Violence against Women in India

Defining Violence Against Women

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• The World Human Rights Conference in Vienna (1993) was the first international forum to formally recognise gender-based violence as a human rights violation, and the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993) defined it as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to a woman, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.”
• Sociologically, violence against women can be defined more precisely still. Liz Kelly frames it as “any physical, visual, verbal, or sexual act experienced by a woman or girl, at the time or later, as a threat, invasion, or assault, that has the effect of hurting her or removing her ability to control an interaction” — a definition that deliberately centres the victim’s own experience of violation rather than only the perpetrator’s intent. Gelles and Strauss define violence more generally as an act carried out with the intention, or perceived intention, of physically hurting another person, while Schuler supplies the gendered dimension specifically: gender violence is “any act involving the use of force or coercion with intent of perpetuating and promoting hierarchical gender relations” — meaning the violence is not incidental to gender but constitutive of maintaining a gender hierarchy.
• Radhika Coomaraswamy, in her UN Special Rapporteur’s report on violence against women, extended the 1993 UN definition in one crucial respect — adding violence perpetrated or condoned by the state to violence occurring within the family and the general community, meaning state inaction or complicity (failure to prosecute, discriminatory policing, custodial violence) counts as a form of gender violence in its own right, not merely a failure to prevent one.
  • Coomaraswamy’s three-part typology captures the full range: violence within the family (battering, marital rape, dowry-related violence, female genital cutting); violence within the general community (rape, sexual harassment, trafficking, forced prostitution); and violence perpetrated or condoned by the state.
• Margaret Schuler offers a complementary four-part classification by form rather than location: overt physical abuse (battering, sexual assault at home or work), psychological abuse (confinement, forced marriage), deprivation of resources needed for physical and psychological wellbeing (health, nutrition, education, livelihood), and the commodification of women (trafficking, prostitution) — a classification useful precisely because it captures forms of violence, such as denying a woman access to healthcare or education, that a narrower physical-injury definition would miss entirely.

Categories and Forms of Violence

• Indian sociological literature conventionally sorts violence against women into three broad categories: criminal violence (rape, abduction, molestation, murder), domestic violence (dowry death, wife-battering, sexual abuse by kin, maltreatment of widows and elderly women, coerced sati, denial of property share), and social violence (forcing a daughter-in-law toward female foeticide, eve-teasing, forcing a young widow into unwanted remarriage or renunciation) — a typology useful less for its rigid boundaries than for showing how the same underlying subordination expresses itself differently depending on the woman’s specific relationship to her aggressor.
• Radhika Coomaraswamy further identifies three distinct grounds on which women become vulnerable to violence, each rooted in a different aspect of gender construction: because of being female as such (rape, genital mutilation, female infanticide — tied to society’s construction of female sexuality and its place in social hierarchy); because of her relationship to a man (domestic violence, dowry murder, sati — tied to the concept of woman as property and dependent of a male protector); and because of the social group to which she belongs (rape used as a weapon during war, riots, or caste/ethnic/communal conflict, to humiliate the community through her body) — a reason relating, again, to male perceptions of female sexuality and women as men’s property, extended here to the level of collective, not just individual, ownership.
• Rape is a violent act of sexual intercourse against a woman’s will and consent, sociologically read not merely as a sexual crime but as a demonstration of a power relationship between men and women that objectifies the victim and diminishes her identity as an individual. Indian society has historically responded to rape victims with stigmatisation rather than support — victim-blaming logic (“she must have invited it”) that persists regardless of a woman’s dress or conduct, since sexual harassment and assault are documented against women in every kind of clothing, including conservative dress, undercutting the “provocation” narrative on its own terms.
• Sexual harassment at the workplace remains among the least reported forms of violence, largely from fear of job loss and social stigmatisation — underscoring that under-reporting itself is a structural feature of gender violence, not simply a data-collection gap.

