Mumbai: He was lured into a room near where he played cricket, a man then shut the door and window, and raped him. That’s what a 14-year-old Mumbai boy told his mother from his hospital bed last July.
The boy died soon after, killed by the rat poison he consumed after the assault, according to details described to Reuters by his parents and police.
Inspector Balwant Deshmukh, the investigating officer, said police have all but given up hope of finding out who raped the boy. “We will revive the case if we get new clues, but as of now it’s in cold storage,” he told Reuters.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government last month introduced the death penalty for rape of girls below 12 and increased the minimum punishment for those whose victims were under 16, after the rapes of an eight-year-old girl and a young woman in two states ruled by his party led to public protests.
But the emergency order, known as an ordinance, did not mention boys, although a government survey has showed that male minors were more likely to be victims than female minors.
The ordinance lapses in six months and the government has to introduce legislation to convert it into law. At that time, the government plans to broaden the statute to make it gender-neutral, said a senior government official who declined to be named.
“Whatever applies to girls will apply to boys,” the official said.
The government’s chief spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
In the meantime, the minimum punishment for raping a boy is 10 years in jail, compared with 20 years for assaults on girls under 16.
“Why this discrimination?” asked the father of the boy who was raped, sitting in his tiny first floor home in a teeming settlement near Mumbai’s international airport, largely populated by migrant worker families.
Between sobs, the mother recounted her horror at her son’s condition in the hospital during his dying days.
“Please get us justice,” she said as the interview came to an end.
The boy’s medical reports, which were reviewed by Reuters, said their son had been “sodomised”.
Hostility, ridicule
Insia Dariwala, who runs a foundation that raises awareness about child sexual abuse, said police generally lack the sensitivity to deal with cases of assaults on boys.
“I have interacted with adult male survivors and social workers who have cited police hostility, ridicule and even lack of trust when it comes to believing that a boy was sexually abused,” she said. “The most common perception dished out to male survivors is that they may have enjoyed it.”
The Mumbai police investigating the boy’s rape, however, said officers are regularly trained on how to handle sexual abuse of children of both genders. The federal government is also running workshops for police that cover all children, said Stuti Kacker, head of the government’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, which advises on child-related policies.
Some activists working for the safety of children say outrage over the gruesome gang rape and subsequent death of a young woman in New Delhi in 2012 succeeded in raising awareness about sexual violence against women in India, but far less attention is paid when the victims are male.
Agencies
