A protest has erupted in India seeking justice for a female doctor who was gang raped and murdered in the hospital she worked at. On August 9, the 31-year-old doctor-trainee’s corpse was found on a blood-soaked mattress at R.G. Kar Medical College in the city of Kolkata.
According to Reuters, Dr. Moumita Debnath’s colleagues said she was over halfway through a 36-hour shift when she decided to rest in a lecture hall at the college hospital.
Although Debnath’s family was initially told she died by suicide, an autopsy report brought before the Kolkata High Court by the victim’s parents revealed that she died by strangulation and her body showed signs that she had been subjected to a brutal and sustained sexual assault.
Among the injuries Debnath suffered included severe pelvic bone and muscle trauma, causing her legs to be twisted in an unnatural way. Her neck was broken, her eyes and mouth were bleeding, and she had sustained injuries to her abdomen, hands, and leg.
The post-mortem report also noted that over 150 mg of semen was recovered from the doctor’s body, indicating that up to 30 men could have been involved in the violation of Debath’s body. The normal volume of semen produced by a male upon ejaculation typically varies from 1.5 to 5.0 mg, according to the online medical encyclopedia MedlinePlus.
“No step taken to arrest any other offenders while the evidence clearly indicates that their daughter was the victim of a gang rape and murder, a crime that could not have been committed by one person alone,” they explained, adding that they noticed discrepancies in the autopsy report. The family also alleged that they had been prevented from seeing their daughter’s body for over three hours after arriving to the coroner’s office.
“[An] improper autopsy was done with a view to shield the others involved in their daughter’s death,” the family’s lawyer alleges.
Although the court scolded the college hospital, including its former principal, Dr. Sandip Ghosh, for mishandling the case by not filing a police report after finding the doctor’s corpse, the case was passed on to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation last Tuesday.
So far, at least one man has been arrested in connection to the case – civil servant Sanjoy Roy. Roy is known to be addicted to pornography.
News of the doctor’s brutal death has sparked outrage across India. In addition to medical professionals participating in sit-in demonstrations on the college hospital campus to demand more safeguarding measures for doctors, feminist groups also rallied in Kolkata in solidarity with the victim.
The outrage also prompted hospitals to halt elective services at some medical centers. On Thursday, the Indian Medical Association (IMA) called on over a million doctors across the nation to pause non-emergency services for 24 hours in a national strike to express their outrage at the mishandling of the case.
Speaking to Reuters, IMA President R. V. Asokan said: “Women form the majority of our profession in this country. Time and again, we have asked for safety for them.”
Although many doctor federations and hospitals continue to protest, the Federation of Resident Doctors Association ended its strike this week after Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda accepted their demands to enact the Central Protection Act.
The law was proposed in 2022 to protect medical professionals from violence but did not move forward in parliament because India’s former health minister, Mansukh Mandaviya, believed its objectives were already covered by the Epidemic Diseases (Amendment) Ordinance 2020.
Disturbingly, unverified rumors that Debnath’s rape had been filmed and uploaded to the internet began to circulate this weekend, leading to an explosion in search queries from sick individuals seeking to watch the video.
According to Google Trends, queries such as “Moumita Debnath porn” and “Dr. Moumita Debnath video” have experienced surges across India, with “Moumita Debnath rap[e] video” experiencing a 110% increase in searches. As of the time of this writing, of all the queries associated with her name, “Moumita Debnath photo video” is the 5th most searched in India, while “Moumita Debath last video” is the 12th most searched overall.
Of image search queries, “Moumita Debnath body photo” and “Moumita Debnath body postmortem” are the two fastest rising queries associated with the deceased woman’s name, while the more explicit “Moumita Debnath rap[e] photo” is the 11th fastest rising image query.
Internet users from other subcontinental nations, such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, have also expressed an interest in locating the rape footage.
The queries were not limited to Google, but porn websites as well. The Publica found that on XVideos-India, Debnath’s name has been searched alongside actual pornographic videos.
This would not be the first time gang rape footage in India trended on pornography websites.
In 2019, a doctor of veterinary medicine was brutally raped and murdered in Hyderabad. Priyanka Reddy had been heading home when a group of four men sabotaged her scooter, took her to an isolated area, raped her, and suffocated her to death. Her corpse was later burned in an effort to destroy the evidence.
In the days following the news of Reddy’s horrific murder, her name began trending across porn sites as men scrambled to locate the rumored footage of her final moments. Most notably, Reddy trended for days on XVideos, the second most visited porn site in the world, where her name was searched over 8 million times, primarily in India and Pakistan.
