Indian law enforcement and justice authorities have shirked their responsibility to fight sex attacks, a UN child rights watchdog said on Thursday, amid uproar over the horrific gang-rape and lynching of two girls.
“There has been a dereliction of duty in relation to rape cases,” said Benyam Mezmur, deputy chairman of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
India has been struggling to overcome a reputation for sexual violence since the fatal gang-rape of a student in New Delhi in December 2012, which sparked mass protests and drew international condemnation of India’s treatment of women.
Public outrage was reignited last month by the deaths of two girls, aged 12 and 14, who were gang-raped and lynched in their impoverished village in northern Uttar Pradesh.
A string of other headline-making cases have piled pressure on Indian authorities.
The UN committee is made of up 18 independent experts who monitor the implementation of international children’s rights treaties.
The panel held a hearing with Indian officials earlier this month.
In its conclusions on that session, released on Thursday, it said it was alarmed by “widespread violence, abuse, including sexual abuse, and neglect of children.”
It pointed to data showing that one-in-three people who are raped in India is a minor, and that half of the abusers were known to the child or in a position of trust and responsibility.
“We’re not only interested about those cases that attract international media attention,” said Mezmur, who hails from Ethiopia and is a human rights law lecturer at the University of Western Cape in South Africa.
He said they were the tip of the iceberg.
“We’re also very much concerned about those that do not benefit from the media attention, do not get to be reported to the authorities, do not command a protest in the streets of the cities or the villages where they have been committed,” he said.
A rape occurs every 22 minutes in India, according to Indian government figures.
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