The National Crime Records Bureau released the data for 2014 on Tuesday evening, and one of the major stories from it remains sexual assault. Here are six big takeaways from the numbers.
1. The spike in reported rapes in India is tapering off. Reported rapes grew, but far less slowly than between 2012 and 2013, the year of the big spike.
Reported rapes grew at roughly the same pace as total cognisable IPC crime, which was not the case between 2012 and 2013, when the increase in reported rape was far higher.
2. Reported rape in India remains low by global standards
The data for other countries is from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for 2013, while the data for India is from the NCRB (2014). Even if Delhi were a separate country, it would figure below France on that list.
However, heavy under-reporting undoubtedly exists in India. According to National Family Health survey household data analysed by economist Ashish Gupta, just 5.8 per cent of rapes by men other than the husband were reported to the police, and just 0.6 per cent of rapes by the husband. Since marital rape was not recognised as a crime in India, it was probably reported as “cruelty,” Mr. Gupta found, even though just 2.3 per cent of all rape experienced by women was by men other than their husbands.
3. Delhi is for the first time home to the largest number of reported rapes, in both absolute and proportionate terms.
This is a major change – smaller cities particularly in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh usually had the highest rates of reported rape.
4. The big spike in reported rape in Delhi is, however, beginning to taper off and my hypothesis is that the activism around the December 2012 gang rape has helped Delhi come closer to the ‘real’ numbers of reported rape.
5. While the proportion of reported rapes in which the accused was known to the victim has not been released for cities, for the country as a whole there is slight dip, from over 95 per cent to 84 per cent.
It’s unclear yet what has caused this changed.
6. The conviction rate in rape cases remains far lower than that of IPC crimes in general. But it bears repeating that the NCRB is only a collection of FIRs.
What ultimately comes out in court – for all crimes and not just rape – can be vastly different from what an FIR said. For instance, as I found in my analysis of 600 rape cases in Delhi’s district courts, the largest proportion of cases involved the parental criminalisation of consenting couples.
