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Five charity workers gang-raped in India
[DAWN] CHENNAI: Five Indian anti-trafficking campaigners were gang-raped at gunpoint during an awareness programme they were organising in a village, police said on Friday.Unidentified men picked up nine activists during a street play performance in Kochang village in Jharkhand state and drove them into a dense forest, where the men were beaten up and the women raped, police officer Ashwini Kumar Sinha said. "It is a very rare case, where people working on anti-trafficking have been targeted," Sinha told this news agency in a phone interview from Khunti district of Jharkhand. "We are not ruling out the possibility of the involvement of trafficking gangs and are investigating all aspects." The street play had been organised by charity Asha Kiran, which runs a shelter home for the rehabilitation of rescued girls in Khunti district of Jharkhand, which has been identified as a trafficking hotspot. There are around 200 rescued girls in Asha Kiran’s shelter. Most of were trafficked into domestic servitude to cities where a growing middle class is looking for cheap live-in labour. Jharkhand is among the top five states in India that reports increasing cases of human trafficking, with traffickers targetting poor villages, convincing vulnerable families to send their daughters away for employment, campaigners said. Posted by: Fred 2018-06-24 |
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