NCW wants CBI probe in Kerala rape case -Governance Now

NCW wants CBI probe in Kerala rape case

Crimes against women have risen by 400 percent in Kerala in the past four years, says NCW chairperson

Puja Bhattacharjee | May 7, 2016 | New Delhi

#Lalitha Kumaramangalam #CBI #NCW #Kerala rape

The national commission for women (NCW) will ask the centre to hand over the investigation of the brutal assault, suspected to be a sexual assault, and murder of a 30-year-old woman in Kerala to the CBI. “The crime scene was heavily compromised when we visited,” NCW chairperson Lalitha Kumaramangalam said.

The Dalit woman was allegedly raped on April 28 inside her house in Perumbavoor in Ernakulam district of Kerala. The incident has resulted in a huge outrage in Kerala. The assault bears a resemblance to the December 16, 2012 rape case in Delhi. It has been 10 days since the incident yet no arrests have been made by the police, though several people have been detained.

“Crimes against women have risen by 400 percent in the last four years in the state,” she said, at a press conference in New Delhi on Friday.

On their visit to the hospital, the commission found that the victim’s mother Rajeshwari was not given any kind of counselling to deal with the trauma. “She was being kept sedated all the time,” said Kumaramangalam. Moreover, Rajeshwari’s neighbours were uncooperative and did little to help. “The neighbours heard some noises from the victim’s house on the day of the murder. But nobody intervened. They thought it was a family squabble,” she added. Initially, the neighbours even refused to speak to the police.

Kumaramangalam also highlighted that the post-mortem of the victim’s body was a botched affair. She said that a student conducted the post-mortem while an associate professor supervised. “The incident was looked at more as a case study than a serious crime. The whole system of our country is misogynistic to the core,” she said.

At present, the assembly elections are underway in Kerala and the state machinery is busy with election duties. NCW is planning to approach the election commission of India (ECI) and request them to relieve some police personnel from the election duties. “This is an urgent matter and has to be thoroughly investigated. We are going to meet them as soon as they give us an appointment,” she added.

Kumaramangalam also said that the NCW in collaboration with the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) has been conducting a training course for women police officers since January. “We want to train women officers to deal with sensitive cases. Two training workshops have been conducted in Chandigarh and Delhi. The third workshop will be held in Bangalore towards the end of May. So far 167 women police officers have been trained,” she said.

Comments

Other News

‘Better than the entire world’: Here’s the ‘India book’ for ages

The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India By Gopalkrishna Gandhi Aleph Books, 624 pages, Rs 999 Vet

Why the youth’s ‘affair’ with stock market is usually tragic

Nine out of 10 individual traders in the equity Futures and Options (F&O) segment have incurred net losses, according to a recent SEBI study. What’s even more striking is that a significant portion of these traders are young individuals – students, early professionals and first-time earners

Why recognizing unpaid work makes sense

Across the globe, unpaid domestic and caregiving work remains an unseen yet essential contributor to economic and social well-being. Women, in particular, dedicate significant hours to household tasks and caregiving, yet this labour remains excluded from Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculations, leading t

News broadcast needs to reinvent, innovate: Sudhir Chaudhary

Popular news anchor and veteran journalist Sudhir Chaudhary says the news broadcast industry has not reinvented itself in the last 20 years, leading to news consumption gradually shifting to other platforms. Unlike social media influencers with millions of followers, there are no stars in the news industry

How education can transform lives — and society

The Moving of Mountains: The Remarkable Story of The Agastya International Foundation By Adhirath Sethi Penguin Enterprise

What the sharp change in South Asian geopolitics means for India

More than a week after the chief adviser of Bangladesh’s interim government, Muhammad Yunus, created a ripple in South Asia by asking China to expand its economic base in his country as it is “the only guardian of the ocean” for India’s seven landlocked northeastern states, New Delh