PATNA (India) – Girls as young as seven were drugged, raped, forced to sleep naked and scalded with boiling water at a government-run shelter home in Bihar dubbed the house of horrors. Over 30 girls were raped in the Muzaffarpur home by its politically connected owner and its staff, reveals a police charge-sheet.
A total of 44 children lived at Seva Sankalp Samiti, a short-stay home for girls who had run away from their families or been rescued from railway stations or the streets.
The oldest victim was 18 years old.
Ten people, including owner Brajesh Thakur, have been charged in the document that details a network of police, politicians, administration and criminals exploiting and torturing the girls at the home.
Brajesh Thakur runs several non-profits. The youngest to be raped in the home was a seven-year-old mute child.
The police questioned 48 girls for the charge-sheet, which chronicles the torture, assault and depravity that the shelter home meant for its young inmates.
The girls were given sleeping pills on the pretext of de-worming and raped at night. Many girls told the police that their private parts would hurt badly.
A caretaker, referred to in testimonies as “Kiran Aunty”, would allegedly force the girls to sleep naked and would also sleep naked with them and sexually abuse them. Sometimes, the charge-sheet says, Kiran would force the girls into rooms were “galat kaam hota tha (we were raped).”
The girls were beaten and scalding water was thrown on them. The “caretakers” would sit on them and force them to cook rotis.
A board of doctors at Patna Medical College and Hospital in the state capital confirmed that most of the girls living at the shelter had been sexually assaulted.
Some girls have alleged that when one of them got pregnant, she was thrashed and she lost the child.
Others allege girls were killed and buried near the building. A team of policemen dug up the area but the police say they found nothing.
A girl who managed to run away was brought back, tied up and beaten brutally.
When the girls tried to reach out to people outside and complain, no one, including a doctor who visited the home, helped them.
As grisly secrets tumble out of the home each day in the shelter home case, the Nitish Kumar government has been targeted by the opposition, especially former ally RJD. Tejashwi Yadav, who heads the RJD in the absence of his jailed father Lalu Yadav, has accused the state government of links with the accused.
‘They are safe now’
A child is sexually abused every 15 minutes in India, according to NGO Child Rights and You. Crimes against minors have risen more than 500 percent over the past decade, the non-profit organisation said, after analysing government data.
In 2016, police in India received 38,947 reports of rape compared with almost 35,000 in 2015, according to National Crime Records Bureau data.
Back in Bihar, the abused girls are attempting to recover.
“I visited … the girls, they are safe now, their spirits are not broken. They recounted their tales of horror to me,” Dilmani Mishra, head of the Bihar women’s commission, told the media. “This is a terrible tragedy, the youngest was around seven years old.
“[The girls said to me], ‘We will get education, we will become police officers, high ranking officers and we will make them suffer, those who made us suffer’.”
