India schoolgirls beaten by mob after resisting boys’ ‘sexual advances’

Girls as young as 12 attacked with canes, say authorities and school warden

Police officers outside the school where more than 30 girls were beaten by a mob (ANI/V6 News)

Up to 10 people including four women have been arrested over the beating of a group of schoolgirls who reportedly resisted the “sexual advances” of teenage boys near their classrooms.

Some three dozen girls were taken to hospital after the attack in India’s eastern Bihar state on Saturday afternoon, according to local media, with some having sustained internal injuries.

The boys had written lewd comments on the wall of the girls’ school, The Times of India reported, prompting a robust and apparently physical response from the girls. Elsewhere it was reported that the boys had made obscene comments towards the girls.

Reports said the boys left the school, in Darpakha village in Supaul district, and returned with their mothers and other villagers before the girls were attacked.

“The boys brought their mothers and others from the neighbourhood,” Baidyanath Yadav, the Supaul district chief, said.

Reema Raj, a school warden, told The Times of India: “Suddenly, the girls started screaming and shouting. First, I thought they were making the noise while playing. When the voices got louder, I saw around 15 people, and women, thrashing the girls with canes and rods.”

Authorities are investigating claims the girls, aged between 12 and 16, had been subjected to regular sexual harassment, the Hindustan Times reported.

One girl told The Guardian the teenage boys became angry “because we had protested their sexual advances”.

“They had been always teasing us and scribbling dirty words on the walls of our school,” she told the site.

In total 34 girls were taken to hospital.

The Times of India reported that nine people had been arrested by Sunday night, citing superintendent of police Mrityunjay Kumar Choudhary. The police chief also told the site that officers had been posted at the girls’ school, called Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya, to provide security.

The school, located about 180 miles from Patna, the capital of Bihar state, is said to be a government-run boarding academy for girls from minority communities.

India is the world’s most dangerous country for women due to a high risk of sexual violence and being forced into slave labour, according to a Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of about 550 experts on women’s issues released in June.

Earlier this year more than 30 girls were sexually assaulted and tortured at a shelter in Bihar.

Women have launched a string of campaigns and demonstrations in the years following the horrifying gang rape of a student on a moving bus in New Delhi in 2012. The 23-year-old woman later died in hospital in Singapore.

India’s home ministry has created a nationwide sexual offenders’ register while its tourism ministry has attempted to reassure women that they are safe in the country.

Additional reporting by Reuters