----------------------------------------------------------------------- Documented by Goa Desc Documentation Service & circulated by Goa Civic & Consumer Action Network (GOA CAN)<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Ph:2252660 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------- This is an exclusive interview to senior journalist Devika Sequeira, the mother of the gang-rape victim reveals that her daughter was anally and orally sexually abused. The mother says her daughter is hundred percent sure that she was raped by Roy Mascarenhas and Vishal Mehta. The mother has also lashed out at the GMC and the Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour. ---------------------------------------------------------------- They destroyed my daughter's, family's life: rape victim's mum --------------------------------------------------------------- Ever since her daughter was brutally raped within the premises of the Fine Arts College, Altinho, on May 17, life has spiralled into an endless nightmare for the victim's mother.
She hasn't slept the last ten nights; has been frenziedly shuttling between hospitals and police stations with a daughter who is still hounded by hallucinations and nightmares; and has not the energy to even call up her lawyer for an update on the case.
All this on top of another personal crisis: an impending divorce, and six children to care for single handedly.
While the case is merely a sensationalistic piece of news to the outsider, it is something else to the victim and the family.
"They have destroyed not only my daughter's life, but my entire family's", she says angrily, of the boys accused of the sexual abuse. "Don't they have sisters and mothers too? Who do they think they are to do this to my daughter?"
People she thought were friends have turned their backs. Except for one, no college colleagues have even bothered to call up her daughter, leave aside rallying to her support.
Worse still, each of her younger children is also having to deal with the fallout of the traumatic events.
But the courage and grit that brought this mother of six to the police station on May 19 to register the rape case, is what she will have to rely on to pursue it to its logical conclusion.
"On the night of May 18 when Sister ----(the nun from a convent in Anjuna where her daughter asked to spend the night) called to say my daughter had disclosed she was raped in the college, I couldn't believe it. I didn't sleep the whole night. My daughter repeated her story to me the next day. She spoke for over an hour. It was as if she was unburdening herself of a huge ordeal.
"I was in a terrible dilemma. I have lived in Goa for 20 years, all my children have been born here. Could I face the social consequences of making a police case?" said the victim's mother.
But her second daughter's persistence that the boys who had perpetrated the rape should not be allowed to get away, is what prompted the mother to "face and fight it out".
One of the controversial points of this case has been the statement by a senior police officer that a medical examination of the victim revealed that her hymen had not ruptured, and that she may, after all, have not been raped.
But from what the 18 year old told the sisters in the Anjuna convent and her mother, it is apparent she was sexually violated both orally and anally, after smoking three drug-laced cigarettes.
"She has been so traumatised, all these days, she could hardly remember what happened to her in the boy's toilet. Now that the memory of the ordeal is slowly coming back, she recalls quite vividly being raped by Roy Mascarenhas and Vishal Mehta.
She is one hundred per cent sure about these two, and feels the others may have just been present as spectators or silent abettors. Which is why I have told her we will be changing her statement, because we do not wish to implicate those who might not be directly involved," the mother told Herald.
The crucial question now is, how much of the evidence of the drugging or the rape remains with the unprofessional and ordinate delays in the medical investigations.
Livid about the poor response and treatment they received at the Goa Medical College and the Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour, the mother points out that no test was carried out on her daughter to detect the drug levels in her daughter's system at either of these hospitals when she first went there.
The drug test was done at a private hospital in Mapusa on Tuesday. Clothes she was wearing on the fateful day were collected from the family for testing after they had already undergone two washes. "What forensic evidence will remain nine days after the case?" the mother asks pertinently. ----------------------------------- HERALD 29/05/03 page 1 -----------------------------------
======================================= GOA DESC RESOURCE CENTRE Documentation + Education + Solidarity 11 Liberty Apts., Feira Alta, Mapusa, Goa 403 507 Tel: 2252660 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] website: www.goadesc.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Working On Issues Of Development & Democracy =======================================
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