Uttar Pradesh recorded more than 50 percent of the complaints of crimes against women (15,828), followed by Delhi (3,336), Maharashtra (1,504), Haryana (1,460) and Bihar (1,456) out of nearly 31,000 complaints received by the National Commission for Women (NCW) last year, the highest since 2014.
NCW chief Rekha Sharma said, there has been a rise in the complaints because the commission has been regularly conducting awareness programmes due to which the public is now more aware of its work.
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2019 reports that a majority (30.9 percent) of all the 4.05 lakh cases under crimes against women are registered under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The section deals with ‘cruelty by husband or his relatives’.
Section 498A of the IPC is a criminal law that protects married women from their spouses and the relatives of the spouse from inflicting cruelty on women. However, despite having the largest share of crimes against women, domestic violence is known to be a systematically under-reported crime. The reasons range from embarrassment, financial dependency, fear of retaliation, and victim-blaming to following a convoluted bureaucratic procedure. Determining the extent of this underreporting is useful to understand the true state of the prevalence of domestic violence in India.
From July to September 2021, over 3,100 complaints were received every month, the last when over 3,000 complaints were received was in November 2018 when India’s #MeToo movement was at its peak.
As many as 1,819 complaints have been received regarding the offence of outraging the modesty of women or molestation, 1,675 complaints of rape and attempt to rape, 1,537 of police apathy against women and 858 complaints of cyber crimes, according to NCW data.