Criminal Incidence: The Scale No One Can Ignore

Official figures from India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that 445,256 incidents of crimes against women were reported nationally in 2022, an alarming increase from the previous year. These crimes encompass domestic violence, sexual assault, dowry harassment, kidnapping, and murder. The most frequently documented offense: cruelty by husbands or relatives (over 140,000 cases). Rape is another grim category, with 31,516 reported incidents. Assault with intent to outrage modesty hovers at more than 83,000 cases nationally.^[1][2]

Nearly one-third of women aged 18–49 in India admit to having experienced domestic abuse in their lifetimes, a figure confirmed in both the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) and recent academic research. These findings, aided by improved reporting mechanisms, reveal not just the prevalence but the social normalization of violence against women.^[2][3][4][1]

Geography of Violence

The burden of violence falls more heavily on some states and cities than others. Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh consistently top the list for crime volume and intensity. Delhi remains infamous for per capita rates, underscoring that urbanization and economic advancement do not guarantee women’s safety.^[1][2]

In Uttar Pradesh—the state contributing nearly 15 percent of all GBV cases—the legislative and executive branches routinely fail women. Less than 4% of the vital Nirbhaya Fund, earmarked for women’s protection, has been utilized, even as politicians pay lip service to women’s safety while perpetuating regressive attitudes in public and policy.^[1]

Social Determinants and Discriminatory Layers

Gender-based violence in India is neither uniform nor isolated from broader social fractures. Caste and religion make Dalit and Adivasi women, along with religious minorities, particularly vulnerable—Dalit women face a conviction rate for rape at just 2% compared to the already-low national average of 25%. This points to entrenched impunity and profound system neglect. Their labor and suffering are chronically erased from narratives; almost 98% of manual scavengers are women from oppressed castes.^[1]

Violence rooted in patriarchy is so endemic that 49% of survey respondents in 2025 said men and women face violence equally, a dangerous misconception that undermines the severity and specificity of women’s experience. Instead, facts show the overwhelming majority of crimes against women are perpetrated by men in domestic and community contexts.^[2]

Reporting, Stigma, and New Threats

Despite growing awareness, much gender-based violence goes unreported. Stigma, fear of reprisal, lack of economic independence, and social ostracisation silence survivors. On the other side, digital advances—while aiding some survivors—introduce new problems. A recent Asia-Pacific report revealed that 76% of women parliamentarians have faced psychological violence online, while 60% have experienced direct threats through social media platforms.^[5]

Child marriage also persists at a rate of 23%, adding another layer to the matrix of control and violence imposed on women, especially in rural India.^[3]

Government and Institutional Responses

India has, in recent years, expanded the legislative toolkit against gender violence. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (2023) increased sentences for sexual offenses and broadened definitions, while the government rolled out One-Stop Centres, Women Helplines (181), and Emergency Response Systems across the country. The Nirbhaya Fund and special Fast-Track Courts are designed to improve survivor access to justice and speed up trials.^[6][2][1]

Yet, the disconnect between policy and practice is glaring. States with the highest GBV rates remain reluctant or slow to utilize central funds for women’s protection. Trials for high-profile cases last for years; conviction rates stay stagnant; perpetrator impunity remains the norm, not the exception.^[1]

The Cost of Inaction: Personal and National

Economic advances and social mobility for women are hindered by violence. India’s youth female literacy rate is now 96% and labour force participation stands at 45%, milestones reached over decades. But every act of violence robs these gains of their value and meaning, forcing many to abandon work, education, or public life altogether.^[2]

Married women are expected to rely on husbands, and divorces or widowhood leave women financially dependent on family members who may themselves be abusers. In rural areas, widowhood can make women burdens to their families, further restricting their autonomy.^[2]

Fact-Driven Solutions Must Replace Rhetoric

The facts underscore an urgent need for more than symbolic reform. Real change requires:

• Mandatory gender sensitization in schools and workplaces. Education must break the cycle of normalized violence early, bolstered by evidence-based curriculum and teacher training.^[2][1]
• Universal, accessible support infrastructure. One-Stop Centres and Helplines should be boosted with more funding and staff to address the needs of survivors with trauma-informed care.^[6]
• Justice reforms to improve conviction rates and reduce trial length. Fast-track courts must operate at full capacity, with police and judicial actors held accountable for delays and failures.^[1][2]
• Economic empowerment for women. Policies should enable survivors to pursue education and find employment, reducing financial dependency.^[2]
• Technology for protection, not exploitation. Law enforcement must adapt rapidly to new digital threats, training officers in cybercrime and prioritizing online safety, especially for women in public life.^[5]

Responsibility of Leaders and Society

Elected officials and civil society have a unique responsibility. Leaders must reject platitudes and manifest real intent—by allocating resources quickly, measuring outcomes honestly, and enforcing laws without bias. Civil society should amplify survivor voices, ensuring stories do not disappear behind statistics.^[1]

Conclusion: Confronting the Crisis with Facts

India’s gender-based violence crisis is not a mystery lacking solutions: it is a test of national will and honesty. Facts alone lay bare the limitations of silence and lip service. Only when the country commits fully to fact-driven progress—spanning education, justice, economics, and social attitudes—can cycles of violence be broken.

In this task, editorializing is a call not merely for outrage but for remedy. Women’s safety, dignity, and freedom cannot wait. The facts demand it, and so must our laws, leaders, and communities.^[5][2][1]

(The author is an Indian writer and economist, author of three books)

1. https://cjp.org.in/mapping-gender-based-violence-in-india-trends-determinants-and-institutional-frameworks/
2. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/india-country-policy-and-information-notes/country-policy-and-information-note-women-fearing-gender-based-violence-india-august-2025-accessible
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11932463/
4. https://ijmr.org.in/violence-against-women-in-india-comprehensive-care-for-survivors/
5. https://www.ipu.org/news/press-releases/2025-03/60-women-mps-asia-pacific-report-online-gender-based-violence
6. https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2025/mar/doc2025329529701.pdf
7. https://www.emro.who.int/emhj-volume-25-2019/volume-25-issue-4/gender-based-violence-in-new-delhi-india-forecast-based-on-secondary-data-analysis.html
8. https://www.mospi.gov.in/publication/women-men-india-2024-selected-indicators-and-data
9. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2116557
10. https://data.unwomen.org/global-database-on-violence-against-women
11. https://www.isdm.org.in/blog/its-womens-day-but-on-ground-little-has-changed

The post India’s Gender-Based Violence Crisis 2025: Facts must drive change appeared first on SabrangIndia.

1. Student of IIM Calcutta arrested for allegedly raping a woman on campus: The survivor said that she had been sexually assaulted by the accused while she was unconscious.”
2. Drugged, filmed, threatened: Lucknow mall supervisor arrested for raping, assaulting 20-year-old
3. Days after horrific murder, woman assaulted on suspicion of practising black magic in Bihar’s Purnea
4. Harassed over dowry, Kerala woman kills infant daughter, then self
5. Radhika Yadav’s Murder: Psychology Of Pride, Patriarchy, And Prejudice. Parents may expect success and obedience from their children by projecting their own goals or fears onto them.
6. She Set Herself on Fire to Be Heard: Odisha student’s death is a wake-up call

• Girl set on fire by miscreants in Odisha airlifted to AIIMS Delhi for advanced treatment

7. Odisha: Congress student wing chief Udit Pradhan arrested in connection with alleged Bhubaneshwar rape case

These headlines, together, barely scratch the number of incidences of sexual violence against women in India, or the larger issue of gender-based violence in the country. However, what they are representative of is very important. According to the World Population Review’s Women Danger Index, India ranks 9th in the list of countries that are the most unsafe for female solo travellers.

Looking beyond the headlines, CJP’s analysis of the data from the National Crime Records Bureau’s Crimes in India 2022 report reveal that the states of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan have the highest number of incidences of crimes committed against women, with West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh not far behind.

Indian “culture” and its various segmentations have different sets of beliefs regarding women, but one thing it is inextricably linked to is patriarchy – and its various manifestations through different forms of violence. In this report, we analyse gender-based violence women and a few other gender minorities in India, gauging them into a timeline of what can be called a post-2020 one, through an intersectional lens that factors in caste, class and religion – and keeps in mind the structural and systemic inequities and inequalities that exist in contemporary Indian society.

In this report, we use data from CJP’s own database, and also data from multiple reliable think-tanks, non-governmental organisations, news outlets, legal filings and academic publications. We also take into account cross-verified posts from social media accounts that specialise in hate-watching, reporting on Dalit and Adivasi issues, etc. The data from the National Crime Records Bureau’s own publications has also been used for contextualization.

We have attempted to classify this data on the basis of geography, types of violence, and looked into institutional response: from law enforcement and respective state governments’ attitudes to caste-based violence. The report endeavours to be grounded in intersectionality, taking into account the changing metrics of class and gender, which quite obviously come into play while discussing caste.

Understanding Gender Based Violence

The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women defines Gender Based Violence (GBV) as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.” While the acronyms GBV and VAW (Violence Against Women) have been historically used as interchangeable terms post the former entered popular vocabulary in the 1990s, in current discourse GBV spans beyond the male-female binary of violence typology, and extends to multiple gender presentations and sexual identities, thus widening its working scope. The Council of Europe states, “Gender-based violence is based on an imbalance of power and is carried out with the intention to humiliate and make a person or group of people feel inferior and/ or subordinate. This type of violence is deeply rooted in the social and cultural structures, norms and values that govern society, and is often perpetuated by a culture of denial and silence. Gender-based violence can happen in both the private and public spheres and it affects women disproportionately.

Gender-based violence can be sexual, physical, verbal, psychological (emotional), or socio-economic and it can take many forms, from verbal violence and hate speech on the Internet, to rape or murder. It can be perpetrated by anyone: a current or former spouse/partner, a family member, a colleague from work, schoolmates, friends, an unknown person, or people who act on behalf of cultural, religious, state, or intra-state institutions. Gender-based violence, as with any type of violence, is an issue involving relations of power. It is based on a feeling of superiority, and an intention to assert that superiority in the family, at school, at work, in the community or in society as a whole … there is more to gender than being male or female: someone may be born with female sexual characteristics but identify as male, or as male and female at the same time, or sometimes as neither male nor female. LGBT+ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other people who do not fit the heterosexual norm or traditional gender binary categories) also suffer from violence which is based on their factual or perceived sexual orientation, and/or gender identity. For that reason, violence against such people falls within the scope of gender-based violence.”

These forms of violence vary across countries and cultures, and manifest in different formulations of perpetuating various degrees of hurt at women and other gender minorities.

