Barely 10 days after a three-year-old girl was molested at a playschool at Belandur in Bengaluru, another child of the same age was allegedly sexually assaulted by a non-teaching staff employed at a well-known national playschool chain on Friday.
The accused, Manjunath V., who worked as a supervisor at the playschool, was arrested when the child’s parents lodged a complaint with the police on Friday. A case has been registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.
According to the mother, for the past one month, her daughter had been crying and complaining that she did not want to go to school. “Then on Friday, my daughter came home in tears and told me that a “bhaiya” had touched her,” said the mother, adding that at that moment her worst fears had come true. “She said that she had pain in her private parts. I immediately took her to the hospital and was shocked to hear that she was assaulted.”
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What upset her further was the alleged apathy of the director of the school. “We complained to the school director on Friday, the very day it happened. But the school authorities refused to believe what my daughter said. They even refused to lodge a police complaint, so we went to the police station ourselves. The police acted swiftly and arrested the accused the same day.”
She claimed that the staff had also not listened to her daughter, who recounted the incident to them five to six times, and even identified Manjunath, who was brought to the office. “Even then, the school refused to file a complaint,” the mother said. The director of the school told The Hindu that Manjunath’s services had been terminated on Saturday. The director denied the mother’s allegation that the school had been indifferent to the child’s ordeal.