Three video clips shared during the last 24 hours by retired IAS officer Surya Pratap Singh shows a woman complaining that a police officer sought sexual favours and threatened to implicate her in false cases if she refused. In another case a woman who had reached a police station to register a complaint was abducted from the police station by miscreants. In the third video clip a doctor can be heard describing how he strangled his partner, a lady doctor, and stabbed her to death following an argument with a knife that he kept in his car.
Women are unsafe and, it seems, cannot expect much protection from the police either. The video clips and a list of the most horrifying crimes against women in the state during the month of August, 2020 are appended below.
What is happening on the ground is scary. UP has witnessed a series of crimes against women and children in the last few days. While a few have attracted attention from the media, others have been ignored.
- August 15, Lakhimpur Khiri: The mutilated body of a 13-year old girl was found in a sugarcane field. She was raped and killed. The father of the girl alleged that the rapist while killing her daughter also gouged her eyes and slit her tongue. The criminal even dragged the girl by putting a rope around her neck. The girl was reported missing on Friday (August 14) afternoon. Police claim the two arrested people have confessed to their crime.
- August 15 Gorakhpur: Another teenaged girl was raped and left unconscious in the Gola area of Gorakhpur district. The girl is convalescing at the district hospital. She had left home to fetch water from a hand pump on Friday night, when she was forcibly taken to a hut and raped. She was also tortured by inflicting burn injuries with cigarette butts.
- August 19 Bhadohi: The burnt body of a 17 year old girl, missing since August 17 from Bhadohi was found with her face and upper portion of the body disfigured with acid to hide her identity.
- August 10, Bulandshahar: Sudeeksha Bhati, a district topper studying in Babson College in Massachusetts, lost her life in an ‘accident’ that happened because of eve-teasers while she was on her way to Bulandshahr on the pillion of a motorcycle.
- August 9 Jalaun: A 21-year-old woman committed suicide hours after she and two of her friends were questioned by local police over allegations of theft. The sister of the girl said she had hanged herself after she was released.
- August 6, Hapur: A six-year-old girl was kidnapped when she was playing outside her house in Garhmukteshwar Kotwali area of Hapur. The kidnapper raped the minor girl, mutilated her private parts, dumped her in a field near the village and escaped. She was found 12 hours later and her condition was critical.
Samajwadi party president Akhilesh Yadav in a tweet said: "Attacks on women and children are on rise in the BJP regime. It seems that the BJP government was lenient towards the criminals involved in rape, murder and kidnappings."
