Protect your teenage girls from Delivery and Service boys visit home

• Last year alone, 2,638 teenaged girls, some as young as 13, eloped with ‘beaus’, majority of them delivery men, cable guys, garage mechanics and even rowdies.

    The attraction of opposites, taken to an extreme. That’s the only quick way to explain an eyebrow-raising set of statistics culled from the crime records bureau of the police department.
    Last year alone, 2,638 teenaged girls, some as young as 13, eloped with their ‘beaus’. That would be shocking enough in the light of their tender age. What boggles the mind, however, is that the boys/men of their choosing come, for the most part, from social segments considerably below their own — sales boys, cable TV boys, garage mechanics, even a couple of rowdies.
    Of the 5,484 missing complaints filed in city police stations in 2011, 2,638 were teenaged girls. Of these, 1,356 have been traced so far. The JP Nagar police station saw the largest number of such cases, with 170 cases — 102 of them pertaining to teenaged females — being registered. The JP Nagar cops have been able to trace 61 of the girls so far.
    In 2010, the same police station registered 197 missing complaints, of which 178 were teenaged girls. 

    Take the case of Rashi (15), who comes from a well-to-do family residing in Yelahanka New Town. A class X student, she got into a relationship with Manjunath, a 20-year-old 9th standard drop-out who would come to her house to collect the cable TV fees. Their SMSes turned from being merely friendly to pure infatuation. Knowing her parents would oppose the affair, she took some cash and jewellery from home and eloped with the boy. The cops traced them to Rajasthan; apparently, they had already got married in a temple.
    Ameena, just 14, went missing in the last week of December. The JP Nagar police managed to trace her and her boyfriend, Shakir (14). He works in a garage and is a drop-out from her school. According to the police, the medical report showed that the duo had engaged in sex.
    In another case, an 18-year-old engineering student got a misdirected SMS, called back out of curiosity — and the upshot was that she fell head over heels for the man, a hardened rowdy. Strangely, even after learning of Naveen’s criminal past, Neha refused to end the relationship. They got married in a temple, but she couldn’t adjust to his shabby abode and came back to her parents. Her infatuation saw her elope with him a second time, before sense finally dawned on her and she returned to her parental home. 

    In yet another pointer to the predatory nature of young, unattached urban males, 14-year-old Sakshi ran away with 22-year-old Pramod, a pressure cooker salesman.
    He went to their house to attend to a problem with the cooker and gave the impressionable minor a suggestive look.
    She took his number from her parents and the liaison between the two went on for a month before her parents got wind of it. Disregarding their warnings, she ran away with the man and the duo got married in a temple. The JP Nagar police traced them and reunited the girl with her parents.
    According to a senior police officer who has monitored such cases, only a small number of the girls involved have had the good sense to do an about-turn and return to their parental homes. The rest continue to suffer silently in a socially ill-matched relationship — one that is of their own making.
    As the officer remarked, in several cases it is the girls who shell out money to satisfy the demands of their beaus. Bus stops and temples are known places where the first contact is made and numbers are exchanged.
    “We have seen cases where the parents had to literally touch their daughters’ feet to get them to return home,” he said.
    (Names of the girls have been changed as they are minors) 

-Hemanth Kashyap & Manjunath L Hanji (Bangalore Mirror)