Sexual Molestation Cases from around the world in the past week

Sexual abuse remains one of the world's least-reported crimes — and yet every week, some cases make the news. Here are the ones that surfaced in the first week of January 2015.

India: A 22-year-old Japanese woman alleged she was gang-raped by five men in India and held captive for weeks, according to AFP reporting. Five arrests were made. The case put India's already-strained tourism reputation under a fresh dark cloud.

Pakistan: A cleric in Lahore was investigated after a 6-year-old boy — who had been reported missing by his father — was found dead on mosque grounds, allegedly sexually assaulted and strangled. (We are deliberately not naming the child.) The case raised, once again, the question of blind trust in religious authority figures.

Thailand: A junior monk at a temple in Uthai Thani accused the monastery's abbot of sexual misconduct, according to the Bangkok Post. An inquiry was underway at the time.

United Kingdom/United States: Prince Andrew was named in a US court filing in which a woman alleged she had been forced to have sexual relations with him as a minor, in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein case. Buckingham Palace categorically denied the allegations.

These are only the cases that get reported. Countless women and children are sexually abused in every part of the world without any penalty ever. If even a small step — a case reported, a victim believed, an abuser prosecuted — comes out of reading these stories, it matters.