HYDERABAD: In 15 days, Rachakonda SHE teams have detained 117 individuals on charges of stalking and harassing young women.
Of the 117 detained, 70 are minors. Rachakonda’s Women Safety Wing DCP T Usha Vishwanath said, “Between November 16 and 30, we received 135 complaints of women harassment. Twenty-four of those women were harassed by phones, 30 were harassed through WhatsApp calls and messages, 18 were harassed through social media apps and 63 were directly harassed.”
During the same period, the SHE Teams also conducted 47 programmes to create awareness of the crimes against women and the rights they have.In one case, a 16-year-old girl from Malkajgiri was flashed by an unidentified man when she was returning home from college. As she was entering the apartment, a man got down from a Honda Activa bike near the gate and suddenly undid his pants and showed her his private parts.
The girl immediately alerted her father who came out to find nobody near the gate. “After checking the CCTV footage, it was found that an unknown person came towards the victim, took a U-turn past her, chased her and went to their house,” the police said in a press release. The girl then contacted the Malkajgiri SHE Teams. A case was subsequently registered at the Malkajgiri police station.
In the second half of November, the Kushaiguda SHE Teams conducted a decoy operation and caught 22 individuals harassing young women on the roads and registered cases against them. A similar decoy operation was also carried out in LB Nagar, Vanasthalipuram and Malkajgiri, in which the police detained 37 people.
Meanwhile, the Rachakonda SHE Teams conducted decoy operations in Metro trains and caught five men travelling in the women’s compartment and fined them. The Women Safety Wing along with the Bhumika Women’s Collective NGO conducted a counselling session for eve teasers at LB Nagar CP Camp office (Women Safety Wing Office) on Tuesday.The police urged women to report cases of harassment without fear and assured them that the SHE Teams would take strict action against the harassers immediately.