Gender Based Violence on Women

GBV against women is systemic and structural. Chitra Lakhera writes, “When we frame violence systemically, it is freed from the liberal as well as radical assumptions of male dominance. It places emphasis on the observation of the system from within so that “actions” and not “actors” take precedence. While it does begin with a set of dichotomous variables—like men and women, violator and violated— but in its analysis, it discards such positions and only analyses communicational patterns that bring about peculiar forms of organizations. Luhmann [12] argues that social systems are essentially organized through communicational acts, which are also ultimately affected by psychological interpretations. Thus, the cultural codes and their psychological interpretations interact to produce a distinct social form of communication that, over time, formulate and sustain specific meanings and realities associated with women. Once internalized social systems built a self-destructive pattern within themselves, and they can no longer recognize injustice, inequality and violence as undesirable. A systems approach therefore re-reads the problem by unravelling the conscious and unconscious forces of aggression that produced historically through an interaction of social codes and psychological attributions.” In India, violence against women has been normalized to an observable form of a “natural precondition”, where the increasing figures of incidences reported do not raise alarm, but short-lived shock at best. This could be connected to Bourdieu’s conception of the “paradox of doxa” – which “refers to the puzzling observation that people often accept and even perpetuate social structures that disadvantage them, a phenomenon he termed “symbolic violence”. This paradox arises because doxa, the deeply ingrained, taken-for-granted beliefs and values of a society, are so normalized that they appear natural and inevitable, even when they contribute to social inequality.”

These forms of violence invent and reinvent themselves in more insidious styles, with the advancement of time – keeping at par with feminist progress, thus actively existing as a force of dismantlement, parallel to advancement of any sort – consistently undoing, if not essentially returning things to the original state. This violence, obviously, does not exist as a vacuum, assuming women as a uniform class that face the same degree of it across society. Caste, class and religious dynamics heavily influence the nature and the intensity of violence borne by women (and individuals, in general). Simantini Mukhopadhyay and Trisha Chanda explain that the failure to recognize intra-group differences would be detrimental in the context of violence against women since the experience of violence is often shaped by the simultaneous and complex interactions of the other identities of women, namely class and race, – as Crenshaw (1991) argued. Feminist writing in India has likewise argued that gender needs to be considered at its intersection with class and caste (a stratification unique to India) to understand how the control of female sexuality relates to the organization of production, sanctioned and legitimized by certain ideologies.

Typology

 Besides structural violence, in which there is no singular perpetrator-victim dichotomy but the existence of something larger, social and systemic – The World Report on Violence and Health, (WRVH 2002), presents a typology of violence that, while not uniformly accepted, can be a useful way to understand the contexts in which violence occurs and the interactions between types of violence. This typology distinguishes four modes in which violence may be inflicted: physical; sexual; psychological attack; and deprivation. It further divides the general definition of violence into three sub-types by using the victim-perpetrator relationship framework as required. These include

• Self-directed violence in which the perpetrator and the victim are the same individual and are subdivided into self-abuse and suicide.
• Interpersonal violence, between individuals, is subdivided into family and intimate partner violence and community violence. The first category includes child maltreatment; intimate partner violence; and elder abuse, while the second is broken down into acquaintance and stranger violence and includes youth violence; assault by strangers; violence related to property crimes; and violence in workplaces and other institutions.
• Collective violence refers to violence committed by larger groups of individuals and can be subdivided into social, political and economic violence (WRVH 2002: 6)

We can see this categorisation seep and structure itself into the categories of violence that we talk about further into the report.

We begin our typological analysis by looking at the last released intensive report by the National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB): Crimes in India 2022. The data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reveals that the rate of crimes against women in India (calculated as crimes per 100,000 of the women population) increased by 12.9% between 2018 and 2022. In India, the reported crimes against women per 100,000 women population is 66.4 in 2022, in comparison with 58.8 in 2018. This increase could be owed to a bevy of different factors, as Bushra Ansari and Sowmya Rajaram write, “including an increase in actual crimes, an improvement in reporting mechanisms, and a growing willingness of women to speak out about their experiences of violence.”

According to the NCRB, there were 445,256 incidents of reports of violence on women in India – inclusive of crimes categorized under the IPC (Indian Penal Code) and SLL (Special and Local Laws). Of these, the categories with the highest incidences were as follows:

1. Cruelty by Husband or his relatives (Sec. 498 A IPC, section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita): 140019 incidences, 144593 victims
2. Kidnapping & Abduction of Women (Total): 85310 incidences, 88273 victims
3. Assault on Women with Intent to Outrage her Modesty (Sec. 354 IPC, Section 74 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita): 83344 incidences, 85300 victims
4. Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (Girl Child Victims only): 62095 incidences, 63116 victims
5. Rape (Total):  31516 incidences, 31982 victims

The following is a categorical breakdown of the shares of the different kinds of violence enacted upon women in the year 2022 – represented visually.

Kinds of Violence vs Number of Incidences – pictured.

According to the 2022 data, Cruelty by Husband or His Relatives is the crime with the highest number of incidences – and it comes under the banner of IPV (Inter Personal Violence) – and also its subcategory, intimate partner violence.

Giri and Parveen report in Intimate partner violence in India: Patterns, causes and way forward, that about 31.4% of Indian women between the ages of 18 and 49 report having at least once experienced domestic abuse, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), which was performed between 2019 and 21. This rate is lower than the statistics from NFHS-3 but slightly higher than the results of the previous survey (NFHS-4), which was conducted in 2015–16. The below graph shows the percentage of women who have experienced spousal violence at least once since the age of 15, according to the NFHS Report.

Based on data from the NFHS-5 report, the graph shows the proportion of women who have at least once experienced domestic abuse since they were 15 years old. The average percentage of spousal violence nationwide is 32%. It is important to note that intimate partner violence and domestic violence in India are conflatable categories, and domestic violence manifests in a number of different strategies that are used to corner the victim in households where the woman is married. This includes all the four forms of violence aforementioned: physical, psychological, sexual and deprivation.  The NCW (National Commission of Women), by May, had recorded 7698 complaints from women across the country, with domestic abuse topping the list by category. The Hindu reported, “The total comprised 367 cases in January, 390 in February, 513 in March, 322 in April, and two in May. The category alone accounted for nearly 20 per cent of all complaints, according to official data.

Closely following were complaints of criminal intimidation, which saw 989 cases over the three months – 268 in January, 260 in February, 288 in March, 170 in April, and three in May. Assault was the third most commonly reported issue, with 950 complaints — 249 in January, 239 in February, and 278 in March, 183 in April and one in May.”  Scholars have attributed this widespread prevalence of domestic violence in India – right from the very hetero-patriarchal structure that they are born into – with most parents holding men to a higher preference due to their status as “economic providers”, to their disempowerment in their adulthood which is a consequence of this setup – resulting in lower rates of literacy and financial freedom among them. Jennifer C Hughes and Shreya Bhandari refer to the use of the Duluth Power and Control Wheel. The wheel helps in understanding the different combinations of abuse tactics used by the abuser to keep control over the victim – “The diagram portrays the tactics an abusive partner uses to keep the victim in the relationship. Whereas the inside of the wheel consists of subtle, continual behaviours, like using threats and intimidation, the outer circle ring clearly states the various blatant forms of violence. The abusive acts in the outer ring (physical & sexual violence) are explicit, forceful and often intense in nature that reinforce the regular use of other subtle methods of abuse. The types of DV stated in the inner and the outer circle of the wheel are universal in nature and applicable globally (Pence & Paymar, 1993).”

The Duluth Power and Control Wheel (Source: Lived Experiences of Women Facing Domestic Violence in India, Shreya Bhandari & Jennifer C Hughes)

These tactics clearly highlight the fact that women are not safe in the confines of their own home – and almost every aspect of her emotional and social life are manipulated and weaponized against her to maintain the disequilibrium of power that exists in most marital homes for them.

A lot of the violence that comes within the ambit of domestic violence is that which is related to dowry negotiations. It is suggested that traditionally, dowry was a voluntary marriage gift from a bride’s family to the groom at the time of marriage.  According to Mitchell and Soni, a precise chronology of the development of dowry is not available; however, the literature suggests that the dowry system was gradually institutionalised and expanded during the British period in India.

Over the course of time, however, the nature of this gift turned from a voluntary one into a compulsion for the parents of young daughters to make large payments to the grooms’ families in order for their daughters to marry. Additionally, dowries are increasingly being extorted after the time of marriage, where husbands’ families are demanding money from the wives’ families long after the time of marriage by threatening the life and physical safety of the wife. When the dowry is not paid, the husband or his family may beat, burn or murder the wife as a means of punishing her family for not paying.

Historically, dowry was recognized as streedhan within the dominant-caste Hindu tradition, a form of women’s inheritance and female property. Accordingly, a common justification for dowry is that it is a pre-mortem inheritance since women do not get any share of their fathers’ property. In the absence of any inheritance, dowry has also been argued to be a pro-women institution. Another point of view is that dowry was primarily a strategy to compensate for women’s shares of immovable property and land. Nonetheless, the contemporary dowry practice is a ‘cultural oxymoron that has no resemblance to the historical institution’, and a bride rarely has any control over her dowry. The practice of dowry was originally limited to the upper caste community of northern India, but today, dowry is practiced across regions, castes and classes.

The caste system in India is a hereditary social ordering which historically prescribed an individual’s occupation and place in society. Numerous Indian communities that traditionally practiced bride-price have since switched to dowry, contributing to the rise of dowry demands. A bride-price is when a groom or groom’s family provides a gift to the bride and her family, and both practices have historically occurred in India. In South India, the change from bride-price to dowry appears to have occurred first among the urban, educated Brahmin caste and then spread rapidly to rural areas, among the lower castes, and to Christians and Muslims.

Data available on the NCW websites state that up till December 31, 17%, or 4383 complaints were received which were related to dowry harassment, along with 292 reports of dowry deaths.

Sexual Violence on married women: In 2011, The International Men and Gender Equality Survey revealed that one in five men have forced their wives to have sex. The United Nations Population Fund Survey revealed that more than two-thirds of Indian married women between 15 and 49 years old claimed to have been beaten or forced into sex by their husbands. In another study, conducted by the Joint Women’s Programme, an NGO, New Delhi – it was found that one out of seven married women in India has been raped by her husband at least once. The International Institute of Population Sciences claimed that 26 per cent of women in Pune, 23 per cent in Bhubaneswar, and 16 per cent in Jaipur often have sex with their husbands against their will. The study found a direct link between alcoholism and sexual abuse. One-fifth of the women surveyed said their husbands were often drunk while forcing sex. (Chhibar, 2016).

