Breaking out and police inquiry
In 1993, however, a few girls finally lodged a police complaint. Then district superintendent of police Deepak Jog started an investigation and soon complaints began pouring in.
The Women’s organisations staged demonstrations in various parts of the state, demanding a detailed inquiry into the cases. With rumours of the involvement of Pandit Sapkale and Raju Tadvi, Jalgaon Municipal Council (JMC) members belonging to Indian National Congress party, the issue was hotly debated in the state assembly too.
Following the uproar, a special investigation team was stationed at Jalgaon. Headed by Arvind Inamdar, Meera Borwankar and Deepak Jog, it got cracking at the case. Subsequently, a chargesheet was filed and a special court of Sessions Judge Mridula Bhatkar was set up in Pune to conduct the trial. Recording of evidence began in 1995.
About 20 cases of sexual exploitation, including 12 rapes, were registered in Jalgaon and neighbouring Bhusaval. Some of the victims were just 12-year-olds, and all came from poor families.
The 1992Ajmer rape case involved the serial gangrape and blackmailing of more than five hundred school and college-aged Hindu girls in Ajmer, Rajasthan. The perpetrators were a group of young Muslim men led by Farooq and Nafis Chishty, members of the Khadim family that oversaw the caretaking of the Ajmer Sharif Dargah. Over the course of multiple years, ending in 1992, victims were lured into a remote farmhouse or bungalow, where they were sexually assaulted by one or several of the men. Additionally, the perpetrators took nude or otherwise revealing photographs of their victims, which were used as blackmail to prevent the women from speaking out.
The Vishram Patil murder case gained national attention in India when the widow of the murder victim accused Pratibha Patil, the presidential nominee of the United Progressive Alliance, of shielding her brother, G. N. Patil, in relation to it.
The Suryanelli rape case refers to a case of kidnapping and subsequent rape of a 16-year-old school girl from Suryanelli, Kerala, India, in 1996. The girl was allegedly lured with the promise of marriage on 16 January 1996 and kidnapped. She was allegedly raped by 37 of the 42 accused persons, over a period of 40 days. The remaining had abetted the crime. After P.J. Kurien, the then Union Minister and later Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman belonging to UDF led by Congress party, was named, the issue was politicised, due to a then upcoming general election. Several women's rights activists like K. Ajitha and Suja Susan George, and women's organisations, like NFIW and Anweshi, have taken an interest in the case.
The Mathura rape case was an incident of custodial rape in India on 26 March 1972, wherein Mathura, a young tribal girl, was allegedly raped by two policemen on the compound of Desaiganj Police Station in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. After the Supreme Court acquitted the accused, there was public outcry and protests, which eventually led to amendments in the Indian rape law via The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1983.
In the infamous 2003 Kiliroor sex scandal, a teenaged girl named Sari S. Nair, hailing from Kiliroor, Kottayam, Kerala, India was sexually abused by reportedly being promised roles in TV serials. She was taken to many places in and around Kerala and was allegedly exploited sexually by "influential persons". Shari S Nair later died after she gave birth to a daughter who is now being raised by her parents.
The Rochdale child sex abuse ring involved underage teenage girls in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. Nine men were convicted of sex trafficking and other offences including rape, trafficking girls for sex and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child in May 2012. This resulted in Greater Manchester Police launching Operation Doublet to investigate further claims of abuse with 19 men so far being convicted. Forty-seven girls were identified as victims of child sexual exploitation during the police investigation. The men were British Pakistanis, which led to discussion on whether the failure to investigate them was linked to the authorities' fear of being accused of racial prejudice. The girls were mainly White British.
The Derby child sex abuse ring was a group of men who sexually abused up to a hundred girls in Derby, England. In 2010, after an undercover investigation by Derbyshire police, members of the ring were charged with 75 offences relating to 26 girls. Nine of the 13 accused were convicted of grooming and raping girls between 12 and 18 years old. The attacks provoked fierce discussion about race and sexual exploitation.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consists of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Northern England from the late 1980s until 2013 and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history", with one report estimating that 1,400 girls were abused by "grooming gangs". Evidence of the abuse was first noted in the early 1990s, when care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council. The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16. From January 2011 Andrew Norfolk of The Times pressed the issue, reporting in 2012 that the abuse in the town was widespread and that the police and council had known about it for over ten years.
Prosecution of gender-targeted crimes is the legal proceedings to prosecute crimes such as rape and domestic violence. The earliest documented prosecution of gender-based/targeted crimes is from 1474 when Sir Peter von Hagenbach was convicted for rapes committed by his troops. However, the trial was only successful in indicting Sir von Hagenbach with the charge of rape because the war in which the rapes occurred was "undeclared" and thus the rapes were considered illegal only because of this. Gender-targeted crimes continued to be prosecuted, but it was not until after World War II when an international criminal tribunal – the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – were officers charged for being responsible of the gender-targeted crimes and other crimes against humanity. Despite the various rape charges, the Charter of the Tokyo Tribunal did not make references to rape, and rape was considered as subordinate to other war crimes. This is also the situation for other tribunals that followed, but with the establishments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), there was more attention to the prosecution of gender-targeted crimes with each of the statutes explicitly referring to rape and other forms of gender-targeted violence.
On 27 May 2014, a gang rape and murder of two teenage girls was reported in the Katra village of Budaun district, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was widely reported in the press in India as well as overseas. After an extensive investigation, CBI concluded that there was no gang rape and the suspects were released. However, on 28 October 2015 the POCSO court rejected the CBI closure report; it was a major setback for CBI.
The Banbury child sex abuse ring was a group of six men who committed serious sexual offences against under-aged girls in the English town of Banbury, Oxfordshire. In March 2015, they were found guilty of offences including rape and sexual activity with a child over a period extending from 2009 to 2014. Police in Banbury had drawn on the lessons of Operation Bullfinch, which targeted sexual abuse in nearby Oxford.
Mahadev Katulkar is a judge in Chhattisgarh, India.
After a sexual assault or rape, victims are often subjected to scrutiny and, in some cases, mistreatment. Victims undergo medical examinations and are interviewed by police. If there is a criminal trial, victims suffer a loss of privacy, and their credibility may be challenged. Victims may also become the target of slut-shaming, abuse, social stigmatization, sexual slurs and cyberbullying. These factors, contributing to a rape culture, are among some of the reasons that may contribute up to 80% of all rapes going unreported in the U.S, according to a 2016 study done by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Kashmir conflict has been beset by large scale usage of sexual violence by multiple belligerents since its inception.
The Kathua rape case involved the abduction, gang rape, and murder of an 8-year-old girl, Asifa Bano, by six men and a juvenile, in January 2018 in the Rasana village near Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir, India. A chargesheet for the case was filed, the accused were arrested and the trial began in Kathua on 16 April 2018. The victim belonged to the nomadic Bakarwal community. She disappeared for a week before her body was discovered by the villagers a kilometer away from the village. The incident made national news when charges were filed against eight men in April 2018. The arrests of the accused led to protests by the Panthers Party and other local groups, who sought justice for the victim. A protest in support of the accused men was attended by two ministers from the Bharatiya Janata Party, both of whom later resigned. The gang rape and murder, as well as the support the accused received, sparked widespread outrage in India and world-wide.
Mridula Bhatkar is a former judge of the Bombay High Court, in Maharashtra, India, serving on the court between 2009 and 2019. She adjudicated in several notable cases during her tenure as a judge, including the Jalgaon rape case, the 2006 Mumbai train bombings, and the conviction of Gujarat police officers and doctors in the 2002 gangrape of Bilkis Bano.
The Jalgaon housing scam, sometimes called the Jalgaon Gharkul scam, was the illicit diverting of approximately ₹110 crore (US$14 million) in loaned public municipal funds by the Jalgaon Municipal Corporation, in the city of Jalgaon in Maharashtra, India, approximately between 1997 and 2006. The funds were earmarked for a 1996-initiated project for the building of over 11,000 units of subsidized housing to benefit the area's rural poor population, and to reduce the prevalence of slums. The incident is considered the largest known scam in the history of North Maharashtra.
The Pollachi sexual assault case refers to a case of rape and extortion of numerous women by a gang in Pollachi, Coimbatore in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The gang would entice women into isolated places after befriending them on social media and sexually assault them and filmed the act. The videos were later used to blackmail the women for sexual favors or money. The gang came into spotlight after the family of a 19-year-old college student who claimed to had been sexually assaulted and blackmailed complained to the police. According to media accounts, at least 200 women are sexually assaulted in the very same manner and the victims were college and school teachers, doctors, higher secondary school students from all over the state. On the mobiles of the accused, police said they discovered dozens of video recordings of women being abused at a farmhouse belonging to one of the accused and some were leaked.
In May 2022, the gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in Road no. 44, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, sparked outrage across Telangana and India. The minor girl returning home after attending a get-together at Amnesia pub was gang-raped by six persons, including five minors in Jubilee Hills area of the State capital. All the accused were arrested by police from their separate hideouts.
The kidnapping of Kiran Negi took place on February 9, 2012, in Qutub Vihar, Phase II, in Dwarka, southwest Delhi, India. Kiran Negi, a resident of Qutub Vihar, was returning home from work with two other girls when she was kidnapped by three people in a red Tata Indica car. A bystander named Vikas Rawat tried to intervene but was outnumbered. After a police complaint was filed, three persons, namely Rahul (26), Ravi, and Vinod, were arrested. The body of Kiran Negi was found in a mustard field about 30 km away in the village of Rodhai, Rewari district, Haryana. The police claimed to solve the case with confessions from the accused and findings of investigation, reinforced by DNA evidence.
