Little has changed in the country in terms of safety and security of women even five years after the horrific gang rape—that shocked the entire nation—of Nirbhaya, a young physiotherapy student, in a bus on Delhi’s roads, her mother said.
Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother, told The Sunday Guardian, “Even after five years, women still get raped and molested on a regular basis, not only in Delhi, but across the country. Nothing seems to have changed much with regards to women’s safety. We are still talking about the measures which we debated then, like installation of CCTV cameras and streetlights, but very little has been implemented.”
However, she feels that one good thing that has happened since then is that women have started to speak out on violence against them, including rape and molestation, and women’s organisations have started taking cognisance of matters important to women. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) also seem to suggest that crimes against women have increased since 2012.
While a total of 232,528 cases of crimes against women were registered across the country in 2012, the number rose to 314,575 in 2015. Among these, 34,651 cases of rape have been registered in 2015 alone, showing a jump of almost 10,000 cases since 2012. Kidnapping and abduction of women are also on the rise, with a growth of almost 10% since 2012. According to the latest data released by the NCRB for metropolitan cities, Delhi contributed to one in every three cases of all crimes against women that happened in metropolitan cities and 4% of all such cases in the country, accounting for 13,803 cases. This is higher than the 13,260 cases reported in 2014. Delhi reported 1,996 rape cases in 2016, up from 1,893 in 2015.
Soon after the Nirbhaya incident, a stringent law on women’s safety and stricter punishment for perpetrators of violence against women was also passed by the Parliament, but despite that, Asha Devi said that this law has failed to act as a deterrent for those carrying out violence acts against women. “The law is very good, there are several laws in the country, but the problem is the lack of effective implementation of these laws. It is important to see how fast women get justice,” she said.
Delayed trials and justice in most of these cases have also become a cause for concern for many women activists, as they feel that this fails to imbibe fear among persons with a criminal mentality. According to the 2014 data available in the Lok Sabha website, 332 cases of crimes against women were pending before the Supreme Court by December 2014, while 31,386 cases of rape were pending before the High Courts till 2014. However, though the Nirbhaya case was put through Fast Track courts, the family still awaits final justice which they want to see in the form of capital punishment for the guilty. Asha Devi said: “In all the three courts, this case was put on fast track; even then, we await final justice. It took nine months for the trial to happen in the Supreme Court and it’s been already six months that the Supreme Court has upheld capital punishment, but now they have filed a review petition; therefore, it is going to take more time. Such long delays in trials affect society, removing the fear of the law from the criminals. We still have hope that we will get justice, but when that will happen even we cannot say.”