Who Is Victimised, and Why: Causal Factors

• On the basis of empirical research on crimes against women, Ram Ahuja identifies four overlapping profiles of victims: women who suffer devaluation and “altruistic powerlessness,” carrying a poor self-image; women in structurally incomplete, economically insecure, or morally deviant family situations; women who lack interpersonal support and exhibit behavioural difficulties; and women whose husbands are either psychologically disturbed or alcoholic.
• The causal literature identifies both structural and situational factors. Structurally: prevailing social values and patriarchy, contradictions generated by rapid social change, the role of mass media in normalising violent masculinity, and political violence more broadly. Situationally: intoxication (Ram Ahuja’s own study found alcohol involved in 32% of wife-battering cases, though he cautions this is a “cooperative” rather than sole causal factor), and personality traits — violence-prone individuals tending toward suspicion, possessiveness, irrationality, and jealousy, with Stewart’s research finding that childhood exposure to violence or abuse strongly predicts adult perpetration.
• Fundamentally, violence against women is sustained by gender relations that assume male superiority, which is precisely why so much gender violence carries social sanction rather than social censure — it is treated, in practice, as ordinary rather than exceptional. Adriana catalogues its manifestations as spanning physical aggression (blows, burns, attempted strangulation, sexual assault), psychological violence (insults, humiliation, coercion, blackmail, economic or emotional threats, control over speech and action), and, in extreme cases, death — occurring within the family, the state, and the wider society alike, and remaining substantially hidden precisely because domestic violence is assumed to be a private matter.
• Differential socialisation is the mechanism through which this subordination is reproduced generationally: men are socialised into stereotyped roles of domination and control, women into submission, dependence, and deference to authority. A female child consequently grows up with a persistent sense of physical, social, and economic vulnerability that exposes her to exploitation at nearly every stage of life — and the family itself, rather than being a refuge from this dynamic, is frequently where gender differentiation is first instilled, now beginning even before birth through sex-selective practices.
• Coomaraswamy’s location-based framework identifies three institutional sites where violence is defined, legitimated, and maintained: the family (which socialises members into accepting hierarchical, unequally resourced gender relations), the community (whose social, religious, and economic institutions provide the mechanisms for perpetuating male control over women’s sexuality, mobility, and labour), and the state (which has historically legitimised men’s proprietary claims over women through discriminatory drafting or application of law).

Current Data: NCRB and the Legal Transition

• The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded 4,41,534 crimes against women in 2024, a modest 1.4% decline from 2023’s 4,71,000-odd cases; the single largest category by far remained “cruelty by husband or relatives,” accounting for over 1,20,000 cases (roughly 27-31% of the total across recent years), ahead of kidnapping/abduction, assault to outrage modesty, and rape (29,536 reported cases in 2024). Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and West Bengal recorded the highest absolute case counts in 2024, while Delhi recorded the highest rate nationally at over 130 cases per lakh women — a reminder that both absolute numbers and per-capita rates matter, and can point to different states as the most urgent policy priority.
• A significant caveat applies to any year-on-year comparison from 2024 onward: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023 replaced the colonial-era Indian Penal Code effective 1 July 2024, restructuring and renumbering offences against women and children (now consolidated under a dedicated chapter), which the NCRB itself flags as complicating strict trend comparisons with pre-2024 IPC-classified data.
• The BNS’s substantive changes affecting women include: raising the age threshold distinguishing statutory from consensual sexual relations to 18 and removing earlier marital exceptions specific to minors; explicit criminalisation of sexual intercourse obtained through deceit, including a false promise of marriage; mandatory gang-rape sentencing of a minimum 20 years, extendable to life imprisonment; and tightened procedural timelines (medical examination reports within 7 days, cognisance within 14 days). The BNS, however, retains the marital rape exception — non-consensual intercourse within marriage continues to fall outside the criminal law’s definition of rape, a gap that has remained a live point of constitutional litigation and public debate through 2024-26 even as the rest of the sexual-offences framework was substantially rewritten.

Curative and Institutional Measures

• India’s institutional response spans legal, administrative, and civil-society mechanisms: dedicated legal-aid and counselling schemes run through voluntary organisations, short-term shelter and financial support for victims, and assistance with employment and childcare so that leaving a violent situation is not also an economic catastrophe.
• Access to justice has been a persistent structural gap: the case for cheaper, less formal, specialised courts — an expanded family-court system covering both domestic and non-domestic disputes affecting women, staffed by judges, magistrates, and lawyers with specific expertise in these matters — remains as relevant today as when first argued, since delay and procedural complexity continue to deter reporting.
• Organised advocacy consistently outperforms individual complaint: a single woman’s voice carries comparatively little institutional weight against police, in-laws, or courts, but women’s organisations mobilised around a shared cause have demonstrably shifted both individual case outcomes and legal policy — which is one reason publicising the availability of free legal aid organisations specifically matters, since awareness of a resource is a precondition for using it.
• Changing parental attitudes toward daughters is identified as a further lever: much of the vulnerability documented above is compounded, not caused, by families that treat a daughter facing violence as a source of shame to be managed quietly rather than a person to be protected and supported.

