American rape survivor recounts horror dealing with Delhi Police

It happened this month. A young woman from the US, who was studying a course in Jaipur, was visiting Delhi.

She met a few boys, who said they were from Haryana, and was raped by a friend of one of them on May 17. The rape wasn’t the end of her horror journey, in fact, it was just the start of it. Her ‘new’ friends, despite she having been raped, kept insisting that she shouldn’t approach the cops as law-related proceedings took a long time in India.

After overcoming a sea of hesitation and anxiety, the survivor shared her harrowing account with a few close friends, one of whom put her in touch with a son of a prominent lawyer. The lawyer’s son referred her to his father, a Supreme Court advocate, Surinder Singh Hooda, also a Marg Darshak at the Adhikar Legal Aid Clinic, started by the Indian Youth Congress, the youth wing of the Congress Party. Adhikar is a body of lawyers working for the benefit of poor and renders legal aid to the needy and poor.

The survivor, with help from Hooda, went to lodge a police complaint in Delhi against the rapist. However, this turned out to be another traumatic experience for the rape survivor as what she went through in dealing with the police was outright humiliation and insensitivity. Certainly, our police haven’t learnt much on how to deal with rape cases—especially on how to treat rape survivors.

After mustering enough courage and writing her statement, with help from Hooda, she went to the Nabi Karim Police Station on May 23 to file a First Information Report (FIR) at 10 pm. First, she had to recount her horrid tale to the male Station House Officer (SHO), who listened to her story and then asked her to wait for a woman IO (investigating officer) as only a female officer can file her FIR. After waiting for two-and-half hours, the woman IO finally arrives with a worker from the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW), and the rape survivor has to narrate her story—all over again.

Narrating her harrowing experience repeatedly to uninterested strangers made the girl even more distraught. She keeps telling her friends over phone that she does not want to go through the trauma repeatedly. However, her friends provide her moral support and encourage her not to leave the police station without filing her complaint.

The woman cop was anything but empathetic, as the survivor figured out in her ensuing interaction with her.

In fact, the lady cop, without introducing herself to the survivor as to who she was, put her written complaint in front of her and asked her to explain the events. “At this point, I have not been told who she is or why I am telling her again. I feel as though I have been kept in the dark, I don’t even know what the process really is and why I am speaking to whomever,” recounts the survivor.

When the survivor tells the lady cop that she could explain anything she didn’t understand in her complaint, she insists that the she has to narrate her horrid experience in Hindi as she couldn’t read English. So, she attempts to explain with her very limited ability to speak in Hindi, but as she can’t do so, she requests to explain in English. The American says that English was her first language and Hindi her third: “I need to convey this in English.” The cop retorts by saying: “Well, Hindi is my first language so you need to explain yourself in Hindi.”

Thereafter, the cop insists that the complaint be written in Hindi. It didn’t matter that the survivor didn’t have a good hold over the language. The American was about to give up and leave in utter desperation when her lawyer Hooda, along with a colleague, Ashish Pandey, arrived at the police station. The cop ultimately accepted her English statement, but only after Hooda and Pandey had a long argument with the lady cop.

The survivor later recounted that, while she was going through all this, it was only hope and encouragement from friends that kept her going as she encountered this dark side of Indian law.

The next day, the American went to the police station at 4 pm to find the status of her complaint but returns to her zostel. An hour later, she’s asked to come to the hotel where she was sexually assaulted. As they go through the CCTV footage, the survivor identifies the alleged rapist taking the stairs, and who is immediately apprehended.

But, her agony hadn’t ended there. In what could be termed as the worst instances of police apathy, she was made to sit diagonally opposite—within three feet—of the alleged rapist, in the car, when they were returning to the police station. If that wasn’t bad enough, she was made to sit next to her alleged rapist in a small room at the police station! She had started to flinch in fear and anger at the sight of the man.

And, if one thought, that was terrible, it got still worse. At one point, she was left alone with the man as the woman investigating officer and a male officer step out of the room for some business. It may have been just two minutes but she was feeling suffocated when the accused started to beg for forgiveness, offering her anything she wanted if she took back her complaint.

Feeling absolutely humiliated and miserable, the girl walked out of the room, only to be escorted back by the police officers.

And, after all this, after the police had made her feel that she was making a mountain out of a molehill, an FIR against the accused was finally filed. She recounted that had it not been for Hooda and Pandey, she wouldn’t have been able to file a case at all.

“The process of reporting the incident was almost as traumatising as the incident. I did not feel welcome. I felt ashamed and guilty myself that I was bringing such a case forward. I was beginning to feel as though... I was making too big of a deal of such a small incident,” she recalls.

Now, take a step back. Had the victim been from a poor rural background, without any understanding of law and without any legal aid at her disposal, would the police have filed an FIR? What would have happened if the crime had happened in the hinterlands?

How could the government even claim that the law and the police have been made women-friendly?