A 20-year-old woman has been arrested over a video circulating on social media that shows a small child being assaulted. The child is one year and five months old and is in hospital.
Officers of the Children and Women’s Bureau of the Enderamulla Police Station acted on the footage and arrested the suspect — the child’s mother — on Saturday, 31 October, Hiru News reported at 11:48 a.m. Colombo time on Sunday, citing the Police Media Division.
What police say
The suspect is a resident of the Kompannaveediya (Slave Island) area and was arrested in Enderamulla. The child was also taken into police custody, and both were handed over to the Kurunduwatta (Cinnamon Gardens) Police Station, in whose area the offence is said to have occurred, for further investigation.
Initial inquiries indicate the assault took place on 28 October — three days before the arrest, and before the footage began circulating.
The child was injured and is receiving hospital treatment. The suspect was due to be produced before the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court on Sunday.
The video did the work of a complaint
The sequence here is worth setting out, because it is the mechanism rather than the incident that is unusual. The assault is dated to 28 October. No complaint appears to have started the case. What triggered it was the circulation of the footage itself, which brought the matter to the Enderamulla bureau three days later.
Two police divisions are involved for a straightforward reason: the bureau that identified and arrested the suspect is not the division with territorial jurisdiction over the offence, so the file and both parties were transferred to Kurunduwatta.
Sri Lanka’s Children and Women’s Bureau units sit within police stations and handle offences against children and women specifically. Taking the child into custody alongside the suspect is the standard protective step where the alleged offender is the parent.
Not reported
The filing does not identify anyone involved, which is appropriate where a child is the victim. Beyond that, it does not say who recorded the video or who posted it, whether the person who circulated it is also under investigation, or on what platform it appeared. It does not describe the child’s injuries or current condition beyond confirming hospitalisation, or say who the child has been placed with. It gives no indication of what charges are contemplated, whether the National Child Protection Authority has been notified, or whether anyone else present during the incident is being sought.
Single verified source. This report rests on Hiru News, a verified newsroom, relaying a Police Media Division statement. The aggregator Newswire.lk carried the same statement, but aggregators do not count toward this site’s credibility index and the original newsroom is cited instead. No other verified outlet had filed at the time of writing.
A note on the image: this article uses a category placeholder. No photograph is used, and none should be, where the subject is an identifiable child in a child-protection case.
