Brutal killing of 11-year-old highlights unrelenting sexual violence in India

By Tora Agarwala

BARUIPUR, India, July 15 (Reuters) – On a Saturday evening this month, an 11-year-old girl left her home for a friend’s birthday party in a small town in eastern India.

He never returned.

While she was still alive, she was kidnapped by a group of men, raped, put in a sack and thrown into a pond, according to the testimony of a local investigating police officer.

The attack was the latest example of brutal sexual violence prevalent across India, where more than 80 rapes are reported to police every day, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. Activists say many more attacks go unreported because of victim blaming and shaming.

Entrenched patriarchy and misogyny, understaffed police forces and serious judicial delays contribute to many perpetrators believing they can escape punishment for attacking women. Activists say this sense of impunity has led to the incessant spread of such cases.

The gang rape of a student in Delhi in 2012 triggered sweeping legal reforms, including tougher sentences for those convicted and speeding up trials. India’s economy has since taken off and the country has moved into the world’s elite, but its dismal record on sexual violence remains.

In Baruipur, locals, including her 46-year-old father, were stunned when the girl’s lifeless body, covered in bite marks and bruises, was pulled from a garbage-filled pond on the morning of July 5, a day after she went missing, according to interviews with police and residents.

“My mind is not working. I haven’t been able to think clearly for days,” the girl’s father told Reuters.

Reuters is withholding the identities of the victim and his family because Indian law prohibits the disclosure of details that could identify survivors or victims in such cases.

The incident has left Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in a difficult position, just months after it first came to power in the state of West Bengal, where Baruipur is located, and where women’s safety was among the top promises in the poll.

But activists say no amount of government change can fix the deep-seated failures that govern most Indian communities, such as the patriarchy, a lack of gender-equal leaders in the police and judiciary, and sexual violence tied to caste hierarchies.

29,536 rape cases recorded in India in 2024; Little has changed in recent years; Sexual crimes against children have increased sharply in the last decade. Cases under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act (POCSO) reached a record 69,191.

At least two more cases have drawn national attention in the past month alone.

A 12-year-old girl in the northwestern state of Rajasthan was abducted, drugged and raped by multiple men at various hotels over four days before she was rescued, local police told Reuters. Police said 22 people have been arrested so far.

On Monday, the Times of India newspaper reported that a 7-year-old girl was raped before being killed and her body dumped in the empty space of an under-construction shopping mall in Ghaziabad, about 30 km (20 miles) from India’s parliament.

Karuna Nundy, a lawyer who helped draft anti-rape laws, said no government had seriously attempted to “dismantle the misogyny and patriarchy” that underlie this problem.

“There needs to be a sustained effort to change behavior at the community level,” he said. “It is very important to recruit the right kind of police personnel and appoint judges who have a progressive understanding of gender on these issues.”

NOTHING HAS CHANGED

Tougher penalties followed the gang rape and murder of a woman on a moving bus in Delhi in 2012, which shocked India and triggered one of the country’s largest public protests in years.

“Nothing will change just because the regime has changed. This is a deep-rooted problem that is ingrained in our patriarchal culture, not just in West Bengal but across India,” said Kolkata-based gender rights activist Satabdi Das.

The government had initially envisaged setting up 2,600 fast-track special courts for sexual offenses by 2026, but only 755 such courts, including 410 special POCSO courts, have been set up across the country, according to the latest government data.

India’s National Commission for Women, a government-appointed monitor, said the incident in Rajasthan reflected “serious administrative gaps, police gaps and inadequate monitoring mechanisms that allow such criminal activities to continue.”

Hari Shankar Yadav, a senior police officer in Rajasthan, said the department took proactive steps to arrest the main accused within hours of the case being registered and save the child.

In the Baruipur case, the girl’s family said faster police response to the initial missing complaint that night could have saved the girl’s life.

“Other than asking a few locals where he was, the police didn’t do much,” a close friend of the family told Reuters. Locals decided to examine the CCTV footage themselves and obtained clips from two such cameras.

Baruipur police officer Arvind Kumar Anand said the department was looking at internal reports “to see who made which mistake.”

Extrajudicial Executions

Human rights advocates say public anger over slow trials is also fueling support for so-called “encounters,” or extrajudicial killings, in which police shoot suspects in controversial situations.

Police said in the Baruipur case, a person suspected of the crime was killed after police officers opened fire while snatching a gun from the police team.

Agnimitra Paul, state BJP minister in West Bengal, said four accused were arrested and one was “killed in the encounter”, adding: “Our government’s message is very clear; we will not tolerate any kind of nonsense.”

Opposition leaders and human rights activists say such killings bypass due process and weaken the justice system.

“Cops shooting suspects is a spectacle designed to alleviate community anxiety; instant justice will eliminate crime,” said lawyer and human rights advocate Vrinda Grover.

“Far from deterring crime, it accelerates the arbitrary powers of the police and the state over the lives of citizens.”

(Reporting by Tora Agarwala in Kolkata; Editing by Aftab Ahmed and Raju Gopalakrishnan)