Indian police have arrested 49 men accused of sexually assaulting a Dalit teenager over several years in the state of Kerala.
Indian police have arrested 49 men suspected of having repeatedly and for years sexually assaulted a teenage girl in the south of the country, police announced Wednesday.
The young victim belongs to the Dalit community, formerly called “untouchables”particularly victim of sexual violence in a country which records a high rate of crime against women.
This woman, now aged 18 and whose identity has not been revealed, claimed to have been sexually assaulted from the age of 13, by around sixty men, in her State of origin, Kerala.
A total of “49 people were taken into custody”confirmed Nandakumar S., senior police official in southern Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district.
The men arrested were known to the victim, among them neighbors and family friends.
“The family, however, was not aware of the nightmare (experienced by) their daughter”said Rajeev N., a lawyer who heads the district’s child protection committee.
Some 90 rapes were recorded every day in 2022 in the most populous country on the planet with its 1.4 billion inhabitants, but a large number of them would have gone unreported.
A court in Calcutta, in the east of the country, is due to deliver its verdict this week against a man accused of raping and killing a 31-year-old female doctor last August.
The discovery of her bloodied corpse in a public hospital in Calcutta triggered a wave of emotion across the country, strikes by medical staff and massive demonstrations against chronic violence against women.
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