HELL ON INDIA:14 years old girl gang-raped and set ablaze in India

A minor girl died in India on
Wednesday after reportedly being
gang raped and set on fire.
The unnamed child was assaulted by
three village youths in the Sirsa
Kalaar district of the northern city of
Orai on Tuesday, Oct. 22, according to
the Indo-Asian News Service. The
girl's assailants reportedly set her on
fire after she threatened to turn them
in.
She sustained burns to 80 percent of
her body and died in the hospital
Wednesday, per IANS. Although the
girl's parents have not filed a police
complaint, authorities are said to be
looking for the assailants.
A class-eight school student, the girl
was likely around 14 years old.
This was not the only brutal attack in
India within the past week. The Press
Trust of India reported Wednesday
that a class-seven girl was abducted
and raped at gunpoint in a sugarcane
field by alleged assailant Sumit
Kumar. He has been arrested, and
there is a case pending against him.
Last week, a 22-year-old technology
professional working in the southern
city of Hyderabad was kidnapped and
raped by two cabbies, according to the
Deccan Chronicle. The men
threatened to hurt her or her family if
she resisted or reported the attack.
They were later arrested.
Four men were sentenced to death in
September for the rape and murder of
a 23-year-old New Delhi student. The
gruesome attack made headlines
around the world, and the case shed
light on the pervasive sexual assault
problem in the country.
After the sentencing, Jacqueline
Bhabha, director of research for the
François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for
Health and Human Rights at the
Harvard School of Public Health,
spoke with the Harvard Gazette about
India's rape crisis and the societal ills
that need mending. She cited female
feticide, child marriage, teen
pregnancy and domestic violence.
"There’s an education challenge and a
public culture challenge," she said.
"Ultimately, I think these norm
changes really cumulatively come not
so much from the top down, but from
the bottom up. It is from organizing,
from establishing new norms that are
considered to be impressive,
powerful, worth emulating, from the
bottom up. But it is also a question of
women having skills and women
having access to power and having
places where they can complain and
safe places."