It is imperative to be mentioned that marital rape in India is not criminalised. Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has heard multiple petitions challenging the very exception in Section 375 of the IPC, which continues to be held up by its so-called revamped and progressive successor Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, states “Sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape”. The Supreme Court Observer notes that “On October 4, 2024, the Union government filed an affidavit opposing the striking down of the marital rape exception. The 49-page affidavit is said to be the first time where the Union has opposed the removal of the exception. The affidavit stated that while the husband has no right to deprive the fundamental right of a woman, describing this violation as “rape” under the “institution of marriage can be arguably considered to be excessively harsh and therefore, disproportionate.” It stated that marital rape should be made illegal and criminalised as “a woman’s consent is not obliterated by marriage…However, the consequences of such violations within marriage differ from those outside it.” However, it relied on other provisions in the IPC and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 which are equipped to “ensure serious penal consequences for such violations”. On October 23, 2024 – the Supreme Court deferred hearings related to petitions involving the same. Earlier this year – a High Court judge, in Chhattisgarh acquitted a 40-year-old man of all charges who was convicted in 2019 by a trial court of rape and unnatural sex with his wife, who died within hours of the assault. Geeta Pandey reports for the BBC, “According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the night of December 11, 2017, when the husband, who worked as a driver, “committed unnatural sex with the victim against her will… causing her a lot of pain”.

 After he left for work, she sought help from his sister and another relative, who took her to hospital where she died a few hours later.

In her statement to the police and her dying declaration to a magistrate, the woman said she became ill “due to forceful sexual intercourse by her husband”.

A dying declaration carries weight in court and legal experts say it is generally enough for conviction, unless contradicted by other evidence.

While convicting the man in 2019, the trial court had relied heavily on her dying declaration and the post-mortem report, which stated “the cause of death was peritonitis and rectal perforation” – simply put, severe injuries to her abdomen and rectum.

Justice Vyas, however, saw matters differently – he questioned the “sanctity” of the dying statement, noted that some of the witnesses had retracted their statements and, most importantly, said that marital rape was not an offence in India.”

The Duluth Wheel’s centre is not just applicable to domestic violence – but to all forms of it. It is explicit that different forms of violence exist to enforce power and control on women – both on their bodies and their consciousnesses. Social and state infrastructures consistently employ mechanisms to ensure “obedience” in women. Women’s bodies and minds consistently become sites of violence outside their homes — in familiar spaces, in unfamiliar ones, and structurally, by impinging on their freedoms and dignities.

In Indian culture, women are assigned value in terms of a connotative form of honour that directly correlates her virginity / sexuality with the idea of the reputation of the family and the morality of the society she belongs to. This often results in honour killings, forced marriages, and in some cases – imprisonment on accusations of ‘love jihad’ inter-community or inter-caste unions, and ostracism. There have been reports that worldwide, nearly 20000 honour killings happen annually – with a third of them being from India and Pakistan. Namrata writes, “Within the ambit of a society built on honour-based social boundaries, having any sexual desires, having any kind of romantic relationship or sometimes even friendship with the opposite sex is wholly impossible. Thus, to be a “good daughter”, one has to refrain from developing romantic interests prior to marriage arranged by the family. As a result, those who transgress these social boundaries of honour have no option but to elope from their homes. Previous research has shown how couples are compelled to leave their homes due to severe parental opposition to their ‘self-arranged’ relationship/marriage and subsequent threats of violence or even killing. In addition, there is increased opposition if the couple belonged to caste, class, religion, same sex or same gotra.”

Violence in the workforce: Women in the workforce are often subjected to symbolic and physical violence – in the form of comments, verbal abuse, and “teasing”, while at the same time bearing with sexual harassment and assault. Women in the formal sectors have recently started relying on the POSH [Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act] – however rates of reporting remain incredibly low, especially in corporate spaces. Experts have also recommended to companies to start taking the implementation of this act not just to smoothen legal procedure, but also to ensure that their employees are not afraid to come forward with their allegations. In 2024 and 2025, there has been an added spotlight on workplace insecurity for women working within the formal sector – with the rape of a young female trainee doctor at the with the rape of a young female trainee doctor at the RG Kar Hospital in Kolkata, and the publication of the Hema Committee report.

Similarly, women in the informal working sector, also pretty often fall victim to the predatory actions of their employers and co-workers. With very little legal protection available to marginalised women who work in economies like this — these cases impact these women to such an extent that they are also deterred from further approaching institutional figures in fear of more exploitation. To begin with, unlike women in the formal sector, a daily wage earner or a domestic worker has no proof of employment to establish that she was at a workplace. Apart from this, according to section 9, any complaint of harassment has to be reported within three months. But as per the act, the committee is allowed to accept complaints even after this period. Social science researcher Anagha Sarpotdar found that committees do not interpret the provision to account for the marginalised condition of informal sector workers as a reason for delays in filing complaints.

— Digital Violence: The digital biosphere is one more space where women and queer people are consistently victimized — Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence, or TFGBV — is a form of violence that has heightened over the last few years. Women often find themselves cyberstalked, harassed, abused, doxed, and even sexually violated. The advent of generative AI has made it extremely easy for abusive users to utilize publicly available photos on social media to make deepfake porn, and non-consensual nudes that they then circulate around the internet. A lot of this occurs especially to women who are outspoken on social media platforms — who are cyberstalked, harassed, and essentially “put in their place”. There has been extensive research done on manospheres across the Internet, and its growth in the Indian digital space — and its insidious connection to Brahminical patriarchy.

A report by USAID states, “Male dominance in online spaces and gendered cultural norms often make the internet inhospitable for women and girls. Just the idea of independent women making their opinions known online, regardless of the content, challenges the patriarchal social structure in India and makes them more vulnerable to violence. Because of this, research shows that female journalists, women’s rights activists, and politicians face much higher rates of online abuse compared to other women. This also contributes to women and girls self-censoring online. Women tend to only communicate to people they know online, use more private settings for communication, and are more selective about posting online—yet these actions create a barrier to being able to fully exercise their rights and freedoms in online spaces. This further perpetuates the patriarchal notion that women are unwelcome in public spaces.”

Indian Muslim Women and their trials with Gender-Based Violence

Muslim women in India face an intense form of gender-based violence that is located at the conjunction of multiple misogynies and oppressive structures. As feminist geopolitics research shows, territory-making and nation-building produce gendered victims and threats that necessitate assimilation or securitization within those borders. Gupta et. al suggest that women have been cast as victims in need of saving in many “femo-nationalist” state projects; here Muslim women are positioned as subjects to be protected by the Indian state while Muslim men are criminalized as intimate and geopolitical threats and become the targets of securitization. Muslim women’s legal claims for gender justice and equality are submerged in discourses of nationalism, religion, class, and electoral politics. The Triple Talaq judgment produces similar effects. Muslim women’s demands for marriage and divorce rights have paved the way for the state to criminalise Muslim men.

Nationalism takes a specific form in India, which was paradoxically defined in 1947 as secular through borders drawn according to religious identity. Post-independence politicians foregrounded India’s secular nature as one of its defining features, but in recent decades, this secularism has been contested. Hindu nationalism has gained force since the 1980s, portraying religious minorities in India as an existential threat. This is particularly true for the Muslim population, as partition along religious lines laid the foundation for Muslims to be understood as India’s eternal internal and external other. Under the government of Narendra Modi, systematic retrenchment of this othering has escalated in events such as the February 2020 violence against Muslims in New Delhi, which killed 52 (mostly Muslim) people. These episodes of violence targeting Muslims were in response to peaceful anti-citizenship amendment Act (CAA) protests (HRW, 2020), reaffirming the systemic violence inflicted against Muslims by the state. The Triple Talaq case reverberates and intensifies the RSS territorial notion of Akhand Bharat, i.e., an India undivided along religious lines. Akhand Bharat is a claim to territorial space that requires the exclusion of the other, with the Muslim populace being cast as such – with them being rendered into a shield of sorts, where their entire existence is flattened into deflection and villainization

In the context of a postcolonial nationalism that has relied upon representations of a Muslim other, legal cases that treat Muslim marriage and divorce practices as a problem requiring a legal solution are a means through which this minoritised religious community can be further marked as outside the boundaries of the nation-state. At the same time, through these legal cases, Muslims are selectively gendered and, through carceral logics, hailed into the state through legal subjecthood. As state actors and politicians seek to shore up the state’s ontological security, or to emphasize security threats for political purposes, they imperil the bodily safety and security of those marked as threatening others.

Gupta et. al further go on to suggest that these personal laws relegate Muslim men and women into the role of managed and manageable threat. When Muslim women are called into the state through the auspices of the law, they cannot engage in the fullness of their humanity, but are rendered as symbols and geopolitical instruments in relation to religious identity. The law is one vector through which global and national forms of paternalistic and Islamophobic discourses land upon women’s and men’s bodies. Laws can protect, safeguard, alienate, or criminalise people, places and entities. Laws that are ostensibly for the protection of Muslim women, minorities and other marginalized communities (and the discourses that surround them) can further state building and territory making. Muslims residing within the territory of India are marked as perpetual outsiders, and securitized through the creation of laws to manage their produced outsiderness. Following Perry, the law in this case situates Shah Bano within the “architecture of patriarchy,” here, a patriarchy formed in relation to the Hindu nation. This limits the horizons of possibility in terms of what kinds of justice can be obtained through legal recourse. To turn to the law, in this case, compromises the humanity of the community.

This continuous struggle with the state compounds and complicates the misogynistic attacks that Muslim women otherwise face, from their own and other communities alike. Not only do they face the culturally Indian patriarchy that looms over every female citizen in the country, they also have to constantly be wary of facing communal violence.

In 2021, many Muslim women – particularly those who had been outspoken in some shape or form in relation to feminist causes were found to be auctioned off on apps like Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai. Functionaries of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board have also been criticised for their excessively staunch stances. Amana Begam Ansari writes for the print, “AIMPLB also exhibits casteist and classist characteristic, as majority of its members come from the Ashraaf castes and upper socio-economic backgrounds. They often fail to understand or acknowledge the realities faced by ordinary Muslims, particularly those belonging to the Pasmanda community. These communities have distinct cultural differences from those in Arab countries. However, in the name of Sharia, the AIMPLB tends to prescribe laws based on their own cultural perspectives. Take this for example. Majority of Muslims do not practise polygamy and divorces are not socially acceptable. Hence, banning polygamy would make sense to protect the interests of ordinary Muslim women. However, the AIMPLB consistently opposes such measures.”

Within the Dawoodi Bohra sect of Muslims in India, there also exists a tradition of Female Genital Mutilation / Cutting (FGM/C) : in which there is a complete or partial removal of the clitoral hood because of its implied existence as an immoral piece of flesh. Currently, there are no legal protections against FGM/C.  Many scholars within the Dawoodi Bohra committee have protested against this practice, along with many pointing out that it is banned across the world in multiple Islamic countries. With the spread of dowry practices from Hindu to Muslim communities, resulting in multiple deaths across the nation.

