This report does not attempt a quantitative analysis of the scope of the problem in India. Many are mistreated a second time by a criminal justice system that often does not want to hear or believe their accounts, or take serious action against perpetrators.
Children are sexually abused by relatives at home, by people in their neighborhoods, at school, and in residential facilities for orphans and other at-risk children. Smaller surveys conducted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have also painted a disturbing picture. A 2007 Indian government-sponsored survey, based on interviews with 12,500 children in 13 different states, reported serious and widespread sexual abuse, thereby putting the government on notice about the gravity of the problem. It is systemic failure,” he told Human Rights Watch.Īs recent research has shown, it is not just within institutions that Indian children suffer from sexual abuse. According to Vinod Tikoo of the NCPCR, the abuse in the institution revealed a massive breakdown. Its director, Jaswanti Devi, had recently been named Haryana state’s “woman role model of the year.” Her charity ran 12 government-funded welfare projects. What is most shocking about the abuse is that it happened in a well-respected facility that was regularly inspected by government officials. “I felt so dirty that even the water I drank afterwards tasted like it had been contaminated.” “They made us do such disgusting things,” one said.
Others said that staff had tied them up and suspended them from ceiling fans as punishment. The head of the team later described the scene they encountered there as “insane, unbelievable.” Girls of all ages told them they had been made to have sex with strangers for money, that the son-in-law of the director had molested them, that they had been stripped naked, and beaten on their vaginas. That help came two days later, when members of the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) visited the facility to investigate the girls’ allegations of abuse. The girls promised the friends they left behind that they were going to return with help. It was all they needed to make their escape to New Delhi. Conditions were so dire that at dawn on May 7, 2012, three teenage residents sneaked out through the front door after one of the girls stole the key to the door, along with 500 rupees, from the purse of the facility’s director. Expressing concern about violence against women after the New Delhi rape, Louis-Georges Arsenault, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) representative to India, said that “too many of these cases are children.”Ĭonsider the case of Apna Ghar, a residential care facility for orphans and other vulnerable children in the northern Indian town of Rohtak in Haryana state. Studies suggest that more than 7,200 children, including infants, are raped every year experts believe that many more cases go unreported. While great awareness has been raised about sexual violence against women in India, much less is known about the problem of sexual abuse of children. If nothing else happens, the case has awakened many Indians to the scale and prevalence of sexual violence in their country. Politicians, lawyers, women’s rights activists, and an independent government-appointed commission have all made proposals for new laws, police reform, and public education. The rape and murder of a student in New Delhi on December 16, 2012, followed by large public protests, has led to a great deal of soul searching about the problem of sexual violence in India.
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