Girl, 16, abducted from home and raped by 8 men, hangs herself a day later
A 16-year-old gang rape victim in India has committed suicide after she was attacked by eight men on April 29. In the past four days, two teenagers were gang raped in separate incidents in the country and the teen who took her own life was one of them.
India has been hit with a rash of rape cases that doesn't look like it's slowing down in spite of the tough laws that were introduced recently. Nazneen Bhasin, a senior police official, said that the teenaged girl was gang raped by eight men in the Nuh district of Haryana in North India.
A 19-year-old was raped by five adult men, including the driver of the three-wheeler transport she had hailed on May 1, in the same state but another district. Police spokesperson Ravindra Kumar said that the driver had tricked the woman into thinking she had missed the bus she was meant to be on and offered to drop her off at another bus stop.
The young woman was then taken to an isolated area near the town of Gurugram and was raped by the rickshaw driver and four other accomplices of his who were at the spot waiting. The police are yet to make arrests in either of the tragic cases.
Kumar said: "A case of gang-rape has been registered after the medical examination of the victim confirmed the same. The matter is under investigation."
Gurugram, which is in the outskirts of the southwest side of the capital city New Delhi, is expanding at a rapid rate as a satellite town. Many international companies of repute have set up offices there because of the major role the town plays as an industrial, financial, and technological centre.
Reports from the media claim that the 16-year-old who committed suicide by hanging herself was taken from her own home when she was alone and then raped by men from her village. Her attackers came on two bikes and a car and abducted her while her parents were away at a relative's house. After raping her, they left her in front of her own house early on Monday morning.
A scuffle broke at home and her family entered an argument with the accused men. They were pressurizing the family to drop the police complaint. Leaving her at home, the elders had gone out because of the brawl. She then hanged herself on April 30. The police have said that they have registered a case of rape, kidnapping, and abetment of suicide.
The gang rapes in the state came less than a month after the country approved the death penalty for raping girls younger than the age of 12. There is also an increase in prison time for the rape of older girls and adult women after there was nationwide outrage following a vicious rape and murder of a young Muslim girl in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
After the fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi in 2012, the number of registered cases of sexual violence in the country has been on the rise in spite of the large-scale protests in the country.
The people protested en masse at that time and the government had hastily promised to speed up all the rape trials that came into the courts. This included stricter penalties such as capital punishment in some extreme cases. A law against stalking was also introduced.
Statistics since the time of the highly publicized case Nirbhaya in 2012, have shown that the number of reported rapes increased to around 40,000 in 2016 with almost 40% of these cases being that of child rape.