Armed forces in Kashmir are detaining children and molesting women and girls amid a state-wide blackout, report claims.

Security forces in Kashmir have abducted hundreds of boys in midnight raids and molested women and girls amid the state’s 11-day blackout, a group of Indian economists and activists said in a new report.

Regional police, army, and paramilitary forces have raided hundred of homes around the region and arbitrarily snatched “very young schoolboys and teenagers” from their beds from as early as August 5, the investigation — titled “Kashmir Caged” and published Wednesday— said.

Those officers also molested women and girls during these nighttime raids, the researchers said, without specifying exactly what their actions were.

The report doesn’t explicitly say whether those officers were employed by the Kashmiri regional government or the Indian government. However, most police, paramilitary, and army officers in Jammu and Kashmir work under the Indian government.

Parents were afraid to tell them about their sons’ abductions as they didn’t want to arrested for disrupting state security. Some worried that their boys would be “disappeared” — killed in custody — because their family had spoken out, the report said.

There are no formal records of these arrests, one civilian said, so if someone was killed in custody the police could claim that they were never taken in the first place.

One 11-year-old boy in Pampore, a town in western Kashmir, told the researchers he was beaten up during his detention from August 5 to 11, and that there were boys even younger than him in custody.

The researchers also said that Kashmiri security forces have been indiscriminately firing pellet guns against civilians, leaving them hospitalized and bleeding internally.

Journalists in Kashmir have reported being prohibited from moving around the region, and local TV channels and news websites are unable to function.

Some local journalists have been able to continue file stories either with a satellite phone or giving USB sticks of their work to people flying out of the region, but they remain a minority.

People in the city of Srinagar have also been able to organize large-scale protests despite the communications ban.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/kashmir-forces-detaining-kids-molesting-girls-amid-blackout-report-2019-8