Rape of infant girl outrages India
• An eightmonth-old girl has been hospitalized in India’s capital after being raped, police said, a sexual assault that has both sickened and transfixed a city and country grown distressingly accustomed to horrifying sex abuse cases. A relative has been arrested.
As an indication of the widespread attention and concern the case has prompted, one major television station, NDTV, ran regular updates at the bottom of the screen Tuesday: “Baby in ICU; Condition stable.”
According to police officials, the infant’s parents were working Sunday morning and had asked a cousin to watch their two girls, the eight- month- old and a twoyear- old. The family lives in a poor neighbourhood in the northwest corner of New Delhi.
When the baby’s mother, a maid, returned in the afternoon, she found the infant bleeding profusely between her legs. Her father, speaking to reporters with his face obscured to protect the family’s identity, said the bed the baby had been lying on had been smeared with blood.
The mother asked the cousin what had happened and he could not give her a clear answer.
She then called police. After questioning, investigators arrested the cousin, a day labourer in his late 20s, who admitted to inserting his finger inside the infant girl’s vagina, police said.
Police said Tuesday that the eight-month-old girl was in stable condition, following a three-hour operation.
Swati Maliwal, chairwoman of the Delhi Commission for Women, a government body set up to help protect women, quickly took up the case, sending out a blast of Twitter posts.
“What to do? How can Delhi sleep today when 8 month baby has been brutally raped in Capital?” Maliwal wrote. “Have we become so insensitive or we have simply accepted this as our fate?”
Methods of reporting sex crimes — and the willingness of victims to speak out — vary sharply from country to country. Statistically, India, with a population of 1.3 billion, does not report a higher number of rapes per capita than many developed countries, such as the United States. But in recent years, several disturbing cases have drawn intense attention, in India and around the world.
In 2012, a young woman was gang- raped and beaten on a bus in New Delhi, dying 13 days later. The gruesome crime deeply shook India and stirred widespread protests.
In another extensively covered case, a 10- year- old girl who was raped by a relative gave birth last year, after India’s Supreme Court refused to allow her to have an abortion. The girl’s parents said they did not realize that their daughter was pregnant until several months had passed, and the courts ruled both that the fetus was too far along to be aborted and that an abortion could be dangerous to the mother.