17-Year-Old Brave Pune Girl Takes A Stand Against Harassment, Gets Local Menace Sent To Jail!

Fed up of repeated sexual harassment by a youth, a minor girl from the city took the brave step of calling out her molester by approaching the police last Friday.

The youth, according to the 17-year-old complainant, had an uncle who was her neighbour; thus, whenever he would visit his relative, he would harass the girl on her way to school.
Unable to take his escalating advances anymore, her proactive step has now sent him behind bars, after his arrest by a team of Yerwada police on Saturday night.

Representational Image

The arrested man has been identified as 21-year-old Ganesh Dhamdhere, a resident of Yerwada. Cops informed Mirror that Dhamdhere is well known in the area for being a nuisance, and has been harassing the teenage girl for quite some time.

Assistant police inspector S Dhakane of Yerwada police station shared, "The complainant is a school-going girl, who resides next to the house of Dhamdhere's uncle. While Dhamdhere stays in a different locality, he often visits his uncle. Whenever he did so, he had taken to standing outside and harassing the girl the minute she stepped out of her own home for any work."

According to police, the girl initially tried to ignore Dhamdhere, but he got emboldened instead and began to make further advances over the last couple of months. "She had tried not to pay any heed to Dhamdhere, but rather than improving, he started harassing her more. He would intercept her, taunt her and ask her to accompany him elsewhere. When the girl did not complain at first, he became even bolder and started molesting her," Dhakane added.

Representational Image

As Dhamdhere showed no signs of stopping, the girl finally mustered up the courage to discuss the issue with her parents and approach police.

Dhakane told Mirror, "In such cases, women often get scared and don't come forward to file complaints, fearing a reaction from society. In many instances, we have found that we had to counsel some girls for days to prepare them mentally to just lodge a case against the culprits. However, in this case, the girl was quite determined. She approached us with her parents and gave us a detailed statement, after which we registered a case against Dhamdhere. Immediately after, we started a hunt for him."

As the case was being registered, Dhamdhere caught a hint of trouble and left his house to take shelter at some other place. "After the case was on file on May 19, we sent a team of police to his home, but he was nowhere to be found. However, we continued the search into Saturday, and finally that night, we received a tip-off that he was hiding at another location, from where we picked him up," Dhakane said.

Police suspect there may be more women who have faced harassment from Dhamdhere, as he had an ill reputation in the area. Cops now plan to approach more girls from the location to see if they can gather any further complaints about the accused youth.