NEW DELHI: Authorities have rescued a raped and tortured Jharkhand teenager who was sold to a Haryana family as part of a bride business that’s booming in the northwestern state, reported Hindustran Times on Monday.
An agent sold 15-year-old Sunita (name changed) for Rs 1 lakh and she was forced to marry a man 30 years older. Every night for nine months, her husband and father-in-law returned home inebriated, beat her with belts and shoes and sexually abused her, the girl said.
“I woke up each morning with bruises on my body. I begged them to let me go back to my mother, but they just enjoyed my misery,” she added.
The yawning gender gap and entrenched feudalism in states like Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh are fuelling a flourishing trade in women trafficked from the poverty-ridden villages of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam and Odisha.
Sunita grew up in a Jamshedpur slum and never went to school. She lost her father early and her mother worked as a domestic help in the Jharkhand city to eke out a living.
She was promised a happy married life in Haryana, but was subjected to torture by her husband on her first day in the state.
Sunita was rescued after a Jamshedpur-based women’s police station contacted the NGO Shakti Vahini in Delhi. An FIR was lodged on Sunday after Sunita’s sister approached authorities for help, said Priyanka Anand, officer in-charge of the police station.