In August 2020, a 13-year-old girl failed to return from a toilet break in the sugarcane fields. Her family went searching for her, only to find her body mutilated.
Her dad said they found her with her eyes gouged out and her tongue cut off – something thepolicedenied. "There were scratches near the eyes, likely due to the sharp sugarcane leaves where the body was found," a spokesman said. That is one of the tens of thousands of annual rape cases inIndia. Despite reforms to the criminal justice system after the abhorrent gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in 2012, campaigners say things have not changed.
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A protester told Indian newspaperThe Telegraphthat "the atrocities against women do not stop", despite high-profile rape cases spurring demonstrations.
India announced new laws in March 2013 following the horrific gang rape of the studentwho was dubbed Nirbhaya– the fearless one.
She died from her injuries days after being raped by six men on a bus. She was brutally assaulted with an iron rod. Her friend was beaten. They were thrown off the bus naked and covered in blood, left to die. Four men were hanged for the attack.
Government prescribed harsher punishments for rapists, including a minimum sentence of 10 years with a possible extension to life, and the death penalty if the victim is younger than 12. They expanded the definition of rape to state that the absence of physical struggle didn't equal consent.
But under the new laws, statistics have remained high. 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).
Attacks peaked at nearly 39,000 in 2016. In 2021, there were 31,677 reported cases of rape. That is 86 rapes every day. It is important to take into account that many rapes go unreported.
Source: Daily Express :: World Feed
