by A police officer in India has been arrested after being accused of raping a 13-year-old girl who went to his station to report being gang-raped.
The alleged incident is the latest to highlight the high levels of sexual violence in the world’s largest democracy, where a woman is raped every 18 minutes on average.
The girl is also a member of the Dalit community in India, which has long suffered from marginalization and violence at the hands of senior castes, while receiving little help from the police.
According to her father, she was gang-raped by four men last month for several days.
But when she tried to file a complaint last week, the station manager raped her, according to an NGO that now provides advice.
Police said the officer was arrested Wednesday along with four other people and the girl’s aunt, who was reportedly inside the station room when she was attacked.
Twenty-nine other officers who were at the police station in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh at the time of the alleged attack were fired.
The news of the incident has caused outrage on Indian social media.
“If police stations are not safe for women, then where are they going to complain?” wrote on Twitter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, a senior member of the opposition Congress Party.
“Has the (Uttar Pradesh) government seriously considered increasing the number of female police officers in order to make them safe for women?”
India has long been plagued by sexual violence against women. In JanuaryPolice in the Indian capital have arrested 11 people, including nine women, after allegedly gang-raping and torturing a young woman in a street parade and humiliating her.
Pankaj Nangia / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Last year, a 34-year-old woman in Mumbai died after being found he was raped and brutally tortured – bringing back memories of the rape and murder of a young medical student in 2012 in Delhi, which sparked mass protests and became an international front page.
India’s rape laws and guidelines have been revised since the 2012 attack. However, the number of offenses remains high, with more than 28,000 rapes reported in 2020, according to the latest official figures, which are believed to be only the tip of the iceberg.
