The 2013 Mumbai gang rape, also known as the Shakti Mills gang rape, refers to the incident in which a 22-year-old photojournalist, who was interning with an English-language magazine in Mumbai, was gang-raped by five people including a juvenile. The incident occurred on 22 August 2013, when she had gone to the deserted Shakti Mills compound, near Mahalaxmi in South Mumbai, with a male colleague on an assignment. The accused had tied up the victim’s colleague with belts and raped her. The accused took photos of the victim during the sexual assault, and threatened to release them to social networks if she reported the rape. Later, an eighteen-year-old call centre employee reported that she too had been gang-raped, on 31 July 2013 inside the mills complex.
On 20 March 2014, a Mumbai sessions court convicted all five adult accused in both cases on 13 counts. On 4 April 2014, the court awarded the death penalty to the three repeat offenders in the photojournalist rape case. For the other two accused, one was awarded life imprisonment while the other accused turned approver in the case. Two minors, one in each case, were tried by the Juvenile Justice Board separately. They were convicted on 15 July 2015, and sentenced to three years (including time in custody) in a Nashik reform school, the maximum punishment that a juvenile offender can receive under Indian law.
The Bombay High Court commuted the three death sentences to life imprisonment for the remainder of their natural life on 25 November 2021.
Incident
A 22-year-old photojournalist working in Mumbai was gang-raped by five people at the Shakti Mills compound, where she had gone on assignment with a male colleague on 22 August 2013. According to the statements given to the police by the two victims, the photojournalist and her colleague left their office at 5:00 pm on an assignment to take some photographs of the deserted Shakti Mills compound. Five men tied up the male colleague and took turns raping the photojournalist while holding a broken beer bottle to her neck to keep her from shouting for help. The rapists then forced the victim to clean the crime scene, and took two photos of her on a cellphone, threatening to release the photos on social networks if she reported the attack.
Following the assault, the men brought her back to the place where her colleague was being held. They accompanied the survivor and her colleague to the railway tracks around 7:15 pm, where they were told to stay. When the criminals left, she informed her colleague that she had been raped six times by the five men and needed medical treatment. On reaching the Mahalaxmi station, her colleague contacted their boss and asked him to come. They went by taxi to Jaslok Hospital at Peddar Road. The victim called her mother and told her to meet her at the hospital. The survivor was bleeding profusely when she arrived at the hospital. She was immediately admitted and began undergoing medical treatment. She gave her statement to police on 26 August, and was discharged on the night of 27 August.
In a statement to the media from her hospital bed, the victim said, “I want no other woman in this city and country to go through such a brutal physical humiliation. Perpetrators should be punished severely as they have ruined my life. No punishment short of a life term will take away my pain and humiliation and physical abuse I underwent. Rape is not the end of life. I will continue fighting.” The victim also expressed her eagerness to return to work, stating, “I want to join duty as early as possible.” Nirmala Samant Prabhawalkar, a member of the National Commission for Women who met the victim at the hospital stated, “She is recuperating from her injuries and trauma. She is still not completely out of trauma but she is composed.”
On 3 September, a 19-year-old telephone operator with a private firm reported to authorities that she had been gang raped at the Shakti Mills compound by five men on 31 July 2013. Three of the men involved were also accused in the photojournalist’s case. The victim had gone to the Shakti Mills compound with her boyfriend, where they were approached by the accused. Similar to the photojournalist case, the men tied and beat up the victim’s male companion, before gang raping her. The two victims fled to Chhattisgarh following the incident, without reporting it, out of fear. Mumbai Police made the telephone operator undergo a “two-finger test”, a check for a hymen as proof of sexual activity. This occurred despite a Maharashtra Government Resolution (GR) on 10 May 2013 which ordered that the test no longer be conducted stating, “The procedure (finger test) is degrading, crude and medically and scientifically irrelevant … Information about past sexual conduct has been considered irrelevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqpPJwxgEGw
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