A TEN-year-old girl has been ordered to be raped by a village chief because her dad beat up a man trying to molest his wife in India’s latest shocking sex crime.

The Times of India reports the girl has been raped at the behest of a village chief in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand in the most recent incident in the country’s seemingingly unstoppable tide of violence against women.

Police said that the rape followed a confrontation on Monday night when a 25-year-old man barged into the victim’s house in an inebriated state, trying to molest the child’s mother.

Her husband then beat up the attacker and threw him out.

The following morning, the man went to the chief of the village in Bokaro district, police said, and complained of being assaulted. A spokesman added that an assembly of elders was convened to determine how best to punish the violent husband.

The families of the victim and the attacker were summoned to the meeting, where the village chief allegedly directed the man to rape the ten-year-old girl to avenge the assault, police said.

The man is then claimed to have dragged the girl into bushes a short distance away and raped her, ignoring her mother’s cries. An hour later, the mother retrieved her daughter from the bushes, where she lay soaked in blood, police said.

As horrifying as this incident is, it is just one of the estimated 25,000 rape cases which are reported across India each year.

According to Indian government statistics, a rape occurs every 22 minutes, but activists say the figure is conservative as many rapes go unreported in the nation of 1.2 billion where sexual crime victims are often publicly shamed.

Rape in India is the fourth most common crime against women.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau 2013 annual report, 24,923 rape cases were reported across the country in 2012.

Out of these, 24,470 were committed by a relative or neighbour; in other words, the victim knew the alleged rapist in 98 per cent of the cases.

Marital rape is not a criminal offence in India unless the victim is separated from the perpetrator.

Several shocking rape cases have received widespread media attention and triggered protests across the country since 2012.

India revised its laws on sex attacks in the wake of the December 2012 gang rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi which triggered worldwide outrage, but they have done little to stem the tide of sex attacks.

In fact, the number of rape cases in India’s capital has almost doubled since the gang rape and murder of the 23-year-old physiotherapy student.

More recently, the brutal rape and killing of two girls, aged 14 and 15, in an impoverished village in Uttar Pradesh state in May, sparked public outrage after the family complained of police apathy towards them because they were from a lower caste.

Cousins Murti and Pushpa were allegedly gang-raped and murdered with their bodies found hanging from a mango tree in Katra Sadatganj village.

The 20-year-old brother of one of the girls — a cousin to the other victim — has been staging a protest in New Delhi for the last three days demanding justice in the case, which is being investigated by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Last month India’s newly elected prime minister Narendra Modi called for action against the current rape crisis.

“Respecting and protecting women should be the priority of the 1.25 billion people in this country,” Mr Modi said in his first speech to parliament since winning a landslide general election victory.

“All these incidents should make us introspect. The government will have to act. The country won’t wait and people won’t forget.”