This piece is dedicated to all those pervy cynics in the media and the public at large, who came to believe that white skin + sex crime + media coverage = automatic administration of justice in India.

British teenager, Scarlett Keeling Eden (15) was sexually assaulted on a Goa beach in 2008 and left to die. The police self-admittedly “killed” her case. Scarlett’s mother – a sinewy, gutsy gipsy – hammered the Goa government into submission. Between being caught on camera smoking pot and naming then-Home Minister, Ravi Naik, and his son Roy in court as being a part of the drug mafia in Goa, the gipsy, accompanied by a media caravan – which had scented blood by now – forced the police to track down two beach shack hands, who had allegedly drugged and raped her daughter.

Cut to Anita. You have never heard of her, have you? She’s a Romanian public relations professional working in Bengaluru. In March this year, Anita was sexually assaulted by an unknown person on Cavelossim beach in south Goa. As the unknown person pinned her to the sand and tried to rape her, she was saved when a woman strolling on the beach with her dogs stumbled upon her. The attacker ran off. But Anita’s agony had just begun.

“I went to the police station (Colva) to report my attempted rape, but there I was met with a staggering indifference. They said it wasn’t a big deal, because after all I hadn’t been raped right? I spent over six hours at the police station for them to write an FIR. They actually asked me several times whether I wanted to report the attack”, says Anita.

Instead of bowing down under duress, Anita decided to brave it. She volunteered for CNN-IBN’s citizen journalist (CJ) programme and decided to tell her story. Anita’s segment is three minutes and fifteen seconds long and shows a blurred image of Anita recounting her horror story.

The video also shows a CNN-IBN media person contacting the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Mohan Naik. Naik speaks of how the police were trying their best and promised an enquiry into the criminal callousness shown by the police personnel. Truth-telling did not work for Anita. Neither did CNN-IBN’s CJ programme. The police did not budge at the time. Not even to commission a sketch artist to draw an approximate image of the culprit.

“I even got the sketch done on my own in Bangalore. But you see it’s like this. The person who attacked me roams freely in Goa and police the does nothing to catch him. The attack left me emotionally and physically shaken. A woman who goes through attempted rape undergoes the same trauma as a raped victim. That is something the police and society do not understand”, Anita said.

Four months on and frustrated by the shoddy police work, Anita has given up pursuing the case and now seeks closure to that phase in her life. “I have also tried to give it a thought and see if I should pursue this incident any further. Finally I decided to let it go and get closure on this”, she says.

“All we can say is that we are still trying to trace the culprit. Saying anything more can disturb the investigation”, a police official said, even four months after the tragedy.

Body crimes against women on Goa’s popular beaches over the last few years have cast a dark shadow on the state’s popularity as a tourism destination. Shoddy police investigations into these incidents have also added to the infamy of the state which attracts 2.6 million tourists annually, out of which half a million are foreigners.

Footnote: The Scarlett Keeling episode almost did to Goa what Steven Spielberg’s man-eating shark did to Amity island in “Jaws”. The 15-year-old girl’s death on the beach, a headstrong mum’s fight for justice and glaring unprofessional policing gave the media the most intoxicating, unending and almost formulaic series of stories to have come from this dateline in a long time. Tourism officials – those in the tourism trade – even went on record to say that the number of tourists from the UK had shrunk following the bad press received by Goa over the handling of Keeling’s death and the issue of safety on Goa’s beaches. Anita’s episode shows how not much has changed since 2008.

Image Source: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrishuggins/4675213155/]