Domestic violence complaints rose 79% in 2020

Complaints about denial of the right to live with dignity and domestic violence registered with the National Commission for Women (NCW) saw a sharp rise in 2020, a year ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic and further exposed fault-lines in gender relations, compared to the previous year.

Altogether, the NCW received 20 per cent more cases in 2020 compared to 2019 -- 23,722 as against 19,730.

According to the official statistics, there were 5,294 complaints of domestic harassment last year compared to 2,960 in 2019, which was a whopping 79 per cent rise.

Also read — NCW received 23.7k complaints in 2020, highest in 6 years

When it came to complaints under the right to life with dignity, there were 7,708 complaints, the highest among 24 categories identified by the NCW, up from 4,694 the previous year -- a 64 per cent rise.

Compared to the first six months, the last six recorded the highest number of complaints of domestic violence.

During the lockdown period, the NCW received at 708 complaints (April-May) as against 459 during the same period in 2019. When the unlocking started, June witnessed a further rise in cases to 461 as against 260 in the same month previous year. Since then, the monthly number of domestic violence complaints reaching the NCW was on the rise with July having the highest number of complaints at 660. In August, there were 539 complaints which came down to 492 and 495 in the next two months. In November, there were 485 cases while last month saw the complaints again rising to 583.

In 2019, the number of domestic violence cases never crossed the 500-mark in any of the months.

While acknowledging that the Covid-19 lockdown and the resultant economic slowdown have impacted the well-being of women, activists and officials also point out that there is more reporting of cases with the NCW starting a WhatsApp number for filing complaints during the lockdown.

On complaints related to women seeking to ensure their right to live with dignity, the numbers rose dramatically in the last six months of 2020. In November last year, there were 1,210 complaints as against 434 in the same month previous year, while it was 824 and 352, respectively, in December.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) in its note on April 7 had said that violence against women tends to increase during every type of emergency, including epidemics.

Jayashree Velankar of Jagori, an NGO, had earlier told DH that people tend to restrict the spectrum of acts under domestic violence to just beating and verbal abuse and tend to put under the carpet gender inequality and unequal distribution of resources within the family. “The existing inequalities are getting sharper. There is an obvious link of rising violence to economic distress, food insecurity and health crisis,” she had said.

The NCW has also received 3,784 complaints of harassing a married woman, including dowry harassment, and 331 cases of dowry deaths last year. If one takes the cases of right to live with dignity, domestic violence, dowry deaths and harassment of married women, it will account for 72 per cent of the total complaints that were received by the NCW last year.

The NCW statistics also showed that it received 1,234 complaints of rape, 704 cyber-related crimes against women, 376 cases of sexual harassment, 201 cases of sexual harassment at workplace and 110 cases of sexual assault among others.