It is to be noted that all of this violence that Muslim women are subjected to does not exist in a bubble or a vacuum. Patriarchal control over their lives has been challenged and condemned by Muslim women over decades, with them adopting different versions of feminism, be it Islamic or secular.

Violence faced by Dalit, Adivasi and Christian Women in India

Dalit women find themselves triply marginalised by gender, caste and class hierarchies in India. Out of the 200 million population of Dalits in India, 50% are women who disproportionately suffer from gender based violence and casteism. Pupul Lama writes for COFEM that the feminist research indicates that violence in the form of ‘caste privilege’ occurs due to the upper caste hegemony wherein men assume autonomy over Dalit women’s bodies and sexuality. This ideological hegemony of the caste-gender connection maintains caste boundaries and legitimizes GBV against Dalit women and girls to preserve the ‘purity of caste.’ In the Brahmanical sense, severe forms of sexual violence such as gang rape are often viewed as a weapon by the oppressor caste males to reinforce caste hierarchies and exercise power by collectively stealing the honour of Dalit women and their communities. It is also horrifying — the plight of Dalit girls who also become victims of SGBV through heinous caste-driven religious practices such as the Devadasi system, i.e., female prostitution in temples where they are forced to offer sexual services with religious sanctions. Not only are such practices rarely condemned by Hindus, they have also managed to romanticise this practice over time through various ostentatious displays of “culture”.

Between 2009 and 2019, the incidence of rape against Dalit women increased at a gruesome rate of 159%. What one also notices is that through time, Dalit victims of sexual and gender based violence and/or other crimes perpetrated by oppressor caste communities have reportage of the same neutralized, to completely invisibilise casteism and making it a solely gender issue. The judiciary and the institutional actors repeatedly fail at protecting Dalit women — IDSN had once pointed out that the conviction rate of rapes in India against Dalit women is only at a mere 2%, as opposed to the national average of 25%. The labour of Dalit women is also constantly erased — with almost 98% of those forced into manual scavenging being women.

Violence on Dalit and Christian women are intertwined in India. While savarna Christian women report on violence and patriarchal rules that affect many of them, Dalit/Adivasi Christian women, who are converts, are treated quite differently. One of the major allegations against Christians ever since the rise of the Hindutva government has been ‘conversion’. CJP recorded multiple hate crimes in the month of June, where women were attacked by Hindutva fanatics and “activists”, and they were humiliated constantly. At the same time, Dalit and Adivasi bodies of women are recognized as “more available”, when it comes to becoming subjects of harm.

Blessy Prasad writes in In India: Bearing the cross of gender, faith and tribe — that Christian Adivasi women often face trouble in their villages in the form of ostracism and harassment, and it concerns them further because they are primary caregivers within their families. Christian tribal women face severe economic marginalization, exacerbated by their tribal status and faith. Tribal economies in India rely heavily on agriculture and forest resources, where women contribute significantly but rarely hold land titles due to patriarchal customary laws. Conversion to Christianity can further restrict their access to communal resources, as village councils may deny them rights to shared land or forest produce. In Chhattisgarh, Christian tribal women often are excluded from government welfare programs, such as the Public Distribution System, due to religious discrimination by local authorities. Economic opportunities are scarce in remote tribal areas, and women face additional barriers in accessing credit or markets due to mobility restrictions and social stigma. Unlike non-Christian tribal women, who may rely on traditional networks, Christian converts often are cut off from these support systems, pushing them into precarious labour like daily wage work.

Christian tribal women have long been targets of gender based violence – during the 2007 Kandhamal riots, a huge number of them were raped and sexually assaulted. With forest areas in India becoming increasingly militarized / with government employed forces treating Adivasis like criminals in areas like Chhattisgarh and Telangana, the safety of women becomes another pressing issue to keep in mind.

Mapping Gender Based Violence on Women in India

Ansari and Rajaram further state, “The statistics in “Crime in India 2022”, the annual report by NCRB, show that a total of 13 States and Union Territories recorded crime rates higher than the national average of 66.4. Delhi topped the list at 144.4, followed by Haryana (118.7), Telangana (117), Rajasthan (115.1), Odisha (103.3), Andhra Pradesh (96.2), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (93.7), Kerala (82), Assam (81.2), Madhya Pradesh (78.8), Uttarakhand (77), Maharashtra (75.1), and West Bengal (71.8). The rate of crime in Uttar Pradesh — which contributed nearly 15 percent of the cases in India — stood at 58.6.” On an incidence count-metric, the four worst offending states would be Uttar Pradesh (65743 incidences), Rajasthan (45058), and Maharashtra (45331). Among Union Territories, quite predictably – is Delhi maintaining its spot as the region with the most number of crimes as it does when it comes to metropolitan cities.

The following are graphical representations of the same.

This choropleth map locates the incidences of violence in India on the basis of state-wise intensity.

This map shows intensity of violence with regards to cities.

As visible in the data above, the three worst offending states were Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.

Uttar Pradesh: While Google search results would lead you to believe that Uttar Pradesh has been taking aggressive steps in making sure that violence against women stays in check, the on-ground reality has been quite different. For starters, UP’s state assembly only has 51 female MLAs out of  the 403 elected members — which only amounts to a rough 12.65%. The reigning party, BJP, in the state has had a lot of issues — with members attacking each other. The state’s Yogi Adityanath, has also stigmatised women in his speeches before.

At the same time, the Minister of State for Child Development, Nutrition and Women’s Welfare of Uttar Pradesh — Pratibha Shukla, has previously vocally stated her partiality to Brahmins, going as far as to tiff with a fellow party leader on the grounds that he was promising the people a lot. According to current National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data, Uttar Pradesh tops the list for crimes against women, yet the state has been hesitant to use the Nirbhaya fund, which is designated for guaranteeing the protection of women. Smriti Irani, the former Union minister for women and child development, recently informed parliament that Uttar Pradesh had used less than 4% of the funding allotted to it.^[1] Only 39.3 million of the 1,193.98 million dollars allotted to the state under which the fund has been used. Just 3.29 percent of the budgeted cash has been used. Following the violent rape and murder of a Delhi resident, the Nirbhaya Fund was revealed in the 2013 Union budget. The grant was intended to be used for initiatives that would directly improve women’s safety and security. (Meena & Kumar, 2022).

Maharashtra: Maharashtra has only 22 female MLAs, down from 24 last term – constituting only 7.6% of the total number. The state government has also not been faring well in terms of promises it made before coming to power. A Frontline report revealed that the Mahayuti government has been grasping for straws as its most successful strategic device, the Ladki Bahin Yojana – something that they had taken from MP’s style of governance – is looking to shrink. The Maharashtra Mahayuti government’s promised scheme, to grant Rs.1,500 every month to women below the poverty line, has begun to show cracks as the State faces a financial crunch in development work. Out of the 2.5 crore women registered under this scheme, the state is looking at a massive cutdown of around 15% – which is around 32-35 lakh women.

The rape case at Pune’s Swargate bus terminus has resulted in a lot of discourse surrounding the myth that Maharashtra is a “safe” state for women. The comments of the accused’s lawyer, and minister Yogesh Kadam who insisted that the victim did not ‘resist’.

In May, Nisha Nambiar had reported for The Times of India, that there exists a critical gap in Maharashtra’s emergency response system — as the integration of the women’s helpline (181l with the police helpline (112) remains incomplete even 2 years after its launch. The state government run call centre functions on only five operating systems, instead of the required 15. 15 personnel, apparently, handle the brunt of 3000+ calls every day. 

Rajasthan: Rajasthan, currently, has 21 female MLAs out of the 200 total count – barely crossing the 10% mark. On the other hand, Down To Earth reported that during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, there were nearly 21 million women “missing” — women who were eligible to vote, but their names were excluded from lists due to the absence of voter cards or other complications. Out of these, Rajasthan was one of the top 3 offenders, which accounted for 10% of the 21 million women who were “missing”.

The security of women within the state has denigrated — as CJP, in its June report, Rajasthan recounted so many incidents of violence that it added up to a rape crisis. The Femme First Foundation reported in 2023 the state has initiated movements for the empowerment of women and girl children by introducing various schemes, focusing on education, the right to life and even financing women entrepreneurs  – ideal when . Sneha Sharon Patra writes, “Women have been moulded into living in a controlling lifestyle of multiple traditions, especially patriarchy, for so long that most get accustomed to the discrimination and accept it as natural. The dominance of certain traditions such as child marriage, dowry system, inferior treatment shown to women, sex selection, not celebrating the birth of girl-child, naming girls Mafi (Sorry), forcing them to drop out of school after primary level to assist at home while boys are expected to be educated and working are some examples of this. This develops into a conservative lifestyle for the women and restricts the voice of young girls adding to reasons for not being able to stand up for themselves.”

While now often referred to as a stereotype, Child marriage is still prevalent in Rajasthan, with 25.4% of women aged 20-24 having been married before 18, according to NFHS-5.

This is higher than the national average of 23.3%. The decline in child marriage rates has been observed, with the percentage of women married before 18 decreasing from 35.4% in 2015-16 to 25.4% in 2019-21.

West Bengal: West Bengal’s political relationship with the women residing in it is increasingly complicated. While the State Assembly has 41 female MLAs out of 294 – the state also has a Chief Minister who is female. While citizens had kept expectations of Mamata Banerjee and her party, Trinamool Congress in having a proactive approach towards handling women’s issues, the ministry has often disappointed. Post the gang-rape of a law student in Kolkata, Mahua Moitra, an MP from the state’s ruling party called out MP Kalyan Banerjee and MLA Madan Mitra for stating that women should be careful about the kind of company they keep – and not accompany those who have a “dirty mindset”. This is not a stand-alone incident, Banerjee herself has referred to the Park Street rape as an “orchestrated” event to malign her government. The state has also seen a string of high-profile cases of extreme violence against women, leading the citizens to lead consistent protest marches.

Soham Bhattacharyya and Torsa Saha write in Making of a Rape–Murder Atrocity and the Failed State of West Bengal, “The sense of irony that inspires and informs this write-up is produced by the popular portrayal of the TMC as the champion of women’s welfare in mainstream media. Economic pundits have lauded the TMC regime for its initiatives such as “Lakshmir Bhandar” (conditional cash transfers to married women), Kanyashree (cash transfer support towards female students), etc. Such schemes have been celebrated as evidence of the “progressive welfare force” at play, highlighting the support from the rural female vote bank that enables the TMC politically and socially (Bhattacharya and Chowdhury 2024). The recent reportages on rape and threat culture, however, point towards the rise of a politico-cultural mechanism that creates and sustains such a social environment, controlled largely by a network of locally operative TMC henchmen and their “franchise” (Bhattacharya 2023). If one puts together all the registered cases of crime and violence against women, it becomes evident that the figures have increased manifold. The fact that West Bengal consistently contributes to 5%–6% of total registered rapes and attempted rapes against women in India per week also highlights the failure of the mainstream media in reporting such instances of crime and atrocity.”

