Study On Rape Cases In India

Study On Rape Cases In India 

Addressing Increasing Number of Rapes in India

On February 1, four convicts in the Nirbhaya rape-murder case, which occurred in December 2012 in India’s capital city of New Delhi, will be hanged as per the court’s order.*

The sheer barbarity involved in the crime committed against the 23-year-old paramedic student, who later came to be identified as “Nirbhaya” (meaning fearless), jolted the collective conscience of India’s 1.3 billion people, uniting them in a call for the instant execution of the perpetrators. Thousands of women and activists stormed the streets to demand action in the name of the victim, breaking the usual silence over sexual violence, which often goes unreported.

Taken aback by the backlash, and to appease a nation convulsed by anger, the Indian government implemented legal reforms mandating harsher punishments for rapists. The prison sentence term for rapists was doubled to 20 years, stalking was made a crime, and new initiatives aimed at improving safety for women were launched. In 2014, shortly after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office, his government also pledged a “zero tolerance” policy on violence against women, promising to “strengthen the criminal justice system.”

Yet oddly, seven years on and stiffer punishments for the guilty notwithstanding, a sense of disenchantment still lingers in the air. Women feel they aren’t any safer on the streets as, among other things, ossified patriarchal norms rob them of agency.

“Nothing has changed for women at all,” Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother, angrily told the media following the court’s verdict on January 7. “So many of these incidents are continuing to happen.”

Even the Supreme Court has admitted that changes effected to criminal law after the Nirbhaya case haven’t yielded results.

According to statistics, a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. India was also declared the most dangerous country in the world for women due to the high risk of sexual violence and of being forced into slave labor, according to a 2018 survey by the Thompson Reuters Foundation.

An overburdened judiciary (India has one of the lowest judge-to-citizen ratios in the world) has further hobbled crime prevention. As of 2018, there were 133,000 pending rape cases in the courts. In May, a panel of judges dismissed allegations of sexual harassment against the erstwhile chief justice of India made by a former court employee in a ruling that infuriated women and activists. The chief justice denied the claims.

There’s consensus among women activists that a complete overhaul of the judicial system is the only way to ensure speedier justice for victims. “The low conviction rate shows that perpetrators of sexual violence enjoy a high degree of impunity, including being freed of charges,” said Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association. “The fact that even a high-profile case like Nirbhaya’s took seven long years to reach a conclusion underscores how slowly the wheels of justice move in the country.”

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