The Khandeshwar police on Sunday arrested a 19-year-old boy for raping his 16-year-old sister and impregnating her.

The police said the accused, a second-year undergraduate student, and his sister, a Class X student, lived with their parents in Panvel. An officer said the father was a government employee and the mother worked at a private firm.

The police said the parents found out that the victim was pregnant when they took her for a medical check-up after she complained of health problems. The girl then opened up to her parents and said that her brother had raped her in August. The girl told her parents that she did not tell them about the incident earlier as she was afraid of the consequences and worried about bringing disrepute to the family.

An officer at Khandeshwar police station said, “The parents took the girl to a hospital in Mumbai and the hospital authorities informed the Azad Maidan police that they had a medico-legal case. An FIR was registered on Saturday and the case was transferred to us.”

The officer said the girl is three months pregnant and the parents are looking into procedures to terminate the pregnancy. The officer said, “We have not yet met the victim. The parents are traumatised and claim that they had no knowledge of the incident.” The accused is in police custody and would be interrogated to find out if he was under any kind of influence during the act.

Dr. Manjeer Mukherjee, senior director of NGO Arpan, said the recent National Crime Records Bureau data showed that in 93.6% cases of aggravated penetrative sexual assault on children, the perpetrator was known to the victim.

‘Easy targets’

Dr. Mukherjee said, “Child sexual abuse is not only a violation of a child’s body but also of their trust. Children trust people they know and it becomes easy for the abuser to target them, groom them, fulfil their unmet emotional needs, isolate them and then sexually abuse them. It is also easier for them to win the trust of the child’s family and caregivers. They continue the abuse as families often place more trust in adult relationships than on the disclosure of the child. Families also often blame the child after such incidents.”