At around midnight Friday, two men kidnapped a two-year-old child from a Ramlila gathering in Delhi and brutally raped her. Relatives found the child abandoned in a park near the house two hours later. That night, in another part of the city, three men abducted a five-year-old child living on the floor below them and raped her. Residents of the building later found her half-dressed, covered in blood and crying.
These attacks come only a week after as yet unidentified people brutally raped and almost murdered a four-year-old girl in the city. The child's intestines were so severely damaged that doctors had to perform a colostomy on her until her injuries healed.
People in Delhi have very good reason to be outraged. There were 199 reported child victims of sexual assault under the age of 12 in 2014. That works out to almost four every week. Seventy-one of those cases involved children under the age of six. That is one child – who might be learning to talk or have only just begun to go school – each week. The rest of the country should be incensed as well. Over 2,000 children under 12 were reported to have been raped in 2014 across the country. Of those 547 were younger than six.
The National Crime Records Bureau collects data on the number of reported rape cases by the age of the assaulted person as per FIRs filed in police stations across the country. We cannot compare the data of 2014 and the years before that because the bureau changed its subheads in its latest report, from counting children until age 10 to counting those until age six.
Even so, data from just this year can hint at the extent of these crimes.
First, these are the rapes reported in Delhi and across India by age in 2014.
And here, these are the children under six who were reported to have been raped across the country. Delhi, despite being a union territory with fewer people than big states, still ranks in the top five in terms of absolute numbers of reported rapes.
However, this does not really indicate whether children in Delhi are better or worse off than in other states. These are just the number of rapes police officials have recorded. As we know, this is not by any means a complete or even representative picture.
This is not even taking into account that in 2014, only Tamil Nadu and Meghalaya submitted data that also includes figures of people charged under the far broader Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences Act. All other states and union territories, including Delhi, reported only charges under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code, which does not mandatorily include violent sexual attacks against boys.
We heard of these three cases in the last week in Delhi because the cases went to the police and the police took the care to file first information reports and the media then picked up on them. Then there are all the cases we do not hear of because children do not speak about it or are not believed, or because adults who find out about it do not report these cases to the police, or because the police do not record those cases.
And let’s try not to forget that even according to the unreliable National Crime Records Bureau almost all rapists in India reported to the police know the people they have assaulted.
The Delhi police on Sunday arrested two 17-year-olds for the rape of the younger child. Both teenagers live in the neighbourhood and know the family. They have also arrested the three accused of the rape of the five-year-old.
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These attacks come only a week after as yet unidentified people brutally raped and almost murdered a four-year-old girl in the city. The child's intestines were so severely damaged that doctors had to perform a colostomy on her until her injuries healed.
People in Delhi have very good reason to be outraged. There were 199 reported child victims of sexual assault under the age of 12 in 2014. That works out to almost four every week. Seventy-one of those cases involved children under the age of six. That is one child – who might be learning to talk or have only just begun to go school – each week. The rest of the country should be incensed as well. Over 2,000 children under 12 were reported to have been raped in 2014 across the country. Of those 547 were younger than six.
The National Crime Records Bureau collects data on the number of reported rape cases by the age of the assaulted person as per FIRs filed in police stations across the country. We cannot compare the data of 2014 and the years before that because the bureau changed its subheads in its latest report, from counting children until age 10 to counting those until age six.
Even so, data from just this year can hint at the extent of these crimes.
First, these are the rapes reported in Delhi and across India by age in 2014.
And here, these are the children under six who were reported to have been raped across the country. Delhi, despite being a union territory with fewer people than big states, still ranks in the top five in terms of absolute numbers of reported rapes.
However, this does not really indicate whether children in Delhi are better or worse off than in other states. These are just the number of rapes police officials have recorded. As we know, this is not by any means a complete or even representative picture.
This is not even taking into account that in 2014, only Tamil Nadu and Meghalaya submitted data that also includes figures of people charged under the far broader Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences Act. All other states and union territories, including Delhi, reported only charges under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code, which does not mandatorily include violent sexual attacks against boys.
We heard of these three cases in the last week in Delhi because the cases went to the police and the police took the care to file first information reports and the media then picked up on them. Then there are all the cases we do not hear of because children do not speak about it or are not believed, or because adults who find out about it do not report these cases to the police, or because the police do not record those cases.
And let’s try not to forget that even according to the unreliable National Crime Records Bureau almost all rapists in India reported to the police know the people they have assaulted.
The Delhi police on Sunday arrested two 17-year-olds for the rape of the younger child. Both teenagers live in the neighbourhood and know the family. They have also arrested the three accused of the rape of the five-year-old.
