Boy, 4, booked for rape of his classmate

NEWDELHI: A four-and-a-half-yearold boy has been booked for raping a classmate inside the classroom as well as the washroom of a prominent private school in west Delhi on Friday, police said.

The girl, who is of the same age, told her mother that the boy used his finger and a sharpened pencil to assault her sexually.

The assault caused wounds in the child’s private parts, her mother alleged in the first information report (FIR).

According to the area’s deputy commissioner of police, legal experts were consulted because of the boy’s age and a case of rape under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act was registered “since an offence was made out and there was a victim”.

Though they registered a case, police were unsure how to proceed with the prosecution because of the boy’s age.

“The Indian Penal Code (IPC) provides children below seven years of age certain protection against prosecution. We are examining those provisions even as we are handling the matter with utmost sensitivity,” said Dependra Pathak, Delhi Police’s chief spokesperson.

In her statement to police, the girl’s mother said the child complained of pain in her lower abdomen after returning from school on Friday. The girl kept complaining sporadically, but the mother ignored it thinking it was “one of her tantrums”.

The girl began crying that night and told her mother about the alleged assault. She told her mother that a boy from her class unbuttoned her pants in the classroom and used his finger to assault her, and sharpened a pencil in the washroom and assaulted her again.

“She tried pushing him, but could not get away as other children had left and there was no staff around,” the mother alleged.

In the FIR, the child’s mother stated that she complained to the schoolteacher through a text message that night. She informed the school again on Saturday, but the authorities allegedly did not cooperate with her and asked her to give a written complaint on Monday.

Since her daughter’s pain did not subside, she took her to a hospital where she was treated as well as a medico-legal case made. A police case was registered thereafter.

The mother alleged that there was no class teacher or even an ayah, or help, in either the classroom or washroom when the assault happened.

She said her daughter’s delayed exit from the classroom, as she saw in CCTV footage, corroborated the sexual assault allegation. The school’s lawyer, however, told HT that they had an ayah present in every washroom of the school.