Police scuffles with an SUCI communist activist during a protest against the recent rape and murder case of a teenage girl in Nadia district in West Bengal. Photo / Getty Images
WARNING: Disturbing.
The alleged horrors inflicted on a teenage girl who claims she was gang-raped in India are hard to comprehend.
But so is the alleged response from a police officer who is accused of raping the 13-year-old girl when she was reporting that she had been raped.
That is the situation in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
It all started when the teenager was allegedly gang-raped by four men last month.
The BBC reports that the girl was taken to the city of Bhopal in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh by four men who raped her repeatedly over a period of four days.
Her father's complaint to the police, dated April 22, says that the men brought her back to the village where she lived with her family before fleeing.
The following day, an officer at the police station in Lalitpur district allegedly raped the 13-year-old when she lodged a complaint despite being accompanied by her aunt.
Local news channel NDTV stated that "the accused official took the girl inside a room in the police station in the presence of her aunt and raped her".
The officer accused of the heinous crime had been on the run but local media reports say he was captured on Wednesday and charged with rape.
Congress party leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra joined in on the overwhelming response to the alleged crime, taking to social media to express her outrage.
"The gang-rape of a 13-year-old girl in Lalitpur and then raped by (an officer) after taking a complaint shows how genuine law and order reforms are being suppressed in the noise of 'bulldozers'," she wrote on Twitter.
"If police stations are not safe for women, then where will they go to take complaints?
"Has the government seriously thought to increase the deployment of women in police stations, to make police stations safe for women?
"The Congress party had kept many important points for women's safety in its women's manifesto.
"To prevent such incidents, serious steps have to be taken for women's safety and women-friendly law and order."
The situation in India again casts the spotlight on a country with a record of rape and crimes against women. One of the most notorious examples happened in 2012 in the capital of Delhi when a woman was gang-raped on a bus and later died from her injuries.
There have been protests in India since then and the country has taken a harder stance — even executing four men in 2020 who were found guilty of rape.
The BBC reports that so prolific is rape against women in India that rape occurs once every 18 minutes and that more than 28,000 women and girls were raped in a single year in the latest crime statistics reporting period.
In November last year, a 16-year-old reported that she had been raped by hundreds of men.
The girl, who was homeless, said she was raped by 400 men in Beed district of Maharashtra state after she had been found begging for money at a bus stop.
She, too, was also allegedly sexually assaulted by two policemen when she tried to file a complaint.
The girl told authorities she was married aged 13 to a 33-year-old man. Her husband allegedly sexually abused her, according to a police statement cited by CNN. She was also allegedly "beaten and ill-treated" by her in-laws.
Women's rights activist Yogita Bhayana described it as "the most tragic [rape] case in history".
"This girl was tortured every single day," she said.
"We want strict action against all culprits."
In August a 9-year-old, "low-caste" girl was allegedly raped and murdered while fetching water, sparking protests in India.
— with Andrew Backhouse
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