The house stands on a hillstop, several feet above the road that leads to Elavumthitta, a village in Kerala that is in the centre of a media storm.

Five days ago, an 18-year-old woman came out with an allegation that stunned the state, of having been sexually abused over the past five years by 58 men. Since then, the police have arrested 44 of the men, several of them from the Dalit settlement where the survivor lived and from neighbouring areas. 

Twenty-nine different cases have been registered across four police stations under sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

One of the first to be arrested was Subin, who allegedly initiated the abuse when the survivor was only 13. They were friends from childhood, their houses situated on either sides of a hillock. Subin is six or seven years her senior. He had allegedly sexually assaulted her and recorded images and videos of her, which he used to threaten her into providing sexual favours for a friend. According to the police, this friend brought in two more men, who further exploited the teenager. 

Over the next few years, her contact details and photographs were spread among different circles of men and minor boys. Many of them contacted her through social media platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp.

The arrested include fisherfolk, drivers, and daily wage workers, some of whom are married. There are at least five students from her college and former classmates from her school among the accused. Further complicating the investigation, there are four minors among the accused and two others who were minors at the time of the crime. The young woman has also said that in a few incidents, there were multiple men involved; subsequently FIRs have been registered for gang rape.

One of the accused is from Thiruvananthapuram, more than 100 km from Elavumthitta. Two of the other accused are now outside the country and DIG Ajeetha Begum – who is heading the probe – has said that red corner notices will be issued against them, if needed.

“Word may have spread from one man to another, to their circle of friends or colleagues. Quite a lot of the accused are from her neighbourhood and daily wage labourers, but there are others too. We were shocked to hear her name so many men,” advocate N Rajeev, chairperson of the Child Welfare Committee in Pathanamthitta, said. 

However, it is still not clear if Subin demanded money from her or received payments from the other men, he added.

The CWC came into the picture in December when the survivor revealed her experience after an awareness campaign by Snehitha at her college. Snehitha is an initiative of the women empowerment network Kudumbashree run by the state government. The survivor had, according to a source in the neighbourhood, at first spoken to a teacher at the institute she attends. The teacher took it to a counsellor at Snehitha, who informed the CWC.

“We asked the mother to accompany her, and the survivor spoke without persuasion. The mother was upset and reluctant at first to let her move into a centre for further counselling because she did not want the father to know,” Rajeev said.

A neighbourhood in shock

On the evening of January 10, women wearing housecoats and shawls stepped out of their houses when the police drove into their neighbourhood and began picking up young men from nearby houses. 

The residents form a closely knit community, having lived together in the Dalit settlement for years. They knew the men who were being taken away by the police; they also knew the young woman whose revelations had led to the sudden arrests. Foremost among their emotions were shock, and then anger. 

This was a girl they saw grow up before them. How could they not know, how could the mother of the teen not know, how were all these young men accused in one wide sweep? This is what the women asked as we met them three days later outside the survivor’s house.

The houses are scattered on undulating ground without gates to separate their compounds in the settlement, a hilly village in Pathanamthitta. The survivor’s house remains shut. The neighbours say that the mother has left the village and claimed that the father and brother were still around.

One of the women we spoke to, who lives near the survivor’s house, said that her son Vineeth was also picked up on January 10 when a plainclothes policeman followed him into the house. Vineeth, 30 years old and working as a driver, got married only a few months ago. “Vineeth had raised the girl in his arms, he was already 12 when she was born. You can ask anyone around here, he is totally innocent,” the woman claimed.

The anger of the women was directed towards the survivor as well as her mother who they blame for not keeping a check on her daughter. As the women launched into victim-shaming, passing comments on the clothes she wore and the late hours she kept, a few men gathered around silently in a seeming show of support. 

The wave of sympathy for the accused also seems to stem from the fact that the families in the neighbourhood are tightly knit. “Like Vineeth, there is a man from the house on the other side who was to get engaged on January 19. Then there is Sandeep, who had got married only a month ago, but after the news came out his wife’s family has taken her home,” the women said.

