In a shocking news, a back-up dancer from the recently released movie ABCD2 was arrested for gang-raping a mentally challenged girl. 20-year-old Nilesh Nirbhavane along with his two other friends took 14-year-old Sambhavna (name changed) to public toilets and other isolated places, where they raped her multiple times, since May 2015. The crime was discovered much later.
It was the girl’s teacher who found a change in the girl’s behaviour for some time since and probed her. When she got to know about the incidents, the teacher notified the girl’s parents, who booked a case against the three accused.
“Initially, she had given the names of the three accused,” said Vinay Kumar Rathod, Deputy Commissioner of Police. “We took in one of them for inquiry, but investigations revealed he had no role to play in the incident. The girl mentioned that Nirbhavane had two broken front teeth.”
This isn’t the first time that a mentally challenged girl was taken advantage of in this manner. A month ago, a senior army officer was arrested for allegedly raping a mentally challenged girl. But the most gruesome incident this year also involved a mentally challenged woman from Rohtak, Haryana.
The Rohtak gang rape shook the country. The woman’s body was found without key organs along with sticks, stones and condoms stuffed into her private parts, three days after she went missing. Her face was partially eaten by animals.
But as past news reports show, most rape cases involving a mentally challenged girl often go undetected until the girl’s family discovers that she is pregnant. In 2012, when a family in Malad, Mumbai discovered that their 14-year-old mentally challenged girl is pregnant, they realised that she had been raped. Getting leads on the accused is often tough in such cases because of the victim’s inability to express.
But the most erroneous assumption that most people make when it comes to mentally challenged people is that because of the state of their mind, they cannot feel or get disturbed by sexual abuse or they cannot have sexual feelings. It is believed that this is what the rapists often think and in many cases even the society at large and sometimes the caregivers too.
But studies and past cases have shown that though an intellectually disabled victim cannot accurately identify what is happening to her as ‘rape’, she is still uncomfortable with it and disturbed by the episode. They are unable to express their emotions about it.
But one woman did express, in her own rudimentary way and it set the tone for her case although her lawyer was still unable to prove that rape had taken place. In a well-known case in New York in 1993, a 41-year-old mentally challenged woman (name withheld) who worked at a fast food joint was raped. She didn’t know what ‘rape’ was at that time, but she was terribly upset by the fact that a man had pulled her into a car in a vacant parking lot and urinated over her after removing her clothes.
As her testimony, she read this out to the judge:
“Dear Judge, I would like ‘O.’ to get the maximum years in prison because he hurt me very badly. It changed my body and my life. After the rape I had to sleep with the light on. I had terrible nightmares. I cried so much. He laughed, Judge, when they arrested him.” She added: “I became very depressed and so sad. I tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills. I lost my job, and I can no longer baby-sit for my sister’s son.” She also said: “I had no feelings for a long time. I couldn’t enjoy any birthdays or buy any presents or anything.”
Her testimony helped. The victim was convicted for sexual abuse, but unfortunately, her lawyer couldn’t prove that rape had occurred.
Caregivers of mentally-challenged women are often unaware of the terrible sexual vulnerability of a mentally challenged woman. They often forget that only their mind is that of a 4-year-old child, the body is fully developed, thus making them an easy target for molesters and rapists.
The worst was the case of a mentally challenged orphan girl at Nari Niketan in Chandigarh. Her sexual assault went unnoticed until she was 20 weeks into her pregnancy and medical termination of that pregnancy could only be done based on court orders.
We need awareness programmes for caregivers to make them realise the high risk of sexual abuse for their wards and simple everyday steps that they could take to safeguard her.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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