TRUE-LIFE HORROR

From a teenager’s rape by a godman in Jodhpur to the gangrape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, a litany of sexual assaults have shamed India

that a rape survivor was trashed, stabbed and set ablaze by five men, including her alleged rapists, on December 5, 2019. The woman, who suffered 90 per cent burns, died at New Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital the next day.

Unnao also gained notoriety when a minor girl accused former BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar of raping her in 2017. A Delhi court convicted Sengar under the POCSO Act and sentenced him to life imprisonment on December 20 last year. Despite the conviction, the court slammed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which had conducted the probe, on procedural grounds. The agency did not assign a woman officer to the case, as is mandatory under POCSO. Although a rape survivor is entitled to record her statement at a place of her convenience, the Unnao girl was called to the CBI office on successive occasions to record her statements. The charge-sheet was filed almost a year late.

The CBI similarly drew flak in a case from Badaun, UP. The agency had concluded that two minor girls, who were found hanging from a tree in May 2014, had not been sexually assaulted and that they had committed suicide. In 2015, a POCSO court rejected the CBI’s closure report and initiated a trial.

THE TRAUMA OF TRIAL

In India, trials in sexual assault cases are invariably protracted and often a demeaning experience for the survivor and her family. While the law says the trial must be completed in two months, the apex court noted last July that trial had been completed in only 4 per cent of the 24,000 sexual offence cases filed between January and June 2019. The Union government has initiated a scheme to set up 1,023 fast-track special courts (FTSCs) across the country for expeditious disposal of rape cases under the Indian Penal Code and crimes under the POCSO Act. But the record of the existing fast-track courts is far from encouraging. As of September 30, 2019, 701,478 cases were pending in the 704 fast-track courts operational across India. “The judiciary itself cannot be expected to wave a magic wand and deal with half-botched and tampered investigations that arrive at their table,” says former Supreme Court judge A.K. Sikri.

A senior public prosecutor, who did not wish to be named, claims that more than 70 per cent of the cases in fast-track courts relate to consensual sex going awry. In 2013, a study commissioned by a newspaper examined 460 cases in Delhi that went to trial and found over 40 per cent of them to be dealing with consensual sex; another 25 per cent related to sex after promise of marriage.

Often, sexual offence survivors give up the legal fight due to factors such as insensitive behaviour by the po