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A minor gang-rape victim’s harrowing tale of police apathy -Sowmiya Ashok
-The Hindu

For this 14-year-old, her life as she knew it has come to an end: she dropped out of school, she cannot interact with any of her friends or even walk freely in her neighbourhood but she still nurtures the dream of becoming a police officer when she grows up. Her resolve to join the force is despite the kind of treatment meted out to her by the Delhi Police after she was gang-raped by “four men” only a month ago in North West Delhi.

According to the family, the police ignored Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) from the time they dialled “100” to register a complaint -- neither did a woman investigating officer visit the victim’s house to ascertain facts in the presence of her family members nor was the family taken to the nearest police station by the male officers who paid them a visit.

The family said the girl, a student of Class IX, was instead repeatedly intimidated at the police station to only identify two of the four perpetrators (the First Information Report filed mentions only two names); further she was asked to testify in the presence of one of the accused by the Station House Officer and she was later put in a shelter home for three nights without the consent of her family on the grounds that she was a minor. The family claims the FIR was not filed in front of them and two of the four perpetrators were allowed to walk free immediately after the incident. It is another matter though that they were later arrested and subsequently granted bail.

“First, I was taken to the SHO’s room where I was asked to narrate the details of the incident. He spoke to me rudely as if he was angry with me. Then they took me to another room where I was questioned by three or four other policemen who also spoke to me rudely and kept pressurising me that I should identify only two of the four men who raped me,” said the girl, who agreed to speak to The Hindu in her relative’s home. “When the SHO called me into his room again, one of the four men was sitting there and I was asked to testify in his presence.”

The girl said she then came face to face with a woman investigating officer who also continued to pressurise her to change her statement. “She too instructed me to take the names of only two of them’’, said the girl. While the FIR stated that one person from the “NGO Nav Shristi” was present at the police station to provide counselling, the girl said: “Another aunty came and asked me to sign on a paper which had my statement. I have no idea who she was and she didn’t look like she was from Delhi.”

Throughout these rounds of interrogations, the girl said she was not allowed to interact with her family at any point nor was any of her family members allowed in the room -- not even her mother, in whom she had confided. “After she returned from the medical test, we were informed by the police that my sister will be sent to Nirmal Chhaya (Nari Niketan) for a few days because she was a minor,” said the girl’s brother, this was despite her expressing the desire to stay with her family.

“They told me that a lot of girls are there and I will feel better if I go there,” said the girl, describing it as a place with many girls who slept in a large hall. “There we were all assigned different duties and I was asked to make rotis. Some of the girls asked me what case I was in.”

Here too, the girl said she was asked to narrate details of the incident to a woman. “She told me ‘it must have been your fault and you are now trying to frame others. There are so many girls who make up lies when they get caught’”, recollected the 14-year-old.