Women in the north Indian village of Katra Shadatganj in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where two young girls were recently raped and hanged. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
CHIRANG, India, Sep 30 2014 (IPS)

On a bright March morning, a 17-year old tribal girl woke as usual, and went to catch fish in the village river in the Chirang district of India’s northeastern Assam state.

Later that evening, villagers found her lifeless body on the riverbank. According to Taburam Pegu, the police officer investigating the case, her assailants had raped her before slitting her throat.

The girl was a member of the Bodo tribe, which has been at loggerheads with Muslims and Santhals – another indigenous group in the region. The tragic story reveals a terrible reality across India, where thousands of girls and women are sexually abused, tortured and murdered in a tide of gender-based violence (GBV) that shows no sign of slowing.

“We have a culture of impunity. Our legal system itself negates the possibility [...] of punishment in cases of violence against women.” -- Anjuman Ara Begum, former programme officer at the Asian Human Rights Commission
Conflict and a lack of accountability, particularly across India’s northern, eastern and central states where armed insurgencies and tribal clashes are a part of daily life for over 40 million women, fuel the fire of sexual violence.

According to a report released earlier this year by the United Nations Secretary-General assessing progress on the programme of action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, violence against women is universal, with one in every three women (35 percent) experiencing physical or sexual abuse in her lifetime.

Of all the issues related to the ICPD action plan, ending gender-based violence was addressed as a key concern by 88 percent of all governments surveyed. In total, 97 percent of countries worldwide have programmes, policies or strategies to address gender equality, human rights, and the empowerment of women.

Still, multiple forms of violence against women continue to be an hourly occurrence all around the world.

A recent multi-country study on men and violence in the Asia-Pacific region, conducted by the United Nations, reported that nearly 50 percent of 10,000 men surveyed admitted to sexually or physically abusing a female partner.

In India, a country that has established a legal framework to address and end sexual violence, 92 women are raped every day, according to the latest records published by the government’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

This is higher than the average daily number of rapes reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which currently stands at 36.

Sexual violence is particularly on the rise in conflict areas, experts say, largely due to a lack of accountability – the very thing the United Nations describes as “key to preventing and responding to gender-based violence.”

According to Suhas Chakma, director of the Asian Centre for Human Rights in New Delhi, “There are human rights abuses committed by security forces and human rights violations by the militants. And then there is also violence against women committed by civilians. No matter who is committing the crime […] there has to be accountability – a component completely missing” from the current legal framework.

An example of this is Perry*, a 35-year-old woman from the South Garo Hills district of India’s northeastern Meghalaya state – home to 14 million women and three armed groups – who was killed by militants in June this year.

Members of the Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA), an insurgent group, allegedly tried to rape Perry and, when she resisted, they shot her in the head, blowing it open. The GNLA refused to be held accountable, claiming that the woman was an informant and so “deserved to die”.

Another reason for the high levels of GBV in India is the dismal conviction rate – a mere 26 percent – in cases involving sexual assault and violence.

In 3,860 of the 5,337 rape cases reported in the past 10 years, the culprits were either acquitted or discharged by the courts for lack of ‘proper’ evidence, according to the NCRB.

“We have a culture of impunity,” Anjuman Ara Begum, a Guwahati-based lawyer and former programme officer at the Asian Human Rights Commission, told IPS, adding, “Our legal system itself negates the possibility or certainty of punishment in cases of violence against women.”

With a declining conviction rate, armed groups have been playing the role of the judiciary to deliver instant justice. In October 2011, a kangaroo court of the armed Maoists in the Palamu district of India’s eastern Jharkhand state cut off the hands of a man accused of rape.

In August 2013, the Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP) – an insurgent group operating in the northeastern state of Manipur – launched an “anti-rape task force”.

Sanakhomba Meitei, the secretary of KCP, told IPS over the phone that his group would deliver fast-track justice for rape victims. “Our intervention [will] instill fear in the [minds of the] rapists,” said Meitei, adding, “We will deliver stringent punishment.”

This is a worrying trend, but inevitable, given the failure of the legal system to deliver justice in these troubled areas, according to A L Sharada, director of Population First – a partner of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in India.

