Crimes against women must stop for the country to prosper

livemint.com:

Crimes against women in India rose by 4% in 2022 from the previous year, a majority of the cases being cruelty by the husband or his relatives (31.4%). Delhi is still rated as the country’s most unsafe city for women, with an average of three reported rape cases per day, accounting for 29% of crimes committed against women in 19 major cities, according to 2023 data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

The latest edition of the NCRB report underlines the continued vulnerability of women to violence. A recent study, which analysed about 400,000 FIRs filed between 2015 and 2018 in Haryana where women were the primary complainants of different offences, has revealed “multi-stage discrimination" in our criminal justice delivery system and raised the issue of whether the complainant’s gender impacts police processes and judicial outcomes.

Commenting on its findings, a senior police officer said that “women complainants often get raw treatment during investigation and trials, are not always viewed seriously by the police, and sometimes get short shrift in the court proceedings." In a 2010 case, India’s Supreme Court observed that “most of the complaints of assault and violence against women are filed in the heat of the moment over trivial issues." It was cited in a 2017 case for the framing of ‘guidelines’ for arrests under Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code that were reversed in 2018 by a larger bench. The NCRB took care to point out that its data records the incidence of registered crimes, not the actual numbers, and that chances of under-reporting cannot be ruled out.