till March this year. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of ‘zero tolerance’, they term the reaction of State Government to such incidents as mostly sporadic and at best compartmental.