In 2015, a 13-year-old girl who was suffering from cancer was allegedly raped and blackmailed by eight of her teachers at her private school, according to a March 26 NDTV article. The girl, who has not been named, was forced to stay after school under the pretext of extra classes, during which time these eight teachers raped her multiple times over the course of a year. According to an India Times article from March 25,the abuse began on April 12, 2015 when they took nude photos of her. They told her not tell anybody and threatened to kill her if she did. She got pregnant as a result of this rape and was forced by her rapists to take an abortion pill.

The matter was made public when the girl was diagnosed with blood cancer about three months ago; neither she nor her parents knew that this was what she was suffering from before. According to her doctors, she does not have long to live. The girl’s parents filed a case against the rapists on March 27. The teachers were arrested and charged under relevant sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.

However, this was not an isolated incident. There are thousands of stories of young girls being raped or sexually assaulted by teachers. A 12-year-old girl was allegedly raped by the principal and three of the teachers in a government school in Bihar, India, according to an article in the Indian ress from Jan. 16, 2016. The accused took her to the roof of the school building and gang-raped her. The mother of the survivor found her lying on the roof in a disheveled state and went to the police. The alleged attackers are currently on the run.

Usually, however, rapes are not reported in the Indian sub-continent, which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. There are a few reasons for this; the police in these countries are not paid very much, and they are eager to accept bribes from people. For instance, it is possible to get out of a rape charge by bribing the police officers in charge of the case, according to a New York Times article dated January 22, 2013. There are no statistics on how often this happens, because the governments of these countries deny that this ever happens; it is just an open secret that everybody knows. In instances where the rapists are rich or influential members of the community, the cases are never even allowed to be filed. These individuals would not want a rape accusation to tarnish their reputation, and since their wealth can buy almost anything, these cases are dropped. According to this article, experts say that the police are poorly organized and unable to deal with serious crimes, particularly crimes against women.

Second, there is still a huge stigma surrounding rape. Even when a girl is raped, in society, it is thought that it is the girl’s fault. If a girl’s family was to report a rape, it would be made public that she is no longer a virgin and that she has “lost her honor.” When prospective future husbands find out that a girl is not a virgin, no matter what the circumstances were, they are no longer interested. That is why, often, a girl is forced to marry her rapist, as evidenced in an Aug. 29, 2015 New York Times article.

One such case is of an Indian rape victim from Yamunagar, who killed herself after local elders forced her to marry her rapist, according to an Oct. 26, 2016 article in the Independent. The 19-year-old, who has remained unnamed in the news, was married for seven months before she killed herself after being subjected to physical and mental abuse from her husband and her in-laws. According to the mother of the victim, they were harassing her in order to make her pay their legal expenses from the initial rape case, because even though the charges were dropped when she married him, the rapist's family had already incurred legal expenses until that point.

Even though countries in South Asia are progressing in the way of development in education, healthcare, infrastructure and manufacturing, people’s attitudes have not changed much, primarily in rural areas. In these countries, an increasingly large gap between the rich and poor is developing and, unfortunately, anyone with money can control the police, the judicial system and the media when sexual assault is carried out. According to an article dated Nov. 24, 2015 from The Live Mint, an E-newspaper, the richest 1 percent of Indians own 58.94 percent of the country’s wealth. The lack of reporting due to concern of maintaining status is a large part of the problem. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, two out of every three cases go unreported. In South Asia, as I have mentioned before, many girls are forced to marry their rapists. In many South Asian cultures, women are still presumed to be the property of the men in their lives — fathers, brothers, husbands — so men often believe they have a right to do whatever they want to women’s bodies. I believe that society needs to change its way of thinking and teach people that everyone has rights. Everyone has the right to their body and maintaining control of what happens with it; no amount of money or status can change that.