Another horrific report of rape and murder from Haryana of a five-year-old girl confirms that despite the cyclical media and civil society outrage, cities continue to be unsafe for women and children. In the latest case of sexual violence, the child from Haryana's Hisar was raped and tortured to death. A wooden stick was found thrust in her vagina with such force that it caused serious injuries to her uterus and intestine – a horrific reminder of the Delhi gang-rape of a physiotherapist on a moving bus in December in 2012.
"I slept at 9 pm along with my children. When I woke up in the morning, my daughter wasn't there... I couldn't find her. I asked the neighbours, they said they haven't seen her. Then someone told me that your daughter has been killed. I got to know about this at 7 am," the girl's mother told reporters.
The girl's body was found in a pool of blood with injuries on her shoulders, waist and nose. Police have not ruled out gang-rape but no one has been arrested yet.
Haryana: A 5-year-old girl was allegedly raped and brutally murdered by inserting a wooden stick into her private parts yesterday in Hisar's Uklana village pic.twitter.com/tEaGwkUmZv
— ANI (@ANI) December 10, 2017
Reetu Gupta, the doctor who conducted the post mortem, told India Today: "The victim died due to the torture perpetrated by inserting wooden stick into her private parts. The stick was inserted with force which not only caused serious injuries inside uterus but also in the intestine."
The report said the family of the victim has refused to cremate the body until the culprit is arrested.
The family was living in a make-shift tent and the child's father, a rag-picker, was away in Delhi.
Five years ago, on the night of 16 December, Jyoti Singh, 23, was returning from a movie in Delhi with a male friend when the couple was assaulted by six people on the bus they had boarded. Singh was raped and an iron rod was inserted into her vagina, that ruptured her intestine. Her friend was thrashed and the two were thrown out of the moving bus. She died of her injuries. The case resulted in an outpouring of anger and led to crucial changes in India's rape laws.
A National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report for 2015 showed that Haryana recorded the highest rate of gang-rapes per lakh woman population in the country, followed by Rajasthan.