A two-year-old boy was sexually assaulted allegedly at a playschool in Kolkata on Monday, 2 July. While he couldn’t explain his pain, his wails and blood-stained pants made his mother suspicious. A medical report confirmed the assault, police said. has been appointed School has denied the incident and the CCTV cameras at the school reportedly haven’t recorded anything between June 26 and July 2. The principal of the playschool has denied the entire incident of the boy being sexually assaulted.
According to the mother, when she went to pick him up from school, he was crying uncontrollably. She found blood stains on his clothes. She took him to a doctor, who was shocked to find injuries on his private parts.
The boy’s father says his wife found him “crying very badly” when she went to bring him home from school on Monday. When she discovered, later, that his “internal parts [were] bleeding”, they sought medical opinion.
“After that night, we visited his doctor, and he mentioned that someone inserted some object in his private part, and his rectum is swollen,” the father recalls in his complaint. On July 4, he says, another doctor — a child specialist — confirmed “the abnormal behaviour”, and was “shocked” and “stunned”.
According to the complaint, when the boy’s parents asked the school’s principal for CCTV footage, she told them the equipment hadn’t been working properly since June 26.
She said the school didn’t have footage from the time period between June 26 and July 2 (Monday), and “also mentioned that nothing has happened in the school”, the father says.”There are healthy chances that the management/administration of the school intentionally deleted the footage to cover something had happened to my son [sic] as they were unable to produce the asked video footage.”
“My son is traumatised and crying” and can’t “walk properly because of the pain”, he says.
And when he signed his name, he added the words: “A helpless father”.
The next morning, the parents went to the school and told the principal about the abuse, who denied the incident. When they demanded to see the CCTV footage, they were sent back home without any help.
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The principal says the boy’s parents alleged that a doctor had harassed their child, a day after the school organised a health camp. But the boy, the official says, “was not even attended by the doctor. He was with the teachers and nannies.”
After the parents complained, the principal adds, the “guardian” provided another version of events.
“Nothing happened in the school. We need a written legal document to reveal the CCTV footage. The parents have no evidence. If molestation had happened, they should have reacted immediately — why wait for 24 hours?”
Meanwhile, the parents’ lawyer, Anirban Guhathakurda, says they can’t be denied the footage.
Later, she told the parents over phone that the CCTV cameras haven’t recorded anything between June 26 and July 2 when the assault took place. The parents have filed a complaint and the police have registered a case under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO).
Last year, two incidents of sexual abuse at top Kolkata schools had stirred the government. While a four-year-old girl was sexually assaulted at Kolkata’s GD Birla School, another child from an equally reputed school was molested, not once but twice by school staff, her parents had said.