Bengaluru: Well over two weeks after the six-year-old child was raped at Vibgyor High, police still haven’t located the scene of the crime. The child remembers being locked in a room on the third floor, a punishment for bad behaviour, when the perpetrators walked in and raped her.
The management attempted to rubbish the claims saying the incident didn’t take place on the campus and the same parents who vandalised the school premises last Thursday are now fighting to save it. The newly-instated police commissioner, who visited the school premises on Monday, claimed that CCTV cameras are not working and that there is no way of confirming the victim’s story! Is this child going to fall prey to a massive cover-up operation?
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The lack of clarity in the child’s recounting of the events could have been caused by post-traumatic stress disorder, said Dr Srinivasa Murthy, a retired Professor of Psychiatry from the Association for the Mentally Challenged.
The child insists that she was locked in a room, which the pedophiles entered. If they knew enough to find a child sitting alone in a dark room, the logical assumption is that she must have been punished regularly, in the same way. And there is no excuse whatsoever for locking a child up.
Read: Victim’s confusion could be due to post-traumatic stress
“Corporal punishment is strictly against the law, especially now with the RTE in place,” said Amara Bavani, a senior teacher at the Good Shepherd convent. “You cannot even ask a child to leave the classroom for not completing her homework and these rules are followed with absolute sincerity even in government schools. When the poorest of the poor are not ill-treated in schools, how can institutions that charge a king’s ransom as the fee be allowed to treat children this way?” she demanded angrily.
However, when Commissioner M.N. Reddi was asked about the ‘dark room’ the 6-year-old rape victim said she was locked in, he said, “The Vibgyor management is denying the existence of a dark room. We are closely examining the CCTV footage to ascertain what the child was talking about. No ‘dark’ room has been built for punishments. If all the windows in a room are shut and the lights turned out, the child will call it a dark room.” However, the response skirts the issue – the child’s insistence that she was kept locked up.
“We have never heard of a child being punished in that manner,” claimed a parent, on condition of anonymity. “The child said the incident took place on the third floor, but we visited the spot with the Commissioner this morning and we couldn’t find a dark room of any sort. I know that school building, my daughter has studied there for eight years and no room matches that description,” she claimed.
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What are the implications of all this, then? That the child is lying? Have all those who rallied so bravely for justice for the defenceless victim of a heinous crime now turned against her? Does academic prowess trump all sense of right and wrong?
