In a New Delhi hospital, a two-year-old girl is fighting for her life as she lays in a hospital bed with severe head injuries and blows to her body the color of eggplant.
The young girl was brought in by a 14-year-old teen who claimed to be the biological mother. She admitted to slapping the child three or four times when the baby wouldn't stop crying and even went as far as biting her in the arm.
Her condition remains critical, said Dr. Sumit Sinha of the India Institute of Medical Sciences. No one knows whether she will survive or if she does, whether she will live with permanent brain damage.
This child's story is dark. The teen who found the child is the abused daughter of an alcoholic father. She ran away from home in June to get away from his violent beatings - often with a stick. She found and brought home the baby in November.
"She told authorities two people, Sandeep and Arti, forced her into a life of prostitution; that Sandeep allegedly raped her first for three days before he found her customers, according CNN-IBN. Months later, the girl met a man named Rajkumar and the two began living together in a New Delhi slum. Police suspect he, too, was sexually abusing the girl." (CNN Story: Indian Baby's Case Opens Door into a Dark World)
In the western state of Rajasthan, police eventually tracked down Munni, 22, the woman believed to be the baby's biological mother. "She had been abandoned by her first husband and sold off in marriage when she was 16 to a young man from a Rajasthani village, Sharma said. She was valued at $6,000, according to The Times of India."
Munni's son is nowhere to be found and her other daughter is somewhere in the state of Bihar.
"This sort of thing happens all too often, Prasad of the Child Welfar Committee said, and sadly, flies under the radar of a majority of India's 1.2 billion people."
This story is similar to the one told in Reluctant Bedfellows by Susan Dewey, and the video in Hollow Bodies.
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