“What we need is a robust legal system, and mob justice hurts that possibility. In fact, such non-judicial justice systems are also very patriarchal in nature and ultimately against women. What we really need are quick convictions [in] every case of gender violence that has been filed,” Sharada stated.

According to the NCRB over 50,000 women were abducted across the country in 2013 alone, while over 8,000 were killed in dowry-related crimes. More than 100,000 women faced cruelty at the hands of their husbands or other male relatives, but only 16 percent of those accused were convicted.

*Not her real name

This story originally appeared in a special edition TerraViva, ‘ICPD@20: Tracking Progress, Exploring Potential for Post-2015’, published with the support of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. The contents are the independent work of reporters and authors.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

NGOs and government data suggests that a child goes missing every eight minutes in India. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

In a country where well over half the population lives on less than two dollars a day, it takes a lot to shock people. The sight of desperate families traveling in search of money and food, whole communities defecating in the open, old women performing back-breaking labour, all this is simply part of life in India, home to 1.2 billion people.

But amidst this rampant destitution, some things still raise red flags, or summon collective cries of fury. Child trafficking is one such issue, and it is earning front-page headlines in states where thousands of children are believed to be victims of the illicit trade.

The arrest on Jun. 5 of Shakeel Ahamed, a 40-year-old migrant labourer, by police in the southern state of Kerala, created a national outcry, and reawakened fears of a complex and deep-rooted child trafficking network around the country.

Ahamed’s operation alone was thought to involve over 580 children being illegally moved into Muslim orphanages throughout the state.

“Many families are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, which forces parents to sell their children. Some children are abandoned by families who can’t take care of them. Some run away to escape abuse or unhappy homes. Gangsters and middlemen approach these vulnerable children." -- Justice J B Koshy, chairperson of the Kerala Human Rights Commission
Experts tell IPS that children are also routinely trafficked to and from states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), child trafficking is rampant in underdeveloped villages, where “victims are lured or abducted from their homes and subsequently forced to work against their wish through various means in various establishments, indulge in prostitution or subjected to various types of indignitiesand even killed or incapacitated for the purposes of begging, and trade in human organs.”

Available records show a total of 3,554 crimes related to human trafficking in 2012, compared to 3,517 the previous year. Some 2,848 and 3,400 cases were reported in 2009 and 2010 respectively, as well as 3,029 cases in 2008.

In 2012, former State Home Affairs Minister Jitendra Singh told the upper house of parliament that almost 60,000 children were reported as “missing” in 2011. “Of those,” he added, “more than 22,000 are yet to be located.”

It is not clear how many of these “missing” children are victims of traffickers; a dearth of national data means that experts and advocates are often left guessing at the root causes of the problem.

NGOs and government agencies often cite contradictory figures, but both are agreed that a child goes missing roughly every eight minutes in the country.

Human rights watchdogs say there are many contributing factors to child trafficking in India, including economic deprivation. Indeed, the 2013 Global Hunger Index ranked India 63^rd out of 78 countries, adding that 21.3 percent of the population went hungry in 2013. According to the World Bank, 68.3 percent of Indians live on less than two dollars a day.

“Socio-economic backwardness is a key factor in child trafficking,” Justice J B Koshy, former chief justice of the Patna High Court and chairperson of the Kerala Human Rights Commission, told IPS, adding that a political-mafia nexus also fueled the practice in remote parts of the country.

“Many families are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, which forces parents to sell their children,” Koshy stated. “Some children are abandoned by families who can’t take care of them. Some run away to escape abuse or unhappy homes. The gangsters and middlemen approach these vulnerable children. In some cases, good-looking girls are taken away by force.”

An action research study conducted in 2005 by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) found that a majority of trafficking victims belonged to socially deprived sections of society.

It is estimated that half of the children trafficked within India are between the ages of 11 and 14.

Some 32.3 percent of trafficked girls suffer from diseases such as HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and other gynaecological problems, according to a 2006 report by ECPAT International.

This is likely due to the fact that most girls are trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation.

A government-commissioned study conducted in 2003, the last time comprehensive data was gathered, estimated that the number of sex workers increased from two million in 1997 to three million in 2003-04, representing a 50-percent rise.

Many of these sex workers are thought to be girls between the ages of 12 and 15.

