Patna’s Gaighat shelter home case came to light on 30 January when a girl inmate of Ghazipur, who was released from the shelter home, claimed immoral activities are taking place at a large scale and its Superintendent Vandana Gupta is directly involved in it.
Now, in a video shared by women activist Yogita Bhayana on social media, the same girl has narrated her ordeal as how she was raped the very first day she was brought to the shelter home as a homeless girl. The victim claimed she attempted suicide multiple times after being fed up with routine sexual abuse and how girls were tortured inside the shelter home if they dared to refuse. She added girl inmates were raped or gang-raped in an unconscious stage after they were forcibly drugged or given injections to make them unconscious. She accused Gupta of direct involvement saying she used to invite youths inside the shelter home to sexually exploit female inmates in an unconscious stage.
‘The state machinery needs to change its attitude. As these girls are poor, this doesn’t take away the dignity of being a human being’, said Bhayana.
Minu Kumar, legal counsel of the girl, told The Daily Guardian Review although Patna High Court had taken Suo-moto cognisance of serious charges and ordered a probe, the Social Welfare Ministry had given clean chit to Gupta and declared the victim a mentally unstable person. “Not a single person has been arrested or sacked so far. This is nothing short of a racket run by government, wherein politicians, officials and police are partners in crime,” she said. In May 2018, reports of repeated sexual abuse of inmates at a short stay home in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, surfaced.