According to the authors, the data and discussion therefore bring to light two significant aspects. First, the two metrics of an emerging political ideology and the economic policies that sustain the socio-political system complement each other surreptitiously. The mainstream discourses around the economic welfare schemes introduced by the TMC government not only dilute the gravity of the increasing crimes against women but also serve to normalise a culture of gendered violence. Second, there seems to be no accountability for the recurrent institutional lapses that render women, especially working women from every socio-economic stratum, more and more vulnerable to the rising degrees of crime and violence in the state. These politico-economic mechanisms—as evident in the cases of Park Street, Kamduni, Sandeshkhali, R G Kar and so many other unreported ones—operate to create an atmosphere of fear and shame, enabled and controlled centrally by the informally organised wings of the TMC.

Madhya Pradesh : While Madhya Pradesh has a better share of women MLAs in their legislature, the state continues to appear in the news for the very reasons it should not. A recent report from The Indian Express notes, “A mob in Tetgama village of Purnia district assaulted and burnt alive five members of a tribal family, including three women, when the 16-year-old boy allegedly named his own mother as the witch. Three months ago, a 60-year-old indigenous woman in Rohtas suffered a similar fate. There are reports of women being strangled, and abandoned in jungles in the Khunti and East Singhbhum regions of Jharkhand because they were made scapegoats, blamed for someone’s sickness. In another recent incident in Umaria, Madhya Pradesh, on July 7, a tribal man was almost killed by physical assault by neighbours who believed he had used demonic powers to call out disease.” Witch-hunting in India, while sounding like it’s rooted in superstition, is far more complicated than that. It is an entirely gendered process of identification. While the male spiritual healers, called ojhas, are held in reverence and allowed the liberty to point out the witch – the “evil” female is blamed for poor harvests, land grabbing, and even ill-health in children. It often so happens that these women are the ones who have objected to sexual advances, hostile land takeovers, or essentially self-asserted. Madhya Pradesh, in the last few years, has emerged as a hotspot for such activity.

The state ministry is not far behind either, with MP Kailash Vijayvargiya announcing in a public meeting that he prefers girls who do not “wear skimpy clothes”. While Shivraj Singh Chouhan has earned the name “mama” for his intensive introduction of welfare schemes for women and for increasing the budget of the Women and Child Development Department from Rs 14,686 crore in the last fiscal to Rs 26,560 for the financial year 2024-2025, him and his government continue to stay silent on the fact that nearly 31,000 girls have gone missing from the state – from 2021 to 2024. Indore, reportedly, had 2384 cases of disappearances, but only 15 were registered by the police.

Delhi emerges as the city with the highest incidences of crime in the country. According to the WHO, data shows that the population of women in New Delhi was 1.5% of that of India as a whole, while crime against women was slightly higher at 5.2% (Table 4). In regard to the pattern of crime against women, it was noticed that the number of cases registered under “outrage and insult to modesty” was much higher in New Delhi (40.4%) in comparison to the country as a whole (27.8%). However, cruelty by husband and in-laws (members of husband’s family) was less common in New Delhi (20.5%) in comparison to the whole country (34.6%) (Table 5). Similarly, kidnapping and abduction cases registered were also higher in New Delhi (25.0%) in comparison to the country (18.1%). The One Stop Centers (OSCs) which were set up in Delhi post the Nirbhaya Rape Case failed completely – with The Reporter’s Collective digging up an undisclosed report from NITI Aayog, which stated that there was only 4% awareness existed among people regarding these centre’s existence. So have the 181 helplines.

This is clearly indicative of a deeper rot, where systematically, information has been hidden and configured in a way to protect the unpalatable ways the government of the city failed its women. Delhi’s status as national capital while being

Violence on LGBTQ+ People in India

The NCRB , as per the data from Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM), does not maintain specific data on crimes against trans people. a global project tracking homicide against transgender and gender-diverse persons, India recorded 102 registered murders of transgender persons between 2008 and 2021.

The NCRB report from 2021 reported that 236 Trans persons are reported victims of all crimes in India. As is apparent, these numbers are extremely low, and they are a reflection of severe underreporting of crimes, a result of inadequate documentation of the lives of trans persons — and genuine lack of initiative and interest in the lives of trans people in this country by the government. Trans, intersex, and hijra people already exist in the frays of society in India — with decisions taken on their life and living without active thought put into them.

As per a 2016 study conducted by National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), 31.5% of transwomen reported having been “forced to have sex in their first sexual encounter with a male partner. However, the legal framework under the old penal regime failed to adequately protect transwomen. In India, the landmark NALSA judgment of 2014 granted a range of rights to transgender persons under the Indian Constitution, with the right to self-identification being a primary focus.

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019, codified these rights into law.

However, the execution of the right to self-identification remains entangled in procedural difficulties such as issuing trans identity cards is hobbled by bureaucratic delays, gender biases, digital access issues, lack of sensitivity among the administrative staff, and unwarranted verification processes, rendering the lives (and deaths) of transgender individuals largely invisible in the country’s statistics. While Trans women could register their complaints under section 354A of the IPC, which has now been introduced as section 74 in the new BNS Act, without any change, for the offence of sexual harassment, the removal of section 377 leaves Trans persons with limited options for legal recourse for sodomy.

This purposeful reading out of protection for men and Trans persons is not only a failed opportunity to create a more just and equitable legal system but also reeks of misogyny in as much as there is a tacit understanding that it is only the bodies of women that need protection and that such protection need not be given to an anyone who is not a woman or a child. It also reflects a very one-dimensional understanding of the workings of gender justice.

The situation gets worse, as justice falters most profoundly in the cases of sexual assault against transgender individuals, who are mostly caught under the definitional void of men and women — considering any comprehension of non-cis identities are still treated as unnecessary and marginal in India, with the most inclusivity being available in the recognition of a “Third Gender”. Trans people were subject to different forms of sexual assault, like rape, sodomy, bestiality etc., collateralized with extortion, abuse, and violence, and often get unrecognized due to lack of proper protection and specific mentioning under the relevant statutes interwoven with various other socio-economic factors. A sampled survey shows an overwhelming eighty percent of the sample had experienced sexual assault and 37% reported repeat victimization-assault during both childhood and adulthood, a testament to their consistent vulnerability.

Abuse faced by Trans sex workers can also be worse than female sex workers. Compared to Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with sexual abuse of a ciswoman and punishes the accused with rigorous imprisonment of at least ten years to life and a fine, the provisions under the Trans Act are starkly discriminatory and violative of the Constitutional right to equality of trans persons, thus reaffirming the near-subhuman legal treatment meted out to them.

According to the Centre for Law and Policy Research,  apart from the Trans Act, there are other laws that are used to harass and arrest trans persons in public spaces. One such example is the Telangana Eunuch Act, 1919 which borrows definitions and provisions from the repealed Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. Both Acts from colonial times, classify ‘eunuchs’ as habitual criminals, who by virtue of their birth, were seen as predisposed to committing petty offences and under Section 4 of the Act, police and state authorities are often found arresting transgender persons in cases where they are found singing or dancing or cross-dressing in public spaces. The said legislation has been stayed by the Telangana High Court in a petition challenging the constitutionality of this legislation. (Singh, 2023)

Institutional Action and Policy Changes

In India, institutional failures in addressing gender based violence is a combination of wilful ignorance, large-scale logistical failures, discriminatory policy making which is a feature of an ethnonationalist state — and large-scale corruption. The problem with the current state apparatus is that in its entire ordeal of promoting India as an “old civilization” rooted in culture, and holding mythology and scripture to apotheosized value — a lot of its machinery has refused to let in progress that is non-technological, in order to hold onto a homogenised idea of “Indian culture”, which is a combination of post capitalism and Brahminical heteropatriarchy.

Some of the Key Areas of Institutional Failure are as follows:

Law Enforcement:

Underreporting: Many GBV cases, particularly domestic violence and sexual assault, go unreported due to fear of stigma, lack of trust in law enforcement, and inadequate support systems. This is further exacerbated by ministers and government mouthpieces who further blame victims, questioning their morality.

Ineffective Investigation and Police Incompetence: Even when reported, police investigations are often delayed and inadequate. Officers often lack empathy or form any sort of respect for the survivor’s needs, leading to a lack of justice — and this failure is systemic because of administrations’ incompetence to train officers in gender sensitivity. A number of times, also, the police refuse to register cases if the perpetrator is influential — or if the victim does not fit the ideal of one.

Bias, Dog-piling, and Victim-Blaming: Law enforcement officers may exhibit biases against survivors, especially in cases of sexual assault, and may even engage in victim-blaming, therefore leading to women making the decision to avoid this added trauma altogether. The judicial process in GBV cases can be entirely too lengthy, which might span years, thus multiple people might not want to go through a process so taxing.

Even when perpetrators are convicted, sentences may be lenient, particularly in cases of domestic violence, sending a message that such violence is not taken seriously. Many judicial officers and lawyers may lack adequate training and awareness regarding GBV, leading to insensitive handling of cases and perpetuating harmful stereotypes. A lot of the time gender sensitisation is so little that judicial officers have no conception of dealing with people with histories of facing abuse.

Lack of Social Support Systems:

There is a severe shortage of safe shelters and accessible counselling services for survivors of GBV, leaving them with limited options for immediate support and long-term recovery. As aforementioned, when the governments are doing the needful, and setting up systems, they are not divesting enough money or energy in promoting these resources, thus fundamentally leaving them defunct.

Reformed Approach to Development

India needs a drastic restructuring of its policymaking practices, and ground the entire process in feminist allyship — and inclusivity, rather than using everyone as pawns to secure vote banks. Empathy should be one of the foremost devices that the state should employ, rather than a later thought.

The approach should also be rooted in the understanding that women are to be assimilated into society, and not segregated into confinements. Nilanjana Bhowmick writes, the institutional response to gender-based violence in India has mostly been to segregate women further. They want women to be confined to “safe” zones – pink carriages in the metro, pink autos, pink bus tickets, pink parks, pink toilets, separate queues. This segregation does not make public spaces any safer or more comfortable for women. This isolation of women, and invisibilization of non-cis, queer bodies enforces the belief that the public space is not a collective one, but only leased out by men out of their withdrawable benevolence.

The current figure on the NCW website for the number of complaints it has received is 13,583. When we started writing this report –a period of a month, approximately– it was in the 12,000s!