Sreelekha Nair, a researcher who was worked with the New Delhi-based Centre for Women’s Studies, added that parents coming from poor socio-economic conditions in remote villages sometimes readily hand over their children to middlemen.

Some parents have been found to “sell their children for amounts that are shockingly worthless,” she told IPS, in some cases for as little as 2,000 rupees (about 33 dollars), adding, “law and order agencies cannot often intervene in the private matters of a family.”

Rajnath Singh, home minister of India, told a group of New Delhi-based activists headed by Annie Raja, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, that a central agency would conduct a probe into the mass trafficking of children from villages in the Gumla district of the eastern state of Jharkhand over the past several years.

The group had brought it to the attention of the minister that thousands of girls were going missing from interior villages in the district every year, while their parents claimed ignorance as to their whereabouts.

Raja told reporters in New Delhi this past Julythat developmental schemes launched by individual states and the central government often fail to reach remote villages, leaving the countryside open to agents attempting to “sneak teenage girls out of villages.”

Experts point out that implementation of the 1986 Immoral Traffic Prevention Act remains weak. Many believe that since the act only refers to trafficking for the purpose of prostitution, it does not provide comprehensive protection for children, nor does it provide a clear definition of the term ‘trafficking’.

Dr. P M Nair, project coordinator of the anti-human trafficking unit of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in New Delhi and former director general of police, said that investigations should focus on recruiters, traffickers and all those who are part of organised crime.

The ‘scene of crime’ in a trafficking case, he said, should not be confined to the place of exploitationbut should also cover places of transit and recruitment.

“Victims of trafficking should never be prosecuted or stigmatised,” he told IPS. “They should be extended all care and attention from the human rights perspective. There is a need for the mandatory involvement of government agencies in the post-rescue process so that appropriate rehabilitation measures are ensured” as quickly as possible, he added.

NGOs like Child Line India Foundation help provide access to legal, medical and counseling services to all trafficked victims in order to restore confidence and self-esteem, but the country lacks a coordinated national policy to deal with the issue at the root level.

Experts have recommended that the state provide education, or gender-sensitive market-driven vocational training to rescued victims, to help them reintegrate into society, but such schemes are yet to become a reality.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

An acid survivor in Bangladesh is rebuilding her life with help from the Department for International Development (DFID). Credit: Narayan Nath/FCO/Department for International Development (DFID)/CC-BY-2.0

By Ranjita Biswas
KOLKATA, India, Jul 16 2013 (IPS)

Preeti Rathi was just 25 years old when she passed away in a Mumbai hospital exactly a month after a man threw acid on her while she stood waiting on a railway platform.

Rathi had travelled from India’s capital, New Delhi, to work as a nurse at INHS Ashwini, the naval hospital in south Mumbai. Despite closed-circuit television footage of the railway platform on which the attack took place, and massive protests launched by her family and activists, her assailant still remains at large.

Rathi’s is not an isolated case. The last few years have seen hundreds of Indian women and girls in cities across the country become the victims of acid attacks.

Those who succumb to their injuries invariably die a painful death – acid eats into the skin, resulting in wounds that quickly become infected and cause septicaemia and other fatal conditions.

Survivors, meanwhile, end up with scars that often last a lifetime, and many live out their days hiding what many described to IPS as their “deformed” faces and bodies from horrified gazes.

Though there is a dearth of official data on the issue, reports conducted by independent researchers and rights groups show that acid attacks are a gendered crime, with young women being the primary targets.

The attackers, more often than not, are men whose romantic overtures were spurned.

In India, a largely patriarchal society that is on the cusp between conservatism and modernism – and where the aspirations of young girls and women to secure an education and find employment are supported by national economic development plans – hundreds of men feel slighted by women’s newfound independence.

Unable to bear what they perceive as an insult to their “masculinity”, many seek revenge by physically harming women, in an attempt to reclaim their authority.

Eighteen-year-old Chanchal Paswan, hailing from the central state of Bihar, has a face that resembles nothing but melted flesh, the result of an attack that was supposedly “provoked” by her protesting against sexual harassment by four men.