Sociological Perspectives on Gender, Caste, and Class

• Veena Das attributes much of the violence directed at women to the cultural enslavement of women — the deep embedding of subordination in cultural norms rather than simply individual pathology — while Sylvia Walby reads workplace sexual harassment as a reactionary measure, a way men use to check women’s advance toward financial independence rather than an isolated interpersonal failing.
• Kalpana Bardhan cautions against treating the family as a sufficient unit of stratification analysis on its own: whether the analytic frame is class or caste, the division by sex and the status of women within the family materially affects that family’s stability and dynamics, meaning gender cannot be bracketed out of class or caste analysis as a separate variable.
• M.N. Srinivas connects the practice of dowry directly to caste dynamics: as economic and social differentiation within caste groups has intensified, the expectations placed on a bride’s family by the groom’s family have risen correspondingly, with caste both constraining and legitimating this practice within the broader Hindu social order.
• Agnihotri and Agarwal, working from a Marxist-feminist perspective, argue that treating gender relations purely as an effect of production relations obscures important questions — even as reform and individuation have nominally advanced women’s status, the underlying emphasis on chastity, patriarchal authority, gendered division of labour, and the sanctity of marriage has persisted largely undisturbed. Bina Agarwal’s related and influential argument is that effective rights in land specifically — not employment or education alone — are what most durably empower women, since land ownership confers a form of bargaining power within the household that other resources do not.
• Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi studied the interconnections between gender, caste, and class directly, finding that patriarchal upper castes historically tightened both caste and gender restrictions simultaneously as they consolidated economic dominance and defended it against challenge — meaning caste and gender oppression in India have never operated as fully separate systems.
• Aparna Basu’s finding that the sex ratio is comparatively better among Dalits and poor tribal communities — because these groups do not follow dominant Hindu cultural norms around son preference to the same degree — is a useful corrective to any account that treats gender discrimination as uniform across Indian society regardless of caste or community.

Contemporary Manifestations and Structural Data Points

• Contemporary data underscores how violence against women in India begins before birth and compounds across the life course: an estimated 63 million women are demographically “missing” in India (a figure derived from sex-ratio distortion), and roughly 21 million women are estimated to be structurally “unwanted” due to persistent son preference. Everyday indicators of gendered neglect are similarly stark — girls have historically been breastfed for shorter periods than boys, women’s food intake has trailed men’s by a documented margin, and healthcare spending on women has lagged spending on men considerably, evidence that discrimination operates through routine household resource allocation, not only through episodes of overt violence.
• Utsa Patnaik’s time-use calculation — that a working woman logs roughly 3,485 hours of labour a year against a man’s 1,212 hours and a working bullock’s 1,064 hours — captures how unpaid domestic and care labour is systematically undercounted as “not work” even as it structures women’s entire daily existence, a form of structural violence distinct from, but related to, physical violence.
• India’s legal and policy apparatus has continued to expand: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which India has ratified, issues General Recommendations — including No. 19, specifically on violence against women — that shape domestic policy commitments; the Protection of Women from Sexual Harassment (POSH) Act, 2013 established workplace redressal mechanisms, though identifying and holding accountable a harasser at work “does not come easily even today,” a gap that persists precisely because of the employment-dependency dynamic this article has traced throughout; and the Domestic Violence Act, 2005 created a specific civil remedy — protection orders, residence rights, monetary relief — distinct from and complementary to the criminal law route.
• Nita Kumar proposes four analytically distinct ways of “seeing” women in social research — as objects of observation, as agents and subjects in their own right, as figures constituted within a controlling patriarchal discourse, or through their own hidden, subversive exercises of agency — a framework that cautions against any single, flattened account of Indian women’s experience of gender violence, since these four lenses can produce genuinely different readings of the same social fact.