Crime & Justice

Over 1,000 Indian women report violence every day: crime data

New Delhi, Aug 31 (EFE).- The acid attack against a 17-year-old girl in eastern India and her transfer to a Delhi hospital on Wednesday put the spotlight back on violence against women in the country, where in 2021, every day over 1,000 women registered complaints of facing aggression.

“Sister Kajal has been hospitalized to AIIMS Trauma Center’s Burns Unit in New Delhi. We pray to God that she will return soon following her recuperation,” tweeted Banna Gupta, the health minister of the eastern state of Jharkhand, where the girl was attacked on Aug. 5.

The case has grabbed headlines just two days after a 20-year-old woman from the central state of Madhya Pradesh was stabbed by a man after she refused to marry him. Similarly, a 16-year-old from Jharkhand was burnt to death on Sunday after a known harasser set fire to her while she was asleep.

“I told my dad at home about him, and he said we will look into it tomorrow morning. I went to sleep. At 4 am he (the aggressor) came and threw petrol from the window and ran away,” the victim told the police in a statement before her death, circulated by Indian media.

These attacks are not isolated cases in India, where 428,278 complaints were registered in 2021 by women who faced violence, according to the latest data released by the National Crime Records Bureau on Wednesday.

This is a 15 percent increase compared to 2020, when 371,503 complaints of this kind were received.

However, the figures only represent a part of the grim reality, as many incidents go unreported to the police.

Cruelty by husband or a family member constituted almost one-third of the complaints last year, followed by “assaulting a woman with the intention of outraging her modesty,” with as many as 86,631 cases.

Kidnapping (71,040 complaints) and rape (30,216) were the other most common crimes reported by women.

The NCRB report also listed severe crimes, such as 287 murders after rape and 98 acid attacks.

Despite the omission of the thousands of cases that go unreported, the data shows that 64.5 out of every 100,000 Indian women complained of having suffered some kind of aggression in 2021, out of a total population of around 1.4 billion.

The northeastern state of Assam earned the dubious distinction of being the most unsafe state for women in the country with 168.3 complaints per 100,000 women, higher than even the notoriously unsafe Indian capital, where the average stood at 147.6, according to the data. EFE

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