Within the span of one week, three young children were raped in New Delhi, India — sparking outrage from city officials and women’s rights activists against the government for failing to protect women and girls against sexual violence in the country.
Two men abducted and raped a 2-and-a-half-year-old child in a west Delhi suburb, who was later found unconscious and bleeding in a park three hours after she went missing during a power outage. According to the BBC, she had been raped “at least once.” Meanwhile, a 5-year-old was reportedly gang-raped by three men who lured her to a neighbor’s house in east Delhi. Those two assaults happened a week after a 4-year-old was dumped near a train track after she was raped and slashed with a blade, ABC News reported.
“Repeated rape of minors is shameful and worrying,” Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal wrote on Twitter, blaming Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Lieutenant-Governor Najeeb Jung for failing to protect the country’s women and girls. “Delhi police has completely failed to provide safety.”
Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) Chairperson Swati Maliwal also blamed the Delhi police and Indian government, stating, “There are huge shortcomings in the law and order situation of the capital. All the agencies of the Centre and the Delhi Government as well should find a solution to it.”
Public awareness about sexual crimes against women and girls in India has become more prominent after the fatal 2012 gang-rape of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus. The victim later died of internal injuries in a hospital. Her death — and the ensuing international outrage about the case — prompted the government to introduce harsh anti-rape laws, like making serial rapists eligible for the death penalty.
Yet despite the crackdown by political figures and police in 2013, not much has changed from 35 years ago, when a court blamed an Indian teenage girl in 1980 for being “an easy virtue” because she was “habituated to sexual intercourse” after two policemen raped her in a police station.
Last year, the head of India’s top investigative agency claimed, “If you can’t prevent rape, you enjoy it.” The Home Minister of Madhya Pradur also blamed a Swiss tourist for her rape because she didn’t tell police of her travel plans. And most recently, when a female journalist asked a politician about crimes against women, he responded, “See, you are here, you are a woman, if someone drags you away and rapes you, what can we in the opposition parties, who are in other parts of the state, do?”
“The police can’t prevent every case but policing still remains weak in Delhi,” women’s rights activist Ranjana Kumari told The Straits Times. “Their emphasis is on women learning to defend themselves through self-defence classes. How can you teach a four-year-old self-defence?”
The country has a ratio of about one police officer for every 1,000 citizens, about one-third the rate of the global median, Bloomberg News reported.
Last year, the government approved deploying female security guards to “dark stretches” of the city, saying it would set up a Women’s Security Force made up of 10,000 Home Guards and 5,000 marshals on to deter crime on public transportation. But the Aam Aadmi Party recently said that the government still is “not serious” about the security of women. AAP leader Sanjay Singh noted that Delhi police installed 25,000 CCTV cameras for President Obama’s four-day visit and added, “if you could instal [sic] so many cameras for the security of Obama, why can’t you instal [sic] these for the security of the women in the capital.”
New Delhi, known as the country’s rape capital, had 1,441 rape cases in 2013 and 1,813 rapes in 2014, according to The Straits Times. Additionally, a total of 309,546 cases of crime against women were reported in India in 2013, an increase of 26.7 percent from the previous year, according to statistics from the Indian government.