Two Teens Arrested for Rape of 2-Year-Old Girl in India
Two teenagers were arrested late on Saturday for allegedly raping a 2 1/2-year-old girl in a park in New Delhi on Friday, the Associated Press reports. Police said they questioned more than 250 residents of the surrounding neighborhood.
Deputy commissioner of police Pushpendra Kumar said that after the two 17-year-old boys were interrogated they confessed to the crime.
The toddler was playing outside her home when she went missing during a 10-minute power outage in the neighborhood. Family members found her lying unconscious and bleeding in a park three hours later.
In a separate incident, police on Saturday arrested three men for raping a 5-year-old in an east Delhi suburb.
The rape of the two girls came a week after a 4-year-old girl was found dumped near a railway track after being raped and slashed with a blade in the capital.
India passed a number of new anti-rape laws after the brutal gang rape of a student in 2012. But last year, 36,735 rape cases were reported in India—2,096 in Delhi alone.
“I think as much as we might say that the levels of sexual assault have gone up, it may well be that it’s the reporting of these assaults that have increased, and that’s in large part because of the women’s movements in India,” the executive director of the International Civil Society Action Network, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, told Al Jazeera.
“But we also need to recognize when these [assaults] are new forms of violence against women and, specifically, violence against girls and children.”
Image via AP. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.