Junko Furuta

sexual abuse on women is a very common phenomenon today.unless there is a scandal involved, people simply flick through any channel that shows a rape or sexual harrassment case.some people may bestow a sigh, but largely its too minor an issue to pay attention to.but once or twice such incidents occur that make you sit up and feel goosebumps all over your body.incidents which, unless you are a rock, are bound to evoke strong emotions in you.incidents that shake your faith in justice, humanity and maybe even God.such is the heinous act against Junko Furuta.the 16 year old Japanese girl who was victim of some unimaginably brutal sexual crimes.she died 20 years ago from shock after 44 days of sexual torture in the hands of her four identified assailants and God alone knows how many unidentified.twenty years later-her assailants walk scot free.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junko_Furuta
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(from Wikipedia)

THE CRIME

In November of 1988, Boy A (then 18), Boy B (Jo Kamisaku, then 17; Kamisaku was a new family name he took after being released from prison [1]), Boy C (then 16) and Boy D (then 17) from Tokyo abducted and held Furuta, a second year high school (grade 11) student from Saitama Prefecture in Misato, for 44 days. They kept her captive in the house owned by the parents of Boy C.

To forestall a manhunt, Boy A coerced Furuta into calling her own parents and telling them that she had run away from home, but was with "a friend" and was not in danger. He also browbeat her into posing as one of the boys' girlfriends when the parents of the house where she was held were around, but when it became clear that the parents would not call the police, he dropped this pretext. Furuta tried to escape several times, begging the parents more than once to help her, but they did nothing, apparently out of fear that Boy A would hurt them. Boy A was at the time a low-level yakuza leader and had bragged that he could use his connections to kill anyone who interfered.

According to their statements at their trial, the four of them raped her, beat her, introduced foreign objects including an iron rod into her vagina, made her drink her own urine and was fed cockroaches, inserted fireworks into her anus, and set them off, forced Furuta to masturbate, cut her nipple with pliers, dropped dumbbells onto her stomach, and burned her with cigarettes and lighters. (One of the burnings was punishment for attempting to call the police.) At one point her injuries were so severe that according to one of the boys it took more than an hour for her to crawl downstairs to use the bathroom. They also related that "possibly a hundred different people" knew that Furuta had been imprisoned there, but it is not clear if this means they visited the house at different times while she was imprisoned there, or themselves either raped or abused her. When the boys refused to let her leave, she begged them on several occasions to "kill (her) and get it over with".

On January 4, 1989, using one of the boys' loss at mah-jongg as a pretext, the four beat her with an iron barbell, poured lighter fluid on her legs, arms, face and stomach, and set her on fire. She died later that day of shock. The four boys claimed that they were not aware of how badly injured she was, and that they believed she had been malingering.

The killers hid her corpse in an 55-gallon drum filled with cement; the perpetrators disposed the drum in a tract of reclaimed land in Koto, Tokyo.

ARREST AND PUNISHMENT

The boys were arrested and tried as adults; but, because of Japanese handling of crimes committed by juveniles, their identities were sealed by the court. However, a weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun reported their real names, claiming "Human rights aren't needed for brutes."[2] Furuta's real name and details about her personal life were reported exhaustively in the media. Kamisaku was judged as a sub leader, at least according to the official trial.

The four boys pled guilty to a reduced charge of "committing bodily injury that resulted in death", rather than murder. Boy A's parents sold their house for approximately 50 million yen and paid this as compensation to Furuta's family.[citation needed]

For his participation in the crime, Kamisaku served eight years in a juvenile prison before he was released, in August 1999. In July 2004, he was arrested for assaulting an acquaintance, whom he believed to be luring a girlfriend away from him, and allegedly bragged about his earlier infamy. [1] Kamisaku was sentenced to seven years in prison for the beating.

Junko's parents were dismayed by the sentences received by their daughter's killers, and enjoined a civil suit against the parents of the boy in whose home the crimes were committed. When some of the convictions were overturned on the basis of problematic physical evidence (the semen and pubic hair recovered from the body did not match those of the boys who were arrested), the lawyer handling the civil suit decided there was no case to be made and refused to represent them further. (There is speculation that the evidence may have been contaminated—for example, by unidentified persons who raped Furuta.

One of the most disturbing parts of this true story is that her killers are now free. After putting Junko Furuta through all that suffering, they are free men.

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"A high-school girl was abducted by four teenaged hooligans while she was on her way to work. They took her to the house of a friend, held her in his bedroom, and for the next forty-five days enacted every imaginable form of abuse on her (and some you wouldn’t want to imagine). They gang-raped her—both with their own bodies and with an assortment of foreign objects—beat her, kicked her, doused her extremities with lighter fluid and set her on fire, and probably did many other things to her that went undocumented by either her tormentors or the police. They mocked her pain. They held her down and dropped barbells on her stomach. This last bit of torture was more than she could withstand, and after going into convulsions she apparently either strangled on her own vomit or simply died from her beatings. When the boys were questioned later about why they didn’t do anything during her seizure, they replied, “We assumed she was faking it.”
"She tried to escape, more than once. The first time, she was caught in the process of making a phone call. The second time, she ran into the parents of the boy who lived there; apparently they had known all along what was gong on. She begged them to help her, but they refused; his friend had criminal connections, and they didn’t want to get into trouble, too. After her death, they taped her arms and legs together, threw her into a 55-gallon drum, filled it with cement, and dumped it in an empty lot. The body wasn’t recovered until almost a year later. The ringleader of the whole incident served eight years in prison and is now a free man."

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She got help from no one.NO ONE. those who knew, JOINED in on the assault.one innocent 16 year old girl.one gruesome unthinkable death.one act of greatest injustice.what really do we need to sit up and DO something?how many more inocents do we need to sacrifice?