It was on the father’s phone that the accused sent messages to the survivor, demanding images of her and telling her where to meet them. The father used a smartphone, but knew little about its technical possibilities, Rajeev noted. He would also be drunk for a good part of the day and was apparently unaware of the daughter using his phone.

The survivor’s parents are both daily wage labourers. She also has a brother. The family thought that their daughter spent many hours away from home because she was active in sports, Rajeev said. When she was gone for days, they thought it was for a competition, without having the least idea about the abuse she was facing. Rajeev said that even when the survivor was taken for counselling by the CWC, the father had at first not suspected anything was wrong since he was used to her absence during sports events.

A ward member said that she took part in the Keralotsavam, a youth festival conducted by the Youth Welfare Board of the government of Kerala. One of her neighbours said that she was also interested in driving and that the family had entrusted Subin, the primary accused, to teach her.

The scenes of crime

According to the police, the men who contacted the survivor met her at different places, including inside a bus at the private bus stand in Pathanamthitta and secluded corners of the General Hospital.

The bus stand is surrounded by shops, and often serves as a hangout for school and college students. Shaji, a security guard, said that he has witnessed students hang around as early as 7 am and then in the afternoon after their classes. “I would tell them to go home but they would tell me off. They would sometimes bring clothes in a bag, change from their uniform into those, and then leave the bags on the upper floor of the building here,” Shaji said.

He added that no buses are parked at the stand after 8 or 9 pm. “Only rarely a Bengaluru bus may be left parked here, if it is not running for the night,” he said. The shops close by 8 pm and the bus stand is nearly deserted. There is also no CCTV, although a night security guard takes Shaji’s place.

An official at the stand said that the bus that the survivor mentioned could be the abandoned one at the back of a closed petrol bunk behind the bus stand. Around the private bus stand are also secluded woody areas, where anyone can disappear into without others noticing. The survivor’s case is not the only such incident to have happened in these parts, said the official. There have been several instances of anti-social activities before this too, he added.

The survivor was also allegedly abused in a building at the General Hospital. The building, called the B and C block, is 15 years old and has three floors. Everything from out-patient services to surgeries happen in the building, which also has CCTV cameras. 

“We had told the police that the survivor, who is being counselled at the Nirbhaya Home, will take time to reveal all the names. In three to four days, she was able to give a list of 58 names, their ages, and details of what happened and where it happened. The police could identify about 40 of them from the phone numbers she had saved in her father’s phone. There were two gang rapes that she recounted, one that took place in a car and one in a bus in the private bus stand, both when she was a minor,” Rajeev said.

According to a top police official, the survivor will give her statement under section 183 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita before a magistrate. “It will take some time for her to go back to her classes, we are arranging notes for her,” the officer said. The police are also in touch with counsellors who could talk to her classmates and teachers and make it easy for her to return to her classes. 

The arrests

Among the 29 FIRs so far, 16 are registered at the Elavumthitta station, 11 in Pathanamthitta, and one each in Malayalapuzha and Pandalam. The names of some of the accused are as follows:

In Elavumthitta: Amal (18), Adarsh (20), Shivakumar (21), Umesh (19), Sreeju (18), Aji (19), Ashwin (21), Sajin (23) Subin (24), CK Vineeth (30), K Ananthu (21), S Sandheep (30), S Sudhi also known as Sreeni (24), and Prajith Kumar (24).

In Pathanamthitta: P Deepu (22), Anandu Pradeep (24), Aravind (23), Vishnu (24), Binu Joseph (39), Abhilash Kumar (19), Abhijith (19), Joji Mathew (25), Ambadi (24), Aravind (20), Kannan (21), Akku Anand (20), a minor, Nandu (25), Shamnad (20), Afsal (21), Ashiq (20), Nidhin Prasad (21), Abhinav (18), Karthik (18), Sudheesh (Kannappan) (27), Nishad (Appu) (31), Achu Anand (21), Lijo (26), and Shinu George (23).

In Pandalam: Akash (19) and Akash (22).

This story was republished from The News Minute as part of the NL-TNM alliance. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity. 

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