Anti-Slave Trade Activists Abducted, Raped in India After Street Performance

According to the local police, five girls were dragged into a car and taken to a "distant place," specifying later that the female activists were taken into the jungle. An investigation has been opened into the issue, but no arrests have yet been made.

A group of armed men kidnapped and raped five female activists in the Indian state of Jharkhand, local law enforcement services reported. All of the girls work for an NGO, striving to raise awareness about human trafficking in the remote Indian district of Khunti. Prior to the incident, the activists had staged a street performance, in an attempt to attract attention to the issue.

"After performing, they headed towards a local mission school," said a senior police official, Homkar, as quoted by BBC Hindi. "Around the same time, some armed people reached the school. They abducted five girls from their team and took them to a jungle and raped them. We have dedicated three teams of police to interrogate several people."

Slave trading is quite prominent in this Indian region: human traffickers kidnap mostly girls, who are then sent as housekeepers to rich homes in Delhi and other major cities.

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The country has alarming rates of sex-affiliated crimes: at least 40,000 rape cases were reported in 2016, which does not take into account those unreported due to a stigma attributed to rape and sexual assault.

In an attempt to fight these kinds of crimes, India's cabinet has adopted an executive order introducing the death penalty for rapists of children under the age of 12.

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