Public Activism Has a Direct Connection to the Reporting of Gender-Based Violence in India

The recent case of an on-duty female doctor being brutally raped and murdered in a Kolkata hospital, has sparked nation-wide protests and yet again raised serious questions and concerns around women’s safety in India. Examining the impact of the Delhi gang-rape incident in Delhi in 2012 and the resultant social movement, this article finds that there was an increase of 27% in the reporting of gender-based violence following the incident.

The incidence of gender-based violence (GBV) is alarmingly high and pervasive. One in three women have experienced some form of violence in their lifetime (Devries et al. 2013). At the same time, cases of GBV are widely under-reported; it is found that only 7% of women who have ever experienced violence have reported it to a formal source such as the police, health systems or social services – this number is as low as 1% in India (Palermo et al. 2014). Such under-reporting can be detrimental; not only does it limit our understanding of the actual magnitude of GBV, but it also weakens criminal deterrence and perpetuates incidence of such crimes.

A survivor’s willingness to report violence could be undermined by several societal and structural barriers including social stigma and shame, distrust of institutions, fear of retaliation by the perpetrator, lack of awareness and access to referral services, and in several cultural settings, high tolerance towards violence (García-Moreno et al. 2005, Kishor and Johnson 2005). In recent research (Sahay 2021), I investigate whether a rise in public activism and greater dialogue on GBV can overcome one or more of these barriers and stimulate reporting in the Indian context.

Protests in Delhi

I explore this question against the backdrop of a brutal gang-rape incident that took place on a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012 (referred to as “the incident” hereafter). The incident was a particularly heinous act; it was widely condemned and marked the onset of a large social movement against GBV, referred to as “The Indian Spring”. Protests of an unprecedented magnitude broke out across the entire country seeking justice for the victim and more broadly, demanding a structural change in how GBV is perceived and dealt with. The surge in public outrage also paved the way for several legislative and policing reforms – recommended by an expert committee constituted by the Government of India – such as stricter punishment for rape, recognising other acts of GBV like stalking and voyeurism, establishing fast-track courts to redress cases of GBV, strengthening police vigilance in public spaces via increasing night patrolling, installing GPS devices in public buses, and introducing home guards in night buses.

I evaluate the effect of this incident and the associated protests on subsequent reporting of GBV cases such as rape, sexual assault, female kidnapping, insult to modesty of women, domestic violence, and dowry deaths¹. To identify the effect, I compare districts across India that were more exposed to the incident and its aftermath to those that were less exposed.

How do we define and measure exposure? In this analysis, exposure is conceptualised as socioeconomic proximity or people’s connectedness to the incident. Essentially, the thought experiment is rooted in the concept of empathy: when people can relate to an incident or identify with people involved in an incident, they are more likely to get affected by it.

Exposure is measured using an array of district-specific indicators that were recorded at baseline using data from India’s Census (2011). The exposure metric includes three key elements: (i) coverage of media (which encapsulates access to information about the incident and the associated protests, measured by district-specific coverage of daily newspaper, television, phone, internet, and radio), (ii) demographic factors (which embodies similarities/connectedness with the victim and her family, measured by district-specific female literacy rate, proportion of urban population, proportion of youth and religious composition), and (iii) coverage of public transport (which leverages connectedness with circumstances and place of the incident, measured by district-specific coverage of public buses). These ten district-specific indicators, measured at baseline, make the exposure index, which takes values between 0 and 1, with 1 demarcating highest exposure.

Sharp increase in reporting of gender-based violence

I find that districts that were more exposed witnessed a sharp increase in reported GBV after the incident than districts that were less exposed (depicted by the positive and statistically significant estimates after 2013 in Figure 1 below). I also find that before the incident took place there was no systematic difference in the trend of reported GBV between the more and the less exposed districts (notice that the point estimates are not statistically different from zero before 2012); thereby, lending credibility to the identification strategy.

At a cursory glance, these findings seem somewhat surprising: why did GBV appear to increase despite measures undertaken to mitigate violence? I provide additional evidence which suggests that the estimated effect could be attributed to a rise in reporting rather than an increase in occurrence. To formally investigate this, I compile a new high-frequency, incident-level dataset via scraping and parsing information from over 300,000 official crime reports published by the Delhi Police. The granularity and richness of this dataset enables me to construct a measure of reporting lag or a proxy of reporting bias. The reporting lag measures the number of days elapsed between the date a crime occurs and the date it gets reported. Based on qualitative interviews and consultations with police officials, a 72-hour cutoff was decided (that is, cases that were reported at least three days after it occurred, were considered as lagged reporting). The data reveal that, on average, cases of GBV are reported with a lag of 370 days. Notably, I find a measurable decline in reporting lag after the incident; the proportion of cases that were reported with a lag reduced by 15% and the magnitude of the lag (number of days) reduced by 35%.  These findings suggest that the rise in public activism against GBV could have emboldened women to disclose their own experiences of violence and report crimes – an effect akin to the implications of the global #MeToo movement. Nonetheless, I explore alternative interpretations of these findings – such as rise in pseudo-reporting, increase in crime recording by the police – and find the most salient evidence in support of the above-described mechanism, that is, rise in reporting by survivors.

Implications for policy and research

My research demonstrates that public activism and greater dialogue on GBV can stimulate reporting of cases. It indicates that social movements could influence and potentially even overcome stigma associated with GBV via raising awareness alongside making the knowledge of sexual violence public. Such a ‘bottom-up approach’ is especially relevant in the current global context where movements like MeToo, Ni Una Menos, Black Lives Matter and more recently Reclaim the night have gained prominence and are increasingly shaping policy dialogues. These results also indicate that in addition to institutional and legislative reforms, social activism among communities could be leveraged to influence a victim’s inherent willingness to report crimes and move the needle on disclosure norms.

Note: Dowry deaths take place when young women are murdered or driven to suicide by continuous harassment and torture by husbands and/or in-laws in an effort to extort more dowry from their families.

Abhilasha Sahay is an Economist at the Gender Group at the World Bank 

This article is republished from Ideas for India.