Up until now, acid attacks have simply fallen under the general rubric of crimes against women, which numbered 244,270 in 2012 and included such atrocities as rape, dowry death (women killed or driven to suicide by in-laws to extort an increased dowry) and trafficking of women and girls, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

The eastern state of West Bengal accounted for 12.67 percent of these crimes, while its capital, Kolkata, ranked the third most dangerous Indian metropolis for women, behind Delhi and Bangalore. As such, the number of acid attacks in Kolkata is estimated to be higher than in many other cities around this country of 1.2 billion people.

Subhas Chakraborty of the Kolkata-based Acid Survivors Foundation India (ASFI), told IPS the organisation recently moved a Right to Information (RTI) petition with the West Bengal government in order to glean the real number of attacks against women in the state.

“There were only 56 recorded cases, and 77 victims, between 2006 and 2011,” Chakraborty said, adding that the actual number of incidents was likely far greater.

In contrast, a study by the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at the U.S.-based Cornell Law School found 153 cases of acid violence reported in Indian newspapers from January 2002 to October 2010.

The Campaign and Struggle Against Acid Attacks on Women (CSAAAW), meanwhile, compiled a list of 65 cases in the southern state of Karnataka between 1999 and 2008.

CSAAAW is credited with helping a young woman named Hasina Hussain seek justice after her former employer, Joseph Rodrigues, poured sulphuric acid on her when she quit her job in his company in 1999 at the age of 19. Even with the backing of the NGO, it took the Kolkata High Court seven long years to finally sentence Rodrigues to life imprisonment.

Activists demand action

C J Pragya, from the southern city of Bangalore, no longer flinches at the thought of showing her face, once considered beautiful but now covered in scars, in public. Far from hiding from her plight, she launched an organisation known as stopacidattacks.org, a platform from which she is running a major anti-acid attack campaign.

For years, activists have been demanding that existing laws be strengthened and acid attacks given their due attention by government agencies.

Seven years ago, the Supreme Court suggested that the government draft a “complete and comprehensive” law to tackle this menace, according to Chakraborty.

But it took the brutal gang rape of a young medical student on a moving bus in the middle of New Delhi on Dec. 16, 2012, and the ensuing wave of protests, to finally push the government to fast track passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in April 2013.

The reform ushered in sweeping changes to laws that claim to protect women against violence, and made provision for harsh punitive measures against those who violate women’s rights.

Acid attacks quickly came under the ambit of the new law, which itself resides under the Indian Penal Code (IPC 326 A&B).

Punishment for acid attacks now includes a minimum of 10 years’ imprisonment, extendable to a life term, while “conviction on voluntarily throwing or attempting to throw acid with the intention of causing damage will incur a penalty of five to seven years,” with a fine that could go up to roughly 16,600 dollars, according to the text of the amended Act.

The fine will be used to pay for the extensive surgical procedures necessary for facial reconstruction. Sonali Mukherjee, a young girl from the eastern Indian city of Dhanbad, for instance, has had to undergo 22 operations since she was attacked in 2003, according to Chakraborty.

Still, money alone will not compensate the families for the long-term trauma of acid attacks. Rehabilitation remains a major problem for survivors, with many poor families unable to afford the extended treatment required for a full psychological recovery.

The Punjab and Haryana High Court recently directed the Punjab government to formulate a policy that would facilitate free treatment, including counselling, for acid attack survivors.

Easy access to acid

While rights activists welcomed the IPC 326 provisions, they are disappointed that the amended law makes no mention of restrictions on acid sales, drawing attention to the fact that a bottle of sulphuric, hydrochloric or nitric acid can be obtained for as little as 30 rupees (half a dollar) from almost any corner store.

Supreme Court Lawyer Kamlesh Jain told IPS that the law would not make a difference until this fundamental problem was addressed.

As early as 2006, rights advocate Aparna Bhat filed public interest litigation (PIL) in federal court demanding a ban on over-the-counter acid sales.

Bhat was representing Laxmi, a victim who ended up scarred for life after a spurned lover flung acid in her face. Bhat contended that the absence of a comprehensive regulatory mechanism made the corrosive substance easily attainable by the assailant, a claim that has found echo among social researchers who blame the large number of attacks on the cheap price of the weapon.

On Jul. 9, the Supreme Court of India warned that it would ban the sale of acid unless the central and state governments immediately regulated its supply.