Fourteen-year-old girl raped in Delhi coronavirus quarantine centre
Fears for the safety of women and girls have been sparked after a 14-year-old girl was raped by two men while staying at India’s largest Covid-19 quarantine centre in New Delhi.
The Delhi Police have charged a 19-year-old with the sexual assault, while an accomplice is accused of standing guard and filming the incident.
The attack took place in the female bathroom of the 10,000-bed Sardar Patel Covid Care Centre and Hospital in the Chhatarpur neighbourhood.
The facility was opened for people with moderate symptoms who cannot self-isolate at home - typically families from poor backgrounds who share one-room apartments in slum areas.
The assault took place on July 15 but the two men, who were also quarantining in the facility, could not be arrested until Wednesday when they had tested negative for Covid-19.
The centre is run by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police but only 100 of the 1,000 allocated officers were on duty when the girl was raped. The authorities have said that numbers were reduced because only 250 of the beds in the facility were occupied.
India is struggling to cope with the world’s third largest Covid-19 outbreak, with cases expected to surpass 1.3 million on Friday.
Almost every day brings a new 24-hour record number of infections, with over 49,000 cases reported on Thursday, and public hospitals in its densely-populated major cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai have become overwhelmed, running out of beds.
In response, the authorities have rapidly converted large buildings including ashrams and racecourses into temporary Covid-19 hospitals but security is a major issue.
Last week, a woman was allegedly assaulted while staying at a quarantine centre in Mumbai while a girl was reportedly raped while staying in an isolation ward in the northern city of Patna.
In 2018, India was named as the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman by a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll, ahead of conflict-ridden nations like Afghanistan and Syria.
Its abysmal record on sexual violence was a major factor behind this, with a rape recorded every 15 minutes, according to Indian Government data.
Despite this figure, less than one percent of sexual assaults are reported to the police.
