News

Increase in number of rape cases in 2018

February 5, 2019 9:50 pm

The number of rape cases decided in the High Court have fluctuated in past three years.

However,  2018 has seen one of the highest ever number of sexual violence cases before the courts.

Data from the last three years shows that Fiji is now fighting a battle against sexual offenders.

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Fiji Women’s Rights Movement executive director, Nalini Singh says after analyzing the data they discovered that 2016 had 62 rape cases, 2017 had 27 and it increased to 94 last year.

“We see more cases coming through the high court as they are clearing a lot of cases. It’s a matter of more cases being reported and more action is being taken by the formal justice sector.”

Singh says in all these cases the accused were male.

She says the average age of the accused analyzed for the three years is thirty-nine.