sexual assault

boarding school

students

hearing disabled

Mirror reports on April 12 and June 29 about the extent of assault suffered by children

Chargesheet in the case ofof children atdetails how caretaker didn’t allow loo breaks; complaints to principal were ignored.Caretaker of the Karjat residential school locked rooms at night and did not allow toilet breaks to children, even when they doubled up with pain. Statements of girls and boys, who were boarders at this school for speech and hearing disabled, were recorded under section 164 and 161 of CrPC. They form part of the case chargesheet filed on June 26 and detail the extent of torture, rape and sexual assault that the children suffered.The speech andstudents indicated the accused and the nature of assaults through sign language. An interpreter was engaged to translate the signs during the recording of the statements. The children responded to questions such as, “What do you have to say about him (caretaker)?” and “How did he harass you?” “At night he would lock the rooms and keep the key under his pillow. We were not allowed to use the toilet. Our stomachs hurt when we wanted to pee. We would pee in a bottle,” one student said.“I wanted to use the toilet and he would not let me. As a result, I had a bowel movement in the room itself, after which he hit me and broke my tooth,” another student said.The girls named their friends with whom they would sleep and recounted the harassment they themselves experienced and witnessed. “He gave us less space to sleep and locked the room at night. He would be quite drunk. He drank in front of us and beat us with a stick,” a student said. Asked if she had protested, she said, “I hit him, but he did not listen. He was drunk.” Asked if she confided in anyone, a student said she had told the principal, but she said, “Let it be.”In her statement to the magistrate, a staff member said she would complain about the caretaker shirking his duties, but the school superintendent who was his uncle took no action. “When I told the principal she told to me to keep silent. She said, ‘We know people in high places. No one can do anything to us.’ The principal and superintendent threatened to sack me,” the staff member said.The police are planning to file a supplementary chargesheet in the case for sections under Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, which was invoked as some of the students are from SC and ST communities.