Three Months on, Choti Nirbhaya Still Recuperating From Trauma

Three months after that brutal incident, Choti Nirbhaya hasn’t made sense of what she’s gone through.

Choti Nirbhaya in her slum. (Photo: The Quint)

Three months ago, this 4-year-old girl from Keshav Puram didn’t know what sexual assault was. On 9 October last year, she was brutally raped by an acquaintance. But three months after that fateful incident, she hasn’t made sense of what she’s gone through and is going through still.

“She is reverting to her normal self. She has started to forget what happened that evening but she doesn’t talk to strangers anymore,” her mother says. The condition of the slum she lives in is unhygienic for her and she runs the risk of getting an infection. And her family can’t move to another place until the government decides to remove these slums and give them houses somewhere else.

(On National Girl Child Day, we republishing this story about a young rape survivor which was originally published on 9 January 2017.)