Travel influencer raped by seven men in India

A Spanish couple travelling the world on a motorbike and documenting their adventure on Instagram was assaulted and the woman raped by 7 men in India on Friday, 1 March. Local authorities have managed to arrest 3 of the suspects and are looking for the other 4.

Fernanda, 28, and her partner, Vicente, 63, were camping in the Dumka district, in India’s eastern Jharkhand state. They were unable to find a hotel, so they decided to just camp out Friday night. They described the ordeal of their attack in two stories on their joint Instagram account that has 300,000 followers.

“We were already inside the tent when three men arrived on two motorcycles and started shouting at us and throwing stones. We were very afraid and Fernanda took one of the tent pegs to defend herself in case we were attacked. But as soon as we got out, we saw that four more men had arrived”, Vicente recalled in the videos. “Three of the men grabbed Fernanda. I tried to go after her, but the other four started hitting me […] They tied me up and put a knife to my neck. Fernanda was raped. Seven of them. Seven men. Sons of bitches.”

While Vincente’s life was being threatened with a knife, the men took turns to rape Fernanda. “They raped me, they took turns while some watched and they stayed like that for about two hours”, she told Spanish TV channel Antena 3. “My face looks like this, but it’s not what hurts me the most”, she said in one of the stories.

The two were found around 11 pm local time by the police, according to Pitamber Singh Kherwar, superintendent of police in Dumka. Following a court hearing on Monday with Fernanda and Vicente and the 3 identified suspects, the couple were given one million rupees (€11,115) in compensation from the authorities, while the police promised to find the other 4 men and bring them to justice.

The couple is now planning to go on to Nepal and return to Spain from there, where they will be putting their world tour on hold until they recover from the nightmare experience. They still plan on continuing their travels, leaving their motorbikes in Nepal, where they will be returning at a later date before heading to their final destination in New Zealand.

Meanwhile, the authorities are more worried about the impact the incident will be having on tourism, than on the crime itself. The Dumku court said the news is “likely to bring adverse publicity against the country and thereby tarnishing the image of India across the globe”.

This case has gained attention and has been promptly responded to because the victims were tourists, but 31,000 rapes were reported in India in 2022, that means 85 rapes per day, or one rape every 17 minutes. However, a lot of cases go unreported due to victim sigma and the lack of action on the authorities’ side.

The death penalty was introduced for rape over a decade ago. The law came after weeks of protests following a 23-year-old student being raped and left for dead on a New Delhi bus by 6 men in December 2012. The death penalty seems to have had little effect to deter the criminals, as most cases just get clogged-up in the justice system.