13-Year-Old Allegedly Rapes 4-Year-Old Girl On Terrace, Victim's Parents Catch Boy In Act

A 13-year-old boy was arrested in India after he was allegedly found raping a 4-year-old girl on the terrace of a home.

The police in the northern city of Ludhiana said the accused was arrested Saturday. The victim has been living in a rented accommodation with her parents for the past six months.

“Recently, one of our relatives, along with his wife and son, took a room on rent near our house,” the victim’s mother said, according to Tribune India. “On Saturday, their son, who is 13-year-old, took my daughter to the terrace."

The woman said when her husband came home and called their daughter, she did not respond. The girl had been playing on the stairs.

"Suspecting something wrong, me and my husband went upstairs and we were shocked to see that the boy was raping her,” she alleged.

The victim's current condition was not revealed by the local police.

The authorities said the accused fled the scene when he spotted the parents. A case of rape was filed after the victim's parents filed a police complaint. The same day, the police took the accused into custody. The boy has been charged under Section 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 4 (penetrative sexual assault) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, according to the Hindustan Times.

In 2019, the NCRB reported of the 32,559 rapes reported in India in 2017, in which 93.1% of the accused were known to the victims. As many as 16,591 rape cases filed that year were against “family friends,”neighbors or other known persons.

Last week in the northern Indian state of Haryana, a 22-year-old man was arrested for raping and strangling a 7-year-old girl to death. The accused was reportedly the victim's neighbor. He approached the girl when her parents were not at home. After raping the girl, he dumped her body in a pit in a village. The police said the girl's parents were daily wage laborers. ​The accused was later arrested and charged with rape and kidnapping under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.