While we have made great strides in the fight against sexual harassment, through #MeToo and the reckoning of celebrities previously hiding under the veil of power, the world's most vulnerable, the most innocent, are yet to freed from the shackles of harassment and abuse and brutality. Specifically, in a region between India and Pakistan that is prime with tension and burgeoning conflict, a child was raped.

Asifa Bano was eight years old. It is suspected that she was taken from her family home by a group of men, many of whom were police officers, kept in a room, raped repeatedly, and then killed. She was a child, an eight year old. She was a child.

Such a contentious case was only heightened by the fast that Asifa was Muslim and her assailants were Hindu. In Kashmir, a nation fighting Indian control since the 1980's such a religious difference only exasperates tensions. Some believe the accused were fueled by a desire to drive Asifa's Muslim community of Nomads out of the region.

India and Kashmir and every other country in this world needs to do better. Asifa was a child, a child, and despite this fact, despite the fact that she was innocent from the world's corruption until her fateful kidnapping, those defending her assailants are treating her like an adult. When her disappearance was reported to the police, they speculated that she must have eloped with a boy. What kind of toxic rape culture is this, in which a child's integrity and honor are brought into question?

Why is it that men in power, whether in the westernized worlds of the United States and Great Britain or the developing nations of India, treat those below them as property and inhuman? She was taken by police officers, those who are supposed to be pillars of a society, those who are supposed to protect, rather than be the ones we need protection from. When your own government betrays you through victim-blaming and the facilitation of corruption, how are we to bring about change?

Asifa deserves better. Women and children in Kashmir and India are often brutally gang-raped, with their cases sparking outrage, and then what? A washing over of fury? Silence? Giving up? How can we ever forget Asifa? How can we ever forget her torture, her pain, her misery, and her violation? How can we forget the violation of children everywhere, whose stories are often glossed over and forgotten in the influx of world news? Who is crying for their justice?

To be in power, to be in a position of authority, is a privilege. It does not bestow upon you the right to violate another. It is a gift. Abuse it, and the only right you have is the right to lose it.

We have to do better. This has to end. The #MeToo movement has to extend beyond America and Hollywood and into the realm of the world's most impoverished, vulnerable, and forgotten.

She was a child.

My heart aches for Asifa. Rest in peace.