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this graphic visualisation report has been worked on by Saptaparma Samajdar)

[1] In the second term of the Modi Government, 2019-2024, Irani was appointed given the key portfolio Union Minister for Women and Child Development. Subsequently, in the cabinet re-shuffle of July 2021, Irani was again given the charge of the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

The post Reading Violence: Gender injustice in India and its dimensions appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Recent months have laid bare a chilling pattern of brutal rapes and assaults across Rajasthan, each incident a stark testament to a deeply entrenched societal malaise.

From the unimaginable violation of a female patient within the sterile confines of an ICU in Alwar, subjected to rape by hospital staff while undergoing treatment, to parallel and equally horrific occurrences echoing from Bikaner, Barmer, and Tonk even in the state capital, Jaipur.

Alwar: Female patient raped inside hospital ICU, fearing Job losses staff, asked for forgiveness

On June 4, 2025, in a deeply disturbing incident, a female patient in the ICU of ESIC Medical College Hospital in Alwar’s MIA area was allegedly raped by a nursing staff member. The incident occurred around 1:30 AM on June 4, 2025. The 32-year-old victim, who had been admitted on June 2 for a tubal operation and moved to the ICU on June 4, recounted the horrifying ordeal to her husband the following day after regaining consciousness.

According to Police, the victim’s husband filed a report stating that a guard had asked him to leave the room around 11 p.m. on June 4, after which the nursing staffer entered. The victim’s husband further detailed that his wife was not fully conscious or able to move, preventing her from resisting the assault by the nursing staff member, who had drawn a curtain around her. The rapist reportedly told her he was a doctor performing an operation.

Accused confessed to the crime in front of doctor

On June 6, the accused nursing staff member, identified as Subhash Gathala from Sikar, confessed to the crime in front of Dr. Deepika. ESIC Medical College Dean Aseem Das confirmed that a case has been registered, and an administrative inquiry team has been formed. The victim’s family registered a complaint at MIA Police Station, and police are investigating.

Alarmingly, hospital staff allegedly attempted to cover up the incident, telling the victim’s husband to “forgive him, or others will lose their jobs.” The husband, however, insisted on going directly to the police. A critical security lapse was also uncovered: the ICU, a highly sensitive area, had no CCTV cameras, as Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar reported

The hospital guard admitted that while shifts change and staff are present, there are no cameras. Police investigation revealed that Gathala, originally posted elsewhere, was temporarily stationed in Alwar on a “diversion.” Police have registered a case and are investigating the matter, taking statements from both the hospital administration and the victim.

State Congress leaders and LoP criticised BJP-ruled state government

Following these alarming incidents, former Chief Minister and prominent Congress leader Ashok Gehlot sharply criticised the BJP-ruled state government.

He took to his social media handle, X, to express his dismay, stating, “During the tenure of the Congress government, the health model of Rajasthan became a topic of discussion in the country and the world, but the BJP government has ruined it. The incidents of rape of a female patient in the ICU of a hospital in Alwar and the incidents of misbehaviour and assault by a doctor on a Dalit Congress leader in a government hospital in Pali are examples of this. The people of the state are regretting that more than half of the tenure of such an inefficient government is still left. How bad will be the condition of the state in this time.”

कांग्रेस सरकार के कार्यकाल में राजस्थान का हेल्थ मॉडल देश-दुनिया में चर्चा का विषय बना था परन्तु भाजपा सरकार ने इसे बर्बाद कर दिया है।

अलवर में अस्पताल के आईसीयू में महिला रोगी से रेप की घटना तथा पाली के सरकारी अस्पताल में कांग्रेस की दलित नेता के साथ डॉक्टर द्वारा बदसलूकी एवं…

— Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) June 7, 2025

Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee President Govind Singh Dotasra also targeted the government, posting on social media that “the entire Rajasthan is ashamed by the atrocity committed by the nursing staff against a woman admitted in the ICU of a medical college in Alwar. This incident, which crosses all limits of barbarism, is a blot on humanity.”

He urged the Chief Minister to “wake up from deep sleep and see that every day in the state, innocent little girls are being raped, and the dignity of women is being torn apart. Under your misgovernance, cases of atrocities against minors have increased by over 18% from 2023 till now. It is shameful that everyone from ministers to the Chief Minister is intoxicated with power. There is no such thing as women’s safety, sensitivity, or good governance left. The situation is getting worse, but there is no one to see or listen.”

अलवर में मेडिकल कॉलेज के ICU में भर्ती महिला के साथ नर्सिंग स्टाफ द्वारा की गई दरिंदगी से पूरा राजस्थान शर्मसार है। हैवानियत की सारी हदें पार करने वाली यह घटना मानवता पर कलंक है।

मुख्यमंत्री जी, गहरी नींद से जागिए और देखिए प्रदेश में हर दिन छोटी-छोटी मासूम बच्चियों से बलात्कार… pic.twitter.com/y9hZoyPJYG

— Govind Singh Dotasra (@GovindDotasra) June 7, 2025

Adding his voice to the growing condemnation, Leader of Opposition Tikaram Juli took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his outrage. He wrote that “the heinous incident of rape of a victim woman by nursing staff in the ICU of ESIC Medical College in Alwar has shaken the entire state.”

हाल-ए-राजस्थान | अस्पताल में महिला से दरिंदगी | अलवर में मानवता शर्मसार

अलवर के ESIC मेडिकल कॉलेज की ICU में भर्ती एक पीड़ित महिला के साथ नर्सिंग स्टाफ द्वारा बलात्कार जैसी घिनौनी घटना ने पूरे प्रदेश को झकझोर कर रख दिया है।

यह प्रदेश की शासन व्यवस्था की विफलता है, जहां पीड़िता…

— Tika Ram Jully (@TikaRamJullyINC) June 6, 2025

Governance failure: safety compromised in sanctuaries

Juli further asserted that this incident signifies “a failure of the state’s governance system, where the victim is unsafe even in a place considered most secure.” He emphasised that “such an inhuman act occurring to a woman in a hospital’s ICU is not just an attack on a single woman, but an assault on the soul of the entire society.”

#WATCH | Alwar, Rajasthan: On alleged rape incident in ESIC Medical College, LoP Tikaram Jully says, “This proves that cases like rape under the rule of Bhartiya Janata Party are also suppressed. They remain unresolved, and if any grievant reaches out to the higher authorities… pic.twitter.com/IdmXwGOp7l

— ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) June 7, 2025

Bikaner: two minor girls raped by self-proclaimed temple priest, govt demolished illegal encroachments of accused

On June 3, 2025, a shocking incident reported in Bikaner district where two minor girls, aged eight and nine, were sexually assaulted by a self-proclaimed temple priest. The girls had visited a temple near their grandparents’ house when the accused, later identified as Shri Bhagwan, lured them with Prasad and promises of new sandals before committing the heinous act. Upon their return, the terrified girls revealed the ordeal to their family, disclosing how the perpetrator had threatened them with a fodder-cutting sickle, warning them of dire consequences if they spoke out.

Accused’s criminal history and demolition of illegal encroachments

The investigation quickly unearthed the shocking antecedents of the 50-year-old accused, Shri Bhagwan. It was discovered that he was a convicted murderer, having served a 20-year prison sentence for the 1993 murder of five people during a robbery in Bidasar. Despite being sentenced to death by lower courts, his sentence was commuted to 20 years by the Supreme Court, leading to his release in 2013, as reported Dainik Bhaskar

Following his recent arrest for the rape incident, authorities moved swiftly to demolish his illegal ashram in Surjansar village. This structure, built on government land, also housed a temple where he reportedly practiced tantric rituals.

Illegal activities and reclamation of land

The demolition drive, led by Sub-Divisional Officer and Tehsildar of area, revealed further illegalities. Opium and cannabis plants were discovered on the premises, indicating cultivation of narcotics. Additionally, Shri Bhagwan was found to be involved in illegal water siphoning and electricity theft. The operation successfully reclaimed approximately 50 bigha of encroached pasture land, returning it to the Gram Panchayat, as reported

The accused, who had misled villagers under the guise of spiritual healing, was also found to be in possession of weapons, highlighting the extent of his criminal enterprise.

Tonk: minor Dalit girl found after sexual assault

Another case of gang rape has surfaced from a village in the Pachewar police station area of Tonk district, Rajasthan. After the brutal assault, the perpetrators allegedly tied the minor Dalit girl’s hands and feet and abandoned her by the roadside. The victim was discovered unconscious on the night of February 28, prompting a police investigation, as NDTV Rajasthan reported

Authorities have since registered a case under the POCSO Act against four young men. It’s alleged that a neighbouring woman assisted the accused in their heinous crime. Police sources indicate that one of the suspects is from the victim’s village, while the other three reside in Kurad village.

FIR registered against four accused

Malpura DSP Ashish Prajapat confirmed that the victim provided a named complaint against four individuals, also accusing a neighbouring woman of aiding them. The police are actively investigating the matter. According to the victim’s statement to the police, around midnight on February 28, as she stepped out of her house for a short while, three or four individuals abducted her after covering her mouth.

The accused then took her to a shed behind a neighbour’s house where the gang rape occurred. When the minor screamed for help, the neighbouring woman allegedly came out but ignored her pleas and went back inside, emboldening the attackers, as reported

They subsequently tied the girl’s hands, feet, and mouth before leaving her near her home. Police have taken cognizance of the case and initiated investigation.

Barmer: a 31-year-old woman allegedly end her life by suicide after being blackmailed with rape threats and obscene videos

A distressing incident has come to light in Barmer’s Girab police station area, where a 31-year-old woman, a mother of three, tragically ended her life by suicide on June 10, 2025. The woman was found hanged at her home, and initial reports suggest she was driven to this extreme step after allegedly being blackmailed with threats of rape and the circulation of obscene videos.

According to police, the woman was reportedly lured, raped, and filmed by a man from her village, identified as Sumar Khan (name changed). He allegedly continued to exploit and threaten her, with the latest pressure on Tuesday causing her immense distress. The woman’s uncle has since filed a formal complaint against the accused. While the family asserts that the husband had reported the matter to the police in September 2024, claiming no action was taken, police officials state they have no record of such a report. A thorough investigation into the matter is now underway, and the woman’s body has been sent for post-mortem, as per a report in the Times of India.

NCW demands immediate action, takes suo moto cognizance

The National Commission for Women (NCW) has taken suo moto cognizance of this grave Barmer suicide case. On Monday, the NCW chairperson, Vijaya Rahatkar, took to X (formerly Twitter) to announce that she has written to the Rajasthan Director General of Police, urging immediate intervention and a swift inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the woman’s death.

The National Commission for Women has taken Suo Moto cognizance of a deeply disturbing case from Barmer, Rajasthan, where a 31-year-old woman allegedly died by suicide after being blackmailed with rape threats and obscene videos.

