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Delhi swept by protests over child rapes
The Telegraph - April 22, 2013
The unnamed girl, the daughter of a poor rickshaw puller, had been abandoned at the hospital by her family.
Doctors said she was bleeding heavily from internal injuries. Her case emerged as anger mounted in the Indian capital over the treatment of a separate family whose five-year-old daughter, who has been named Gubiya, was found with severe internal injuries after she was kidnapped and raped in the Gandhi Nagar slum.
Gubiya disappeared on April 15 but police refused to help her family search for her. She was found in a locked building 40 hours later.
A young female friend of the family protesting against the failure of police to investigate the girl's disappearance was slapped by a senior police officer who was later suspended.
The family said they were later offered 2,000 Rupees (#25) by the police to keep silent about their daughter's rape.
Sushma Swaraj, the parliamentary leader of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, who visited Gubiya at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences on Saturday said that, while she was there, doctors took her to meet the second unidentified five-year-old rape victim and disclosed that they had recently treated other young victims.
These two latest rape cases have revived the intense debate and national introspection over the scale of rapes and sexual assaults in the country which began in December after a 23-year-old student was gang-raped and battered by six men on a bus as she returned from a cinema at a popular Delhi shopping mall with a male friend. She died two weeks later from chronic internal injuries.
There were protests yesterday at Delhi Gate, close to the Indian president's official residence, amid a heavy police presence, and demonstrations at Nehru Park and other places in the city.
Mrs Swaraj said she had believed that the national debate provoked by the student's murder would lead to rapid improvements in public safety for Indian women, but they were now more at risk than before.
"I had thought that things would change. Unfortunately, the situation has worsened," she said.
Human rights campaigners said there had been a 336 per cent increase in child rapes in India since 2001, from 2,113 cases to 7,112 in 2011. They warned that even this increase was likely to be an underestimate because only a minority of cases were reported to the police.
Mrs Swaraj said child rapists should face the death penalty. "I saw another five-year-old girl in the next room. She is also a rape victim. She was found abandoned in the [hospital] campus. She says her father is a rickshaw puller.
"She misses her mother but does not want to go home. Doctors told me that only few days back, they discharged a male child who was a victim of sodomy. I think we should hang these criminals and save our children."
Police have since arrested a 22-year-old man in Bihar for the kidnap and rape of Gubiya. He had been working as a casual labourer in Delhi.
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