India’s grim record of sexual violence was last night under scrutiny again after girls aged two and five were raped in separate attacks in Delhi at the weekend, sparking furious protests.
The two-year-old was snatched from outside her home during a power cut in the west of the capital on Friday night and dumped in a park a short time later. After a huge manhunt, Delhi police confirmed yesterday that two teenagers had confessed to raping her.
The five-year-old was attacked on the opposite side of the city after being lured to a neighbour’s house, where she was gang-raped. Three men have been seized in connection with the assault. Both children are in hospital.
The attacks have triggered renewed protests in Delhi after a series of sexual assaults in the capital, many involving children, that have sparked outrage at home and abroad. A four-year-old girl was raped and slashed with a knife before being left for dead on railway tracks earlier this month.
During protests on Saturday, one relative of the youngest victim complained that Delhi police “are not doing anything to arrest the rapists — we do not feel safe in this city”. Swati Maliwal, chairwoman of the Delhi Commission for Women, described the latest attacks as “shameful” and said that violence against women in the capital had reached “epidemic proportions”.
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Police data released yesterday shows that six rapes and 14 sexual assaults are being reported every day in Delhi. National crime statistics show that 364 rapes of girls aged 10 and under were reported from 2013 to 2014. More than 132,000 sexual offences were reported across India last year. Fierce public debate followed the fatal gang-rape of a woman on a bus in Delhi in 2012.
Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, said yesterday that Delhi police had completely failed to provide safety. He again demanded that Narendra Modi, the prime minister, take decisive action or hand command of the force to local government.
Efforts to change entrenched male attitudes towards sexual violence remain piecemeal. The caste system and enduring patriarchal attitudes in rural India are widely blamed, but the surge of attacks in Delhi underscores the pervasive problem in major cities. Some 3,000 rape cases were recorded in the capital last year, with the true scale certain to be far worse.