Hon’ble Chairperson Smt. Vijaya Rahatkar has…

— NCW (@NCWIndia) June 16, 2025

Jaipur: 21-year-old woman gang-raped in Sanganer

This incident, occurring in March, adds to the disturbing pattern of such crimes. On the evening of Holi (March 14) in Jaipur’s Sanganer area, a 21-year-old married woman was allegedly gang-raped in a secluded farmland. The victim, who had recently moved to Jaipur, had reportedly left her home after a domestic dispute. She was accosted by two youths on a motorcycle who forcibly dragged her into a field and gang-raped her. A third person, who arrived later, fled, as reported

As per the Times of India, the survivor promptly lodged an FIR under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) Sections 70 (gang rape) and 126 (wrongful restraint) at Sanganer Sadar police station. Medical examinations confirmed injuries. Police swiftly arrested Puran Yadav (22) and Himanshu Choudhary (19), and a 17-year-old boy was also detained. The investigation is ongoing.

Moreover, Rajasthan is facing an escalating crisis of gender-based violence, making women’s safety a critical concern. Recent months have revealed a chilling pattern of rapes across the state, defying belief. From an unimaginable assault on a patient inside an Alwar ICU to minor girls targeted in Bikaner and Tonk, and a tragic suicide in Barmer linked to blackmail, the scale of the problem is alarming. Even Jaipur has witnessed multiple incidents, including a gang rape.

These pervasive crimes, occurring in seemingly secure places like hospitals and homes, highlight a profound societal and governance failure, demanding immediate and decisive action to protect women and ensure safe public spaces.

Related:

A Pattern of Impunity? This report details horrific crimes against Dalits in UP, Rajasthan, MP and beyond

Statewide Attacks: Caste fury unleashes brute violence against Dalit students

Tribal women paraded, assaulted; nationwide outrage follows

The post Beyond belief: rape incidents spiral, from a hospital ICUs to villages, exposing widespread gendered crimes across Rajasthan appeared first on SabrangIndia.

What is the Prajwal Revanna sexual abuse case?

Electronic devices like pen drives and CDs had emerged in the public domain on April 21, ahead of the April 26 Hassan parliament poll, which had suggested that Prajwal Revanna, the Hassan MP, had allegedly carried out sexual assaults on several women in Hassan and recorded the attacks on his phone camera. It is to be noted that as many as 2,900 files with videos and images of the sexual encounters of the MP were found in the pen drives that were leaked. A helpline had also been set up by the SIT to report incidents of attack by the MP. At present, a total of three cases of sexual assault have been registered by three women against Prajwal Revanna.

On May 13, JD(S) leader and Karnataka Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) HD Revanna was granted conditional bail by Bengaluru court. The said bail was granted by the Special court in connection with a kidnapping case linked to sexual abuse allegation against him and his son Prajwal. The said MLA had spent after seven days in jail after four-day police custody.  While granting bail, Judge Santhosh Gajanana Bhat had imposed conditions that required the accused to furnish a bond for Rs 5 lakh, along with two sureties. In addition to this, H D Revanna has been barred from leaving the country, entering KR Nagar in Mysuru district, and interacting with the witnesses. He has also been asked to cooperate with the SIT investigation.

A special court on May 18 had issued an arrest warrant against Prajwal. Notably, till now, three FIRs had been filed against him in cases related to alleged sexual abuse. On May 27, absconding Prajwal Revanna had released a video stating that he will be appearing before the SIT on May 31 and will “fully cooperate in the investigation”. He had also suggested that he went into “depression and isolation” after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and other senior leaders spoke about his sexual abuse videos.

Issues highlighted in the meeting of the Federation:

Protecting the dignity of the victims: In the press release, the issue of protecting the women who have been sexually exploited by Prajwal Revanna was raised. The videos of the sexual abuse, which had been non-consensually recorded by Prajwal Revanna, were circulated among the public through pen drives and social-media which have resulted in the violation of the privacy and dignity of the abused women. The Federation states that attempts were being made to show the said content to the children, families, relatives and acquaintances of the victims and such attempts could continue in the future as well.

Highlighting the same, the Federation had discussed and called for taking of such steps that mitigate the severity of this situation. Additionally, the organisation asked for the government to take measures to find all the videos and photographs related to the Hassan scandal anywhere on the internet and to destroy all the sources of the same.

Cancellation of ‘Diplomatic Passport’ of Prajwal Revanna: The organisations also provided that the union government is yet to cancel the ‘Diplomatic Passport’ issued to Prajwal Revanna, and has not even responded to the letter written by state government seeking help with his arrest. Based on this, the organisations demanded for the government to take quick and concrete steps towards cancellation of the ‘Diplomatic Passport’ granted to Prajwal Revanna.

Politicisation of the issue taking away the severity of the crime: In addition to the union government failing to take appropriate steps to arrest Prajwal Revanna, the press release pointed to the pressure being Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, along with other JDS and BJP leaders in demanding a handover of the case CBI with the clear intension to derail the investigation. Furthermore, the organisations also noted that the Congress party’s involvement in the mudslinging has also hampered the seriousness of the scandal. the organisations also emphasised upon the SIT’s duty to contact the directly and reassure the victims of sexual abuse by providing them appropriate protection.

The complete press release can be read here:

Related:

Prajwal Revanna sexual violence case: Arrest warrant against Revanna issued by court, JD(S) decries political conspiracy

JD(S) leader HD Revanna, accused of allegedly kidnapping a survivor of sexual assault by son Prajwal Revanna, granted bail

NDA candidate Prajwal Revanna accused of sexually exploiting and videotaping thousands of women

National Commission for Women: An instrument of social justice or a mere political mouthpiece?

The post Federation of Karnataka State People’s Movements to protest against Prajwal Revanna sexual abuse case on May 30 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
These are the findings of a global perception poll carried out by Thomson Reuters Foundation, a charity, which surveyed 558 experts on women’s issues in order to assess nations on overall safety for women.
 
A failure to improve conditions has led to India becoming the most dangerous country for women; it was fourth in 2011, the last time the poll was conducted.
 
India is ahead of war-torn Afghanistan (2nd), Syria (3rd) as well as Somalia, a country that ranks significantly lower on human development indices, on overall perception of threats to women’s safety.
 
India is the only country to feature in the top five rankings for each of the six categories looked at by the poll, never registering lower than the fourth place.
 
“When only 10% of women in India own land compared to 20% globally, femicide rates are the highest in the world, there are 37 million more men than women in the Indian population, and 27% girls are married before the age of 18 – also the highest rate in the world- you begin to understand the reality in India,” Monique Villa, chief executive officer, Thomson Reuters Foundation, told IndiaSpend.
 
“India is still fighting the deep-rooted patriarchal mindset, which sees women as inferior in the world’s biggest democracy,” Villa added.
 

Source: 2018 Poll, Thomson Reuters Foundation and 2011 Poll, Thomson Reuters Foundation
 
Cases of sexual violence against women and minors in India made international headlines in 2018 with the high-profile case of eight-year-old Asifa in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua district, and the gang rape of anti-trafficking activists in Jharkhand.
 
The government has responded with harsher penalties for rapists and death penalty for child rapists but this may, in fact, deter reporting of rapes, IndiaSpend reported on May 2018.
 
A deteriorating situation
 
“India tops the list with levels of violence against women still running high, more than five years after the rape and murder of a student on a bus in Delhi sparked national outrage and government pledges to tackle the issue,” The Thomson Reuters Foundation report, released on June 26, 2018, said.
 
When the poll was conducted in 2011, India was ranked fourth overall, better only than Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan. Its ranking was primarily attributed to high instances of female foeticide and infanticide, and human trafficking.
 
Seven years later, the 2018 poll shows India has been ranked as the most dangerous country for women on three significant issues:
 

Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
Note: *Yemen had the fourth worst performance along with India on health, Syria had the third worst performance along with USA on combating sexual violence, and Russia had the fourth worst performance along with Nigeria on combating human trafficking.
 
As many as 39 crimes against women were reported every hour in 2016, up from 21 in 2007, IndiaSpend reported on December 12, 2017.
 
The government has failed to address laws discriminating against women, including criminalising marital rape and outlawing khap panchayats that impinge on the right to choose whom one wants to marry, IndiaSpend reported on January 15, 2018.
 
“The three Es: educating boys on gender equality, empowering girls both economically and socially, and enforcing the laws that exist and are not implemented,” Villa said when asked about measures needed to improve women’s safety.
 
(Sanghera, a graduate of King’s College London, is an intern with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post How India Became The World’s Most Dangerous Country For Women appeared first on SabrangIndia.

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This message comes in two parts.

To the men: A#&a is trending on Xvideos. Xvideos is one of the largest porn sites in the world. For any search to trend at that magnitude, millions of people have to search for it simultaneously.

Take a moment to let that sink in. Understand it. Millions of Indian men have searched a porn site, to see videos of an eight year old child get raped to death.

In the last two weeks, 40 rapes in India have been reported — I just Googled this statistic. Do you know what else I found? There are estimates that state that up to 92 women get raped every day in India. That is 33,580 women a year.

This is not for those of you who know this. This is for those who don’t.

Don’t give me the “all men don’t rape.” It does not mean anything. Too many men — over 30,000 a year — rape women. That is enough reason for women to mistrust us, and any woman who does so is justified. And this is rape, the rarest, most extreme form of sexual harassment. Not molestation or a less physically violent form of sexual abuse. God knows what statistics a Google search on that will bring.
 

React when you see a woman being harassed in any way. You do not have to know her

Stop crying about “feminist hypocrisy” or other such nonsensical talking points. If you really care so much about equality, make sure that they have less reason to be afraid. You can start by not disrespecting them if they do not want to have intercourse with you.
News flash: They don’t have to, if they don’t want to. Next time you find yourself ogling a girl, hitting on her even when she is clearly uncomfortable, start by slapping yourself. She might even like you for it.

React when you see a woman being harassed in any way. You do not have to know her. You do not have to know the details of the girl and her harasser’s personal equation.

Try to think of irrelevant issues later and make sure that she, a fellow human being, does not feel alone and scared. Oh yes, speaking of fellow human beings, maybe start treating women as such?

I love how I felt like I was talking to a spoiled 13-year-old when I typed this out. But then, I know you are one. Grow up maybe? Other people have feelings and lives too. Also, stop calling yourselves “shakt launda” to overcome your insecurities. It’s deeply embarrassing to have to belong to the same gender as you.

To the women: Learn self-defense. Arm yourselves with pepper-spray, tasers, and even guns if you can get licenses. Know exactly what to do in case you are assaulted. And please, always, react with violence. Men need to fear you.

