Armed forces in Kashmir are detaining children and molesting women and girls amid a state-wide blackout

Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/kashmir-forces-detaining-kids-molesting-girls-amid-blackout-report-2019-8

Kashmir is in its 11th day of a state-wide curfews and a total internet and phone blackout.

A group of economists and activists published a report Wednesday saying that security forces in the region have abducted hundreds of boys in midnight raids and detained them.

Officials also molested women and girls during those raids, the report said. Forces have also been firing pellet guns at civilians, the researchers said.

The report was compiled using conversations with hundreds of people in and around Kashmir state, all of whom were too afraid to speak on camera for fear of Indian government persecution.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Thursday that his government's actions in Kashmir are liberating women, girls, and marginalized communities.

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Security forces in Kashmir have abducted hundreds of boys in midnight raids and molested women and girls amid the state's 11-day blackout, a group of Indian economists and activists said in a new report.
Regional police, army, and paramilitary forces have raided hundred of homes around the region and arbitrarily snatched "very young schoolboys and teenagers" from their beds from as early as August 5, the investigation — titled "Kashmir Caged" and published Wednesday— said.
Those officers also molested women and girls during these nighttime raids, the researchers said, without specifying exactly what their actions were.

The report doesn't explicitly say whether those officers were employed by the Kashmiri regional government or the Indian government. However, most police, paramilitary, and army officers in Jammu and Kashmir work under the Indian government.

An Indian paramilitary soldier patrols a street in Srinagar on August 10.

AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan

Though the researchers spoke with hundreds of ordinary people — from students to shopkeepers to local journalists — around the state from August 9 and 13 for their report, nobody was willing to speak on camera for fear of persecution from the Indian government, the economists said.
Parents were afraid to tell them about their sons' abductions as they didn't want to arrested for disrupting state security. Some worried that their boys would be "disappeared" — killed in custody — because their family had spoken out, the report said.
There are no formal records of these arrests, one civilian said, so if someone was killed in custody the police could claim that they were never taken in the first place.
One 11-year-old boy in Pampore, a town in western Kashmir, told the researchers he was beaten up during his detention from August 5 to 11, and that there were boys even younger than him in custody.
The researchers also said that Kashmiri security forces have been indiscriminately firing pellet guns against civilians, leaving them hospitalized and bleeding internally.