Abortion cleared for Rohtak child rape Victim

TIL Desk/National/Rohtak/ SIX DAYS after the stepfather of a 10-year-old was arrested for “repeatedly raping” her, an eight-member board of the Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak has decided that the victim, who was “20 weeks plus-minus two weeks” pregnant, will undergo an abortion. But for the victim’s mother, that solves only a part of her problem. She wants her husband to be released, too. “If my husband is jailed, where will I go? Iski zindagi toh barbaad hai, par baaki bacchon ka kya (The girl’s life is destroyed but what will happen to my other children)? I need to think about their future, too,” says the mother, pointing to her daughter, who is sitting cross-legged next to her on a single bed in the labour room of the PGIMS hospital.

“A week ago, I was leaving for my village in Bihar with my daughter when the police came. I wanted to get her abortion done in the village. I didn’t know she would accuse my husband, I thought someone from the neighbourhood was responsible for the crime,” says the mother, who hails from Tilak Tajpur village in Sitamarhi, and has been staying in Haryana’s Rohtak for the last five years.

The victim is second of her four children — her eldest daughter is 15 and another daughter is six. Her youngest child, a son, is four years old. The mother, in her “late 20s”, works as a domestic help and her husband, 20, works at a plywood factory in Rohtak. The couple together earn Rs 15,000 a month.