A 10-year-old girl was dragged from her home, as the entire village watched, to a nearby forest, where she was raped by a 25-year-old man on the orders of a village council in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, family and police said Friday. The revenge rape was carried out in retaliation for an alleged molestation charge blamed on her brother.
A self-appointed headman of a remote village in Jharkhand's Bokaro district decreed on Tuesday evening that the girl be raped as revenge for her older brother's alleged attempt at molesting her assaulter's sister, NDTV reported. Three men, including the village headman, the main suspect, identified as the husband of the woman who was allegedly molested by the victim's brother, and the victim's brother have been arrested, Jitendra Singh, a top local police official, said. "They attacked her in retaliation and we are taking this case very seriously," Singh said, adding that police expect to complete the investigation and file charges in the next few days.
A medical test has confirmed that the minor was raped. Her father, a farmer, was out for work when she was dragged out of her home, while her mother, who was in the house, mutely accepts that her daughter was raped on orders of the headman, who appropriates that title by virtue of being the chief of a dominant caste in the village. When the rape was ordered, the mother told CNN-IBN that she pleaded with the council and other villagers, but no one listened. "We kept begging them. We begged with folded hands but they would not listen. They dragged her away to the forest," she said.
Deeply conservative local councils wield great power across much of rural India. "They can pass decrees on any subject they choose - from how women should dress to whether young lovers deserve to live or die. They usually enforce strict social norms about marriage and gender roles," Globe and Mail reported. "The village councils are often the only practical means of delivering justice in areas where local governments are either too far away or too ineffective to settle disputes. Their power is often derived from the fact that they can order that villagers be ostracized for ignoring their decrees."
Although almost the entire village witnessed the horrific crime, not many villagers were willing to speak on camera, according to NDTV.
From 2001 to 2011, 48,338 child rape cases were recorded in India, the Asian Center for Human Rights' report last year revealed. The annual number of reported cases rose 336 percent over that period. More broadly, records show a rape is committed every 22 minutes in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people, USA Today reported.