Men need to be uncomfortable around you. Men need to hate the repercussions of messing with you. Most importantly, organize amongst yourselves. If there are millions of perverted males in India, there are hundreds of millions of women.
You will win. You have to.

Abhinandan Banerjee writes from Kolkata, India.

This article was first published on Dhaka Tribune
 

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The Delhi Police on Friday first cordoned off, and then ordered a lathi charge on thousands of JNU students and teachers, who were marching towards Parliament protesting against removal of several department heads and a coordinator for not complying with the university’s new attendance rules. The other demand included immediate suspension and arrest of Prof Atul Johri who is accused of sexual harassment. Many of the students have been detained. Several were seriously injured.

In a continuing attack on India’s premier central university — that began with the Modi government’s slapping sedition charges against students in February 2016, the Delhi police which is under the Ministry of Home Affairs simply did not allow the peaceful protest to take place. The 2-kilometre long march was quietly proceeeding from North gate of the campus to Parliaent street when they were suddenly stopped after Bhikaji Cama Palace before the Safdarjung Flyover. Suddenly the protesters were cordoned off and water canons were used before the lathi charge was resorted to. Following the brutality of the police, protesters went to INA and the Sanjay Park.

The Delhi Police on Friday ordered a lathi charge here on thousands of JNU students and teachers, who were marching towards Parliament protesting against removal of several department heads and a coordinator for not complying with the university’s new attendance rules. The other demand included immediate suspension and arrest of Prof Atul Johri who is accused of sexual harassment. Many of the students have been detained.
 
 

The long march was completely peaceful and orderly, with students walking in lines, shouting slogans, carrying placards. The police followed the procession in large numbers but the strength increased to over 200 at INA market where the road had been barricaded. Even before the students could react the cops moved in and started pushing them around. This angered the students who tried to move on.

This was all that the police had been waiting for and they attacked the students with lathis, and water canons. Police brutality is visible in the video below, posted on Twitter:
Not just JNU, but civil society and students from the other Delhi universities joined the march with thousands participating.Water canons were used against all in the march, including teachers and others who participated. The canons were taken down the length of the procession, to ensure that all were hit by the water.

The students are staging a peaceful and silent iprotest at INA, demanding release of the detained students. The march was in response to the open call by the JNU Students Union and Teachers Association to protest against the removal of deans and chairpersons from the Centres ; and the ongoing sexual harassment case where the accused Professor was arrested and released immediately on bail. The girls who have been harassed by him held a press conference in Delhi recently, and made it clear to the media that Johri was a serial offender. They also said that unlike the propaganda by some of his supporters in the BJP, they were not from the Left students organisations but actually most of them were registered members of the ABVP.

The JNU teachers are protesting against the removal of several department heads and a coordinator for not complying with the university’s new attendance rules, and a number of them are on a hunger strike.

Also, Nine women students have filed police complaints against Atul Johri, Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), accusing him of sexual harassment, abuse of power and sexual misconduct. 

The association said the university’s administration has not reached out to the faculty members who have been on the hunger strike for the past three days. It has also demanded that the management withdraw its notification removing the department heads and other circulars issued without consulting relevant university authorities.

The association also criticised the JNU administration over what it called selective inaction by the university against a professor accused of sexual harassment.
Meanwhile various representatives from the political parties rushed to the spot and extended support the students. Manoj Jha from RJD, Ali Anwar from JD(U) and Brinda Karat from the CPI(M) addressed the gathering. 

Related Stories:

JNU students and teachers march to Parliament demanding reforms

More attacks on JNU: Seven Chairpersons, Deans removed over mandatory attendance

 ‘Serial Harasser’ professor being safeguarded by JNU Admin?

The post Delhi Police Turns on JNU: Open Lathi Charge on Student-Teacher Long March appeared first on SabrangIndia.

One sees the origin of this mind-set in law formulation in the nature of laws that were passed in British colonial era-as long back as in 1812. In the colonial law passed in 1812, as Radhika Singha points out, ‘marital infidelity’ was kept in the domains of the private sphere, whereas rape by unknown persons was the most ‘heinous crime’. Criteria for this ‘heinous crime’ was extent of penetration and the damage to community honor. She says,

“It was administrative common sense, the norm of knowing the people, that the honor of men, particularly among the respectable orders in India depended upon the chaste reputation of their women. Stories about the ‘defiled’ woman herself demanding to be killed tended to be accepted as confirmatory ‘of the anxiety which the natives of this Country feel, on points where female chastity is concerned, to preserve unsullied the reputation of their family.’11

Clause 359 of the Draft Code was retained as Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in 1860, with one amendment. The Exception read: “Sexual intercourse of a man with his own wife, the wife not being under ten years of age, is not rape”  [2]

Thus, the law was concerned with the exoneration of the man than the well-being or rights of the woman. The colonial rulers were clever not to disturb the fabric of the exploitative Hindu society by way of not touching upon the sphere of the ‘private’ or ‘domestic’ , at the same time establishing itself as the ‘saviours’ with a humane face showing almost exaggerated contempt for assaults by unknown persons or strangers. The values that families are supreme and “what happens within should stay within” were reinforced through such measures.
There was sporadic reporting of incidents of battery and deaths of resistant child brides by older and powerful husbands throughout 1870s, however most of them were let off with very light sentences.

Phulmonee’s Death Sparks a Movement
Phulmonee was an 11-year-old girl who had not yet come of age and died after her 35-year-old husband raped her. She died after 13 hours of profuse bleeding. ‘I saw my daughter lying on the cot, weltering in blood…,’ said Radhamonee, Phulmonee’s mother[3] Despite the fact that Phulmonee’s parents testified in the court that their caste codes did not allow premenstrual cohabitation and that the couple had been kept apart till that very night when her husband had broken into her room and forced himself upon her, and caused death, the English judge Wilson accepted husband’s version. The husband said that they had cohabited several times before that night and also that since her age was more than 10 years, the charge of rape did not apply.

The jury consisted of six Hindus, two Europeans and one Muslim man. The judge Wilson said, “I think it is my duty to say that I think there exists hardly such solid and satisfactory ground as would make it safe to say that this man must have had knowledge that he was likely to cause the death of the girl…. You will, of course, in these, as in all matters, give the benefit of any doubt in favor of the prisoner.”

The husband was found guilty of causing death by ‘rash’ and ‘negligent’ act and not marital rape or domestic cruelty and hence was sentenced to a year’s rigorous imprisonment. [4]

After Phulmonee’s death, 44 women doctors brought out lists of child brides who had died or suffered grievous hurt consequent to rape, as part of the reformist movement to raise the age of consent. Despite the taboos against women speaking in public, many mothers of these girl children came out and deposed against the forced rapes. However the magistrates let them off in most cases and the husbands were even restored to the girls who were alive even after the act of brutality and assault.

Bull in a China Shop
A century later, in 1971, the Law Commission of India, in its 42nd report, recommended changes in Section 375.[5] In the intervening years, in the Exception to Section 375, the minimum age below which intercourse would constitute statutory rape had been raised to 15 years. The issue of marital rape was critical to these discussions. The report recommended the removal of marital rape from Section 375, and the inclusion of an explanation to the effect that a separated wife would not be deemed to be a wife under the section on rape. It recommended the gradation of the offence of rape by a husband of his wife under a new section: Punishments severe for the rape of child-wives below the age of 12 and minimal where the wife was between 12 and 15 years old. [6]

However, marital rape remained out of the purview of general definition of rape.

1970s was probably the first time that the issue of domestic violence was discussed in the public sphere. The campaign against dowry deaths gained momentum through the labor of many feminist groups. It was not that dowry related deaths had suddenly increased in number, but that these deaths had started coming to attention. Dowry related deaths, or murders, since were happening in the confines of home were difficult to prove in the court of law, and even in case of dying declarations made by wives, were deemed as ‘insufficient  evidence’.

In 1983 Delhi High Court in the case Harvinder Kaur vs Harmander Singh said,[7] “Introduction of Constitutional Law in the home is the most inappropriate. It is like introducing a bull in a china shop. … In the privacy of the home and the married life neither Art 21 nor Art 14 have any place“

This was not an exclusive statement.

Proving Domestic Violence in Courts
When Domestic Violence Act(DVA) was constituted, its success depended on the required services that would have been put in place by the state, on how the law is interpreted by the judiciary and to the extent to which women were going to be able to invoke the protection of the law. [8] But most of all the success of the law depended on the extent to which women internalize that violence in domestic relationships was unacceptable and hence deemed an offence by the law.

There were many factors that needed interpretation and required an understanding. For example the concept of shared household. While giving judgments like S. R. Batra and another versus Taruna Batra, the judges felt that the right to ownership of property was the only way to decide who gets the right to reside in a shared household. This was against the notion of shared household that PWDVA was built upon, where “women of the coparcenary married into the family, in their capacity of mothers and daughters-in-law, had the undisputed right to reside in it. The coparcenary was quite literally the “shared household“; [9]

Further, the concept of cruelty needed understanding. Through the Criminal Law (Second Amendment) Act in 1983, the concept of “cruelty” to wife was introduced under Section 498A and defined as including both, physical and mental cruelty, or any harassment associated with demand for dowry.

In a similar manner, Section 304B was introduced in the IPC in 1986 which created a new offence of “dowry death”. This provision made it possible to prosecute the husband and in-laws of a woman, if she died as a result of burns or any other injury within seven years of marriage, under suspicious circumstances and if it could be shown that she was subjected to cruelty or harassment by the husband/ in-laws in relation to demand for dowry.

Only when the Act came into force did activists from women’s movements realize that there were several other forms of violence that women were facing inside domestic relationships apart from those related to dowry. In such cases it became impossible to invoke Section 304B. In many cases where the women committed suicides or death was due to other kind of violence where dowry was not concerned or the violence committed on unmarried women, elderly women and children, there was no proper recourse to the law.

In fact, the definition of cruelty itself has been questioned over the years.

            “Cruelty was defined to mean any willful conduct which could have driven the woman to commit suicide or caused grave injury to her or posed a danger to her life, limb or health (either mental or physical). The definition was worded in such vague terms that it was difficult to bring issues of sexual violence, economic violence or even threats of violence within the ambit of the section.” [10]

This basically meant, in order for domestic violence to be “proven” in the court of law and for Section 498A to be invoked, the threshold of the impact of violence perpetrated on women should be adequately high, nearing fatal injuries.

Further, even though some acts detrimental to women have been classified as “ crimes “, criminal law itself does not offer much to women. The most persistent problem that women faced as victims of domestic violence was that of being thrown out from the place of residence. Filing a case and the process is itself tedious and there was hardly any support mechanism to address the urgent issues of protection from violence, a shelter, children’s education and other such civil matters that, on a number of occasions discouraged women from walking out of violent marriages.

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