The rise in the number of reported cases of rape and sexual abuse against children in India is a “national emergency”, Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi said yesterday, with up to 100,000 such cases pending in courts.
“Each time a daughter is raped and killed, India’s soul is raped and killed,” he said at the release of a report that outlines how long it takes the courts to process cases of sexual abuse against children.
Protests have erupted across India after a series of child rape cases were reported over the last 10 days.
Police officers and a politician are under investigation in two of these unrelated cases.
The report by the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation, a charity, estimates that a child rape case registered today in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh would take 99 years to go through the courts.
A child raped in Gujarat would wait 53 years for justice.
“If a child has to wait and beg for justice in our courts for decades, it is our collective failure,” Satyarthi said.
“Do you think a 15-year-old abused today, will attend court hearing with her grandchildren when she turns 70?”
Government figures showed 18,862 cases of child rape were registered in 2016, or more than 50 each day.
That amounted to nearly half of the total 40,000 cases of rape of children and adults reported that year, up from 25,000 in 2012.
Rights activists say thousands more rape cases go unreported each year.
On Monday, eight men accused of involvement in the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir appeared in court for the first hearing in a case that sparked nationwide outrage and criticism of the ruling party.
Police say the girl was drugged and raped for days at a temple before being beaten to death.
They said the accused targeted the girl because they wanted to drive her nomadic tribe out of the Hindu-dominated region.
Two Jammu and Kashmir state ministers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) resigned after they attended rallies organised to defend the accused.
Some activists have accused the party of siding with Hindu groups demanding the release of the arrested men.
The BJP government has also faced criticism after one of its legislators in Uttar Pradesh was arrested last week for the alleged rape of a 17-year-old woman.
The woman’s father died in police custody as he agitated for the authorities to take up the case.
Three more child rape cases were reported in the past two days, including one in Surat, where police said they were investigating whether the victim had been trafficked to the city.
Activists accuse the authorities of failing to protect women and children, and of moving too slowly in investigating cases and arresting perpetrators.
In another case, a child’s body was found on a building site early yesterday, hours after she went missing from a wedding in the Etah district of Uttar Pradesh state.
Police said a neighbour who was putting up tents for the wedding had been detained on suspicion of luring the girl to the secluded building.
Etah superintendent of police Akhilesh Chaurasia said the man fled but was arrested within hours.
“We have charged him with the rape and murder of the child. We are awaiting the postmortem reports but prima facie it looks she was strangled to death,” Chaurasia said.