This blog is part of a series on crimes against women, and current legal and administrative safeguards. The first blog can be found here.  

It is necessary to understand the entire gamut of offences against women that are criminalised under various laws of the land to have an informed discussion on what needs to change. The government’s Crime Statistics gives a reasonably detailed indication of the various categories of crimes against women.

There are two broad kinds of crimes, namely, those that are defined and punishable under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and those that are defined and punishable under provisions of other laws. Many of these offences run into each other, and it is not unusual that accused individuals are charge sheeted under various laws simultaneously, for the same criminal act.

Going through the Crime Statistics, I was struck by the numbers of offences for which statistics are collected separately by the National Crime Records Bureau. I counted no less than 41 offences under seven laws, which are considered to be crimes against women. The most numerous of them are under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Crimes under the IPC fall into five broad categories, namely, cruelty by husband or his relatives, crimes relating to murder or danger to life, kidnapping and abduction, rape and rape-related crimes, and insults and related assaults.

In turn, each of these broad categories is subdivided into various crimes, as I list below:

• Crimes relating to murder or danger to life, the most heinous of them all, are (i) murder with rape or gangrape, (b) dowry deaths, (c) abetment to suicide, (d) miscarriage (d) Acid attacks and (e) attempt to attack with acid.
• Kidnapping and abduction is classified according to the gravity of the offence, into that in order to murder, for ransom or for compelling a woman for marriage. In addition, procuring minor girls, human trafficking and selling and buying of minor girls are considered as separate offences with stiff punishments.
• The crimes of rape and attempts to rape are also sub-classified into those rapes (or attempts to rape) of women above and below 18 year of age.
  • Assaults on women with intent to outrage her modesty, and insults to the modesty of women, with each category further divided.

That is a list of 26 crimes, which are defined and punishable under the IPC.

There are six other special laws, namely: the Dowry Prevention Act, the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, Cyber Crimes/Information Technology Act, the Protection of Children from Sexual Violence Act, and the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act.

• Under the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, there are five sub-categories of crimes. These are (a) procuring, inducing children for the sake of prostitution, (b) detaining a person in premises where prostitution is carried on, (c) prostitution in or in the vicinity of public places, (d) seducing or soliciting for purpose of prostitution, and other offences.
• Under the Information Technology Act, publishing or transmitting of sexually explicit material and other women-centric cyber crimes such as  blackmailing, defamation, morphing and the making of fake profiles are criminalised.
• Under the Protection of Children from Sexual Violence Act, heinous crimes are especially criminalised. These include child rape, sexual assault of children, sexual harassment, use of children for pornography/storing child pornography and other offences, including unnatural offences.

A visual representation of all can be found in the document here.

The various descriptions of crimes against women are staggering. Even in their recounting, I can sense a pattern. They are invariably about exploitation; about the domination over the woman by an individual who is powerful and strong. Second, they are largely focused on the body, and thus interrelated. There is nothing that can be considered a lighter offence, or one with relatively less dangerous implications. Assaults on the person of a woman, including verbal assaults, can have a link with kidnapping and abduction. And that in turn, can link with rape, acid attacks, and eventually murder of the woman, often following upon rape. In each, the widespread notion held by many men that women are nothing more than the property of men, is reinforced and underlined.

That realisation is a sinister one. If these crimes can be interrelated, can the ‘solutions’ to rape be found in an isolated fashion? Besides, if they are all interrelated, what are the patterns in the numbers of crimes reported and the action taken on them? Do the statistics reveal some significant trends and patterns?

More of that in my next blog.