Nirbhaya: If walking late at night was a rape invitation, so was wearing a diaper

“If you keep sweets on the street then dogs will come and eat them. Why did Nirbhaya’s parents send her with anyone that late at night? He was not her boyfriend. Is it not the parents’ responsibility to keep an eye on where she goes and with whom?” stated defence attorney ML Sharma. “If my daughter was having premarital sex and moving around at night with her boyfriend, I would have burnt her alive. I would not have let this situation happen. All parents should adopt such an attitude,” said another brilliant lawyer who defended the heinous crime that shook the entire nation with remorse and disgust. Well, kudos to the amazing thinking and rock-solid patriarchy, filtered through the prism of misogynist ideologies and slit through the throats of every Indian woman!

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This ain’t fiction, but actual arguments that surfaced during the time when India’s dark night overpowered years of cultural beliefs. Nirbhaya, the fearless, thrown under the bus of brutality, barbarism, and still, as shocking as it may sound, the victim is blamed for the tragedy.

It was December 16, 2012. A 23-year-old girl was beaten, gang-raped, and tortured by six men in a moving bus in which she was traveling with a friend. Eleven days after the assault, she was transferred to a hospital in Singapore for emergency treatment but two days later, she succumbed to her injuries. The incident scarred the nation with the indescribable pain of losing a daughter in a gruesome manner. It caused an outrage among different quarters of the country who stood against the crime and protested so that no other daughter of India becomes another ‘India’s daughter’.

A woman walking around at night is viewed as an invitation to rape, short skirts demand to get raped. But when a total of 38,947 cases of rape get registered in the country under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) as well as Section 376 and other related sections of the Indian Penal Code (a report published in TheQuint), we wonder what might have lured the predators. Looking back at the latest data available in TheQuint, in 2016, India recorded 106 rapes a day and four out of every 10 victims were minors. 

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Here are six minor rape cases that question humanity in humans: 

• An eight-year-old kid gets raped in Kathua

An example of sheer barbarism and inhumane ‘heroic’ act was set when an innocent eight-year-old girl was brutally raped for days. Sedated, tortured and finally killed the little girl after days of tormenting. The girl had gone missing on January 10, and while her family was religiously praying to every possible God for the safe return of their child, irony sparked yet another melancholy – the girl was killed inside a temple. The body was recovered from the Rasana forest on January 17, according to reports.

• Rape and killing of a 10-year-old

A 10-year-old girl in Chhattisgarh was allegedly raped and then killed by a 25-year-old man during a wedding. The accused later admitted to having raped and killed the child by smashing her head with a stone. The body of the kid was found dumped in a dry riverbed in the village, just as the humanity was dumped deep into the acts of horror.
 

• Sitapur gangrape, a father that puts every single man to shame

While families teach their kids to stay away and safe from the pawns of outside predators, do they really teach their kids to be safe from themselves? A father allegedly gifted his girl child to his friends. This was just the beginning, while what came as a shock, was that he later joined them to gang-rape her. 
 

• Minor rapes another minor. Well, kids do learn from the elders!

A 13-year-old boy allegedly raped a nine-year-old girl in Uttar Pradesh’s Mainpuri. According to police reports, the boy lured the girl with a silver ring and then when the girl was alone at home, raped the child. 
 

• 11-year-old raped in Assam, a place where women are worshiped

This north-eastern state saw the horrors that still creeps inside the walls of this beautiful place, haunting every family to safeguard their precious daughters. In Nagaon district in Assam, an 11-year-old girl was raped and then burnt alive. A 21-year-old and two minor boys from the same village have already been arrested.
 

• Four-month-old infant raped in Indore, maybe the diaper was revealing enough!

A four-month-old baby was allegedly raped and murdered in the Rajwada area. The infant’s body was found in the basement area of the heritage Shiv Vilas Palace. Bleeding the horrors of barbarism, the ravaged body was all it took, to tear apart the last shreds of humanity.

According to a report by child rights NGO CRY, sexual offence is committed against a child in India every 15 minutes and there has been an increase of more than 500 per cent over the past 10 years in crime against minors.

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The inhumane and barbarian cruelty to this young budding souls reveals the clear picture, that maybe, the culprit is not the girl who was with a friend late at night or the one whose parents could not keep an eye on her. Having premarital sex and moving around at night with the boyfriend is clearly not an invitation. If it would have been, at least the infants of this country would have been spared!

Disclaimer: The opinions and facts expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. They do not reflect the views of News Nation. The NNPL does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.