Mandalay police have arrested 11 members of a mob that formed on Sunday to demand that a suspected child rapist be handed over to them from a police station.
Suspect Kyaw Soe, 38, was arrested earlier that day for allegedly raping a seven-year-old girl in the city’s Aungmyaythazan Township on Thursday. The allegation came to the authorities’ attention after the alleged victim complained of pain and bleeding to a neighbor and was taken to a doctor, who determined that she had been raped.
After the suspect was arrested and charged for rape, a crowd began to form outside the police station demanding custody of the suspect, with some rioters tearing down the bamboo fence surrounding the station.
The neighbor who reported the alleged rape, Daw Khin Khin, was at the police station at the time of the riot. She told the Irrawaddy: “We want the death sentence for rapists like him.”
When police eventually blocked the road to the station, rioters threw stones and bricks at them. Police officers fired warning shots to disperse the crowd before arresting the 11 rioters.
The Irrawaddy also reported that a group campaigning for capital punishment for rapists had coincidentally visited the alleged victim’s neighborhood earlier that day.
A slew of recent rape cases and a spike in the national rape statistics have sparked movements calling for the death penalty for convicted rapists across Myanmar. While some campaigners are using the movement to call attention to the need for better sex education in the country, others are taking the demand literally.
The Myanmar government has pledged to propose a Protection and Prevention of Violence Against Women bill in parliament.
MP Naw Susana Hla Hla Soe, secretary of the Women and Children’s Rights Committee in the Amyotha Hluttaw, recently told the Myanmar Times that harsher penalties will be less effective than simply enforcing the penalties already in place.
