Home is where the Indian woman is most unsafe

Every time we read about a gruesome rape incident – the most recent one being the Bulandshahr gang rape in Uttar Pradesh – the media immediately makes a connection to the infamous Nirbhaya case. The horrific incident shook the nation on one hand and inspired a much-needed mainstream debate on rape, it also unwittingly helped to cement a misconception: that women’s security is threatened by strangers.

Here’s the statistical truth: the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) states that 95.5 per cent of rapes were committed by a person known to the victim. As many as 28 per cent are committed by neighbours.

Keep in mind that the government’s position on marital rape and criminalizing rape of married girls who older than 15 but younger than 18. Earlier this week, the Home Ministry said, “Although the age of consent is 18 years and child marriage is discouraged, marriage below permissible age is avoidable but not void on account of social realities. It is submitted that the social, economic and educational development of the country is still uneven and child marriages are taking place. It has been decided to retain the age of 15 years under the exception 2 of Section 375 so as to give protection to husband and wife against criminalising the sexual activity between them”. Criminalising marital rape would apparently put the Indian family system “under great stress”.

Even without these provisions, a total of 34,951 rape cases were registered in 2015  – a decline of six per cent from 36,735 cases in 2014. However, 33,098 (95.5 per cent) were committed by persons known to the victim, while 9.508 (28 per cent) were committed by neighbours. This is a 9.5 per cent increase from 86 per cent in 2014.

As many as seven states/Union Territories (UTs) – Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu – reported 100 per cent of rape cases by known persons. The absolute number of rapes registered in these states are quite low in these places, but what’s noteworthy is the fact that not a single case is a stranger rape.

Barring West Bengal (73.6 per cent), Odisha (85.5 per cent) and Arunachal Pradesh (83.1 per cent), in every state/UT in India, more than 90 per cent of rape cases were by known persons.

Madhya Pradesh continued to report the maximum number of rapes as last year with 4,391 cases in 2015, followed by Maharashtra and Rajasthan.

Given the number of rapes by known persons has increased significantly over the past few years, the biggest – and toughest – question which the government needs to answer is how this can be prevented. Strengthening laws further may not help. In a column for Indian Express, Flavia Agnes, a women rights lawyer in Mumbai and founder of Majlis, a women’s rights organisation, wrote:

“In 2013, the NCRB reported a conviction rate of 26 per cent for rape cases, but our own research (Majlis’) for Mumbai places this at a much lower level — a mere 10-12 per cent. In addition to shoddy investigations and indifferent prosecutions, the victim’s past sexual history was advanced as a mitigating factor to plead for less than the prescribed minimum punishment, even in the rare cases where conviction was secured”.

In April this year, the government announced its plans to set up a sex offenders’ registry on the lines of those maintained in countries like United States of America and the United Kingdom. This will be an online database of charge-sheeted sexual offenders in the entire country, which people can access through a Citizen Portal in the upcoming Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) project.

Minister of State for Home Haribhai Parthibhai Chaudhury told The Hindu “the names and details of sexual offenders, both below and above 18 years of age would be put up only after they have been convicted and completed their sentence in jail. The details will not be included if the case are under trial and are in appeal in a higher court.”

Many activists and researchers, however, have argued that having a registry wouldn’t help curb sex crimes and is bound to fail.  “One of the arguments in favour of such a registry is that it will allow people to live in ‘safe neighbourhoods’ by avoiding neighbourhoods where sex offenders live; avoid employing sex offenders; or weed out sex offenders from ‘safe neighbourhoods’. Such an argument rests on the misplaced notion of ‘stranger danger’ – i.e. the notion that most sex offenders are strangers,” wrote Kavita Krishnan, a social activist, in a column for The Wire. “In fact, in India and the world over, strangers form a very small percentage of sex crimes; most sex crimes against women and children tend to be perpetrated by family members or close acquaintances (a fact proven by the NCRB data above).”

The violation when the rapist is a familiar violates a victim in spaces that are conventionally associated with safety – either the rapist or the victim’s home, for instance. One critical reason why stricter laws don’t usually make too much of a dent in circumstances like ours – where the bulk of sexual violence is perpetrated by a familiar or a family member – is that the harsher the law, the more likely a family is to shield its members.