16-01-2025
Bureau Report
NEW DELHI/ KOCHI: Police in India’s southern state of Kerala have arrested 44 men accused of raping an 18-year-old girl over a period of five years, a police official said on Tuesday, in a case that has shocked the coastal tourist resort.
The victim, an athlete who belongs to the so-called lower caste community known as Dalits, told police in a statement that she was sexually abused by 62 people over a period of five years.
Police have identified 58 of those men, some of whom are minors and arrested 44 over the last two days, officials said.
“We have identified the remaining 14 and they would be arrested soon,” the Deputy Superintendent of Police in the Pathanamthitta district where the crimes took place, PS Nandakumar, told Reuters.
The case came to light after the girl narrated the gang rape to a volunteer during a gender awareness program. Nandkumar, who heads the investigation, said details of how the crimes were committed were still being investigated.
In her statement to the police, the victim said abuse began when she was 13 after her neighbor allegedly raped her.
Local media reported that four of the accused were minors.
Under Indian law, accused in rape cases that involve lower castes do not immediately get bail. Reuters was not able to reach any of the accused for a comment.
There were more than 31,000 reported rapes in 2022 in India, the latest year for which data is available, and conviction rates are notoriously low.
The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in the eastern city of Kolkata caused outrage across the country last year, with protests and street marches calling for action against the accused.
The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in Kolkata last week has brought women onto the streets across India, furious at persistently high levels of sexual violence despite legal reforms and promised crackdowns.
The government brought in sweeping changes to the criminal justice system, including tougher sentences, after the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old in 2012 but campaigners say little has changed.
Around the time of the 2012 attack, police were recording up to 25,000 rape cases a year across India, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). Since then, the annual number has largely remained above 30,000, barring the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020, which saw a sharp fall.
Attacks peaked at nearly 39,000 in 2016. In 2018, on average one woman reported a rape every 15 minutes across the country, according to a government report.
Five years ago, the government of West Bengal state in India pledged to clamp down on violence against doctors. It promised public hospitals better security equipment, female guards to support female physicians and controlled entry points, according to an internal government memo seen by Reuters.
None of these measures had been implemented at the public hospital where a young female doctor was sexually assaulted and killed on Aug. 9, allegedly by a police volunteer, four trainee doctors there told media.
Instead, in the days leading up to the homicide-assault, which prompted nationwide outrage and a doctor’s strike, only two male guards manned R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, they said. They were supplemented by a few closed circuit cameras that did not comprehensively cover the sprawling premises, according to the trainees.