On October 12, Digital Journal reported on a four-year-old child that was raped in New Delhi. This baby was not only brutally raped, but was sodomized and slashed with a knife and left for dead near the child’s home in Keshav Puram, in northwest Delhi.
Now, we are hearing about two new sexual assaults. The two-year-old child was abducted by two men riding a bicycle on Friday night while she was watching a religious event in front of her house in west Delhi’s Nangloi area. Three hours later, the child was found in a park near her home, bleeding profusely. Tests showed she had been raped once.
The two-year-old was found unconscious, bleeding profusely, with obvious severe damage to her private parts, and bite marks all over her body said Swati Maliwal, the chairperson of the Delhi Commission for Women, according to NDTV.
In a separate sexual assault in New Delhi’s eastern Anand Vihar area on Friday night, a group of three men gang-raped the five-year-old child. “Her clothes were partially torn with blood spots all over them. Some locals saw her and she told them she was sexually assaulted,” an officer from Anand Vihar police station said on condition of anonymity. In this incident, NDTV is reporting that all three men suspected in the gang-rape have been arrested.
Outrage or indifference? — The rape of women and children goes on
According to the Telegraph, the film, India’s Daughter, a documentary about the 2012 rape and murder of a medical student on a bus in India was banned by the Indian government. The incident sparked violent protests in India and fueled public outrage worldwide. But that was about all that happened. In India, the rapes continued.
But the Telegraph is reporting that the director of the film, Leslee Udwin, said she had found hope in the outpouring of support following Singh’s rape but was dismayed at the timid outcry after a four-year-old girl was raped and beaten with stones in Delhi earlier this month. I wonder what Udwin is thinking about the latest two rapes?
Some people insist the problem is a cultural one because females are not valued as much as a male in the family circle. And these same people point out that men outnumber women in the country, too. So does this mean men can get their sexual satisfaction from any female, regardless of age simply because there aren’t enough women to go around?
In 2013, there were 33,764 rapes in India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. The data does not break down the numbers by age, just total victims, and I wonder at the low number, and if it is accurate. While the world shudders at the rape of little children, let’s look at the data from more “civilized” countries.
In an updated report in November 2014, The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) said over 80,000 children in the U.S. are victims of child sexual abuse every year. In the U.S., rape is one of the most underreported crimes. In 2007, FBI records reported only 85,593 rapes, while the CDC reported 1.3 million. Truth? The U.S. is number one in countries with the most rapes, and India ranks number three.
According to The Guardian, Between 2009 and 2012, there were an estimated 78,000 victims of rape every year in England and Wales, based on data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, now administered by the Office for National Statistics. The UK’s law governing what constitutes rape is slightly different than the law in the U.S. But the data does show that rape is also underreported.
In Canada, the law was changed to include three offenses under what would be called rape in other countries. Statistics Canada has found that one in four girls and one in eight boys have been sexually abused by the time they are 18. A woman is sexually assaulted by forced intercourse every 17 minutes in Canada, with one out of 17 women being raped in thier lifetime.
The group, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) reports that in 2009, women self-reported 472,000 sexual assaults, according to Statistics Canada. It is interesting that in Canada, only eight percent of sexual assault cases are even reported to police. And this percentage is down from previous numbers.
Actually, when looking at all the countries that have data on rape and sexual assault against women, there seems to be a common thread, and that is that rape and sexual assaults are underreported because the charges are not taken seriously by the authorities. And indifference by authorities is a common reply by many women when asked why they didn’t report being assaulted.
Everyone, men and women, should be outraged over the rape of children, and women of all ages. We are not Neanderthals and I wonder if even our ancestors would have acted the way so many of us do today. But just don’t be indifferent to what is happening.
