A maulvi (cleric) was arrested on Thursday from a madrassa in Hyderabad for sexually abusing 6 minor children, Hindi daily Nav Bharat Times has reported . He has been charged under IPC 377, 506 and POCSO, and is currently being questioned in judicial custody.
SP Ashok Chakravarti said that the accused maulvi had been sexually abusing the children for the past few months. The parents of the raped children had lodged a complaint on 29 April.
This incident comes on the back of the rape of a 10-year-old girl in a Ghaziabad madrassa by a madrassa student & the maulvi running that madrassa.
A madrassa is an Islamic religious school usually attached to a mosque. It functions as a theological seminary, with a curriculum centred on the Quran and Hadith.
Incidents of child abuse – sexual, physical and mental – have been regularly reported in madrassas across the world. A BBC investigation in 2011 had found that Britain’s madrassas faced more than 400 allegations of physical abuse in the past three years, with families often facing community pressure not to go to court or even to make a formal complaint.
Last year, an Associated Press(AP) investigation found that sexual abuse in Pakistan’s madrassas is as common as discussing it is taboo. The investigation shed light on this phenomenon, which is stated to be prevalent throughout the country- from isolated rural communities to urban metropolises.
In 2015, journalist VP Rajeena and director Ali Akbar both came out with startling revelations about sexual abuse in madrassas that they had attended as a child.
Isn’t it time that Muslim society in India and self-avowed liberals & intellectuals like Irfan Habib, AG Noorani, politicians like Salman Khurshid, Asaduddin Owaisi and celebrity activists like Javed Akhtar, Aamir Khan, Shabana Azmi etc turned their focus on this festering issue within the lakhs of madrassas that dot our country? Or will bringing up this issue also be dismissed as Islamophobia?
(Featured image: Representative only)
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