In a shocking incident, a three-year-old girl was allegedly raped and then locked inside a box by an 18-year-old male neighbour in Uttar Pradesh's Rampur's Tanda town.
The incident took place on April 2, when the child was alone at home and her parents were away.
"On seeing the parents away, the accused lured the child with a chocolate and took her to his house. As the child started screaming and crying in pain the accused in fear left her and fled. The locals rushed and rescued the child," police said.
The accused has been arrested and a case has also been registered against him under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO Act) 2012.
Uttar Pradesh has witnessed a 400 percent rise in cases of child rape in 2016 according to data collated by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). However, the chief minister of the state Yogi Aditya Nath came up with an "epic" response to these brutal rapes and murders. He was quoted as saying: "They should be sent to the same place as gangsters have been sent or evil persons in the epics." The chief minister also went on to praise the police for the determination they have shown in their fight against organised crime.
Stats released by the NCRB show that while 20,000 children were raped in 2016, the figure stood at 10,934 in 2015. Many of these rapes have ended in the murder of the child victim.
This phenomenon of rape followed by murder came into the limelight with the notorious Badauni gang rape case. Two Dalit cousin sisters were gangraped, tortured and then hanged from a mango tree on 27 May 2014 in the village of Sadatganj in Uttar Pradesh. Within two weeks of the case, even before the public outrage and media coverage could die down, three more Dalit girls were gangraped with one of them left murdered in Badouni district.
If the national crime figures are to be compared with state-specific statistics, it is evident that the increase in number of rape cases each year in Uttar Pradesh has been twice the national average. While India recorded an increase of 65 percent in rape cases from 2010 (22,172) to 2014 (36,735), Uttar Pradesh recorded an increase of 121 percent from 2010 (1,563) to 2014 (3,467) according to the NCRB data. Rapes by juvenile offenders increased from 1,688 in 2015 to 1,903 last year, almost a